I transcribed the entire interview, and he didn’t say it once. Maybe it’s the American wife and three American kids. Maybe it was living in Palo Alto as a kid or Boston as a young man. Maybe it’s why he wrote a new chapter (NFL v EPL) and had the book edited and printed specifically for an American audience. But not once in my hour-long conversation with Kuper did he use the word football. I don’t think that means anything, but it was nice.

The PR take-away is that it’s Moneyball for soccer, but has it come too late? Can soccer even compete with baseball when it comes to statistical break down? It’s surely tempting fodder for those for whom soccer is religion and those who see sport as science. But those two will always fight. And while it will instigate and educate, Soccernomics can also ring all too true for the pragmatic few who can subtract passion from reality and who have been cursing the fiscal and emotional insanity of professional (Western European) soccer for years. But no matter your take-away, at least it’s not another book about some strange and historic season of Anytown FC.

Kuper and Szymanski set out in late 2007 to write a different kind of soccer book, to change the discussion, to surprise with data. On the day of the book’s American release, Kuper took time over the phone from Paris to discuss the book, the reaction to it, and what it means for American soccer.

TIAS: Starting with some basics before digging into some of your more American insights, my first question is about the translations of the book. I’ve been through both of them—the UK and US versions—and wanted to know how hard it was for you and your editor to make that switch.

Kuper: Changing it into the American version took an additional month. The main addition was the chapter about the NFL versus the Premier League. Obviously we cut some of the UK stuff—and cutting is easier than writing, so it wasn’t an enormous amount of work I have to say.

You speak about Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball a fair amount in the book, and I read a previous interview you gave where you mention that you didn’t read Moneyball until you had already started on this book. Break down that timeline for me, as I’m kind of amazed you had not read Moneyball, which came out in 2003.

Stefan and I met in Istanbul about December 2007 and immediately began talking about this book—it was Stefan’s idea. Then we began in early 2008. It was after Euro 2008, when I came back to Paris where I live, that I read Moneyball. It was in the middle of the process, but it did help. It helped me understand what we were trying to do and understand that the issues in the baseball and soccer worlds were the same ones. I knew about Moneyball before hand. My brother-in-law in fact had told me—My wife is American so I go to the States a lot, mostly Miami. So I have American family and in fact my three children are Americans. So writing this book for the US market was not a total leap into the unknown for me. And I lived for a time in Palo Alto. I did 6th grade there and I lived in Boston as a student. So I had childhood knowledge of American sports which helped a bit. But I do a weekly column in the FT (Financial Times), and I occasionally write about American sport, but what I realized after a while is that we have so many US readers that I didn’t want to write stuff about American sport that they knew better than me. So I tried to write about the sports there through interviews with David Stern or whomever, because one of the most dangerous things a journalist can do is write something his readers know better.

One of the big points in the book is about the changing face of global soccer and your three points largely deal with Wealth, Population, and Experience. Where does the US fit into that?

We show that the US is a major underperformer. Even taking into account that the US doesn’t have much experience in terms of international games played. Before the 1990’s the US didn’t play very often. So even there, the US massively underperforms, because given it is such a large and wealthy country, I would guess that a normal position would be about 10th in the world. That’s my guess; you’d have to quantify that. My sense is that in recent years, the US is increasingly bobbing up to that position on its good days—like the Confederations Cup, like World Cup 2002. I think the underperformance is being corrected slowly, and we suggest a couple of ways the US could make a leap, by learning more from Western Europe than the US has done thus far. I think the US has the greatest potential of all the non-European, non-traditional soccer countries, simply because of its size and wealth and enormous number of active soccer players.

That section of the book really struck me as analogous in a lot of ways to geopolitical discourse with writers like Thomas Friedman heralding the booms of India and announcing the world was becoming, in his catchphrase, flat. You state pretty bluntly in the book that you believe Western Europe has the best practices when it comes to soccer, but Brazil seems to buck that trend to some degree. You give it some respect in the book, but it comes off as a bit of an afterthought compared to the successes of Western Europe. Where does Brazil fit into this picture?

Well, Brazil has the best players. And consistently most of the time in soccer history the best players in the world are disproportionately Brazilian. More so than they are German or French or Italian, but I think after Brazil won the world cup in 1970, it had about 30 years of retrenchment where it tried to figure out a new style—a style that wins matches. Because the Brazilian style that we all glorify from the days of Pele—this wonderful attacking, dribbling style; cavalier soccer at its best—didn’t really work in the new era, because Germany, Italy, and France were just more effective at winning games even though they had worse players. Brazil spent 30 years trying to crack that nut, and the best bid they had of course was winning the World Cup in 1994. A: by having the best players. And B: playing very tedious, collectivist, Western European soccer with those players. The Brazilian population wasn’t altogether happy about that because the population as a whole still wants to see the cavalier game. You see when they play a more cavalier style—World Cup 1982 is a great example—they don’t win. And when they put Ronaldinho, Robinho, and Kaka more or less in the same midfield in 2006, again, they sort of lacked aggression, pace, energy, collectivism defense—all the Western European qualities—and they lost. So Brazil has the best players but they don’t have the best style… anymore.

Does the new coaching staff back that up, in that they hear many of those same complaints from fans of the stereotypical Brazilian style?

Yeah, well, Dunga spent many years in Germany and is himself a very tedious collectivist Western European player, and I imagine that is the style he likes best. But it’s the poisoned chalice being the manager of Brazil, because you don’t just have to win; you have to win playing Brazilian soccer. And I would argue it’s probably impossible to do both. So you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You’re damned if like Parreira in 1994 you win playing the new way, and surely damned if you lose. It’s very difficult for Dunga to square that circle, but I think he’s much more aware than I am of the certain backwardness of traditional Brazilian soccer. In terms of style, not in terms of the individuals, who are the best.

Taking that idea back to the US, I can imagine fans reading this book and thinking that they’ve tried their hand at the foreign coach and it didn’t work out any better. Is that small sample size, just not enough time or data, or wrong guys wrong time? Do you think at all that America could be a special case?

My argument is that it really should be a Western European coach. Bora Milutinovic was not far off of it because he had a lot of Western European experience, and I remember I was part of a group interview with him in 1993 before that World Cup, and I said what style do you aspire to with the US—Brazilian soccer, Italian soccer, Dutch soccer? And he said, no no, at the top level all the countries play the same. And I think that was very true. He was talking about this collectivist Western European style, which he got the US to play at that World Cup very successfully, and which isn’t really nation specific. And I think you need a coach, if he isn’t Western European, who has a huge Western European experience in those central countries I discuss in the book—Italy, Germany, France, Holland. Correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think the US has gone that way has it?

Which bring us to Jurgen Klinsmann. That is still the big what-if hanging around for some US fans, in part because they never got any true information beyond rumor on how that short lived courtship between him and USSF broke down. The usual thought is that USSF didn’t want to give him full control over the program or federation. Given your Western European leanings, was that a big mistake for the US?

I don’t think it needs to be Klinsmann. We say in the book that there are very few coaches who over-perform, who do more with their players, in club soccer in England, than the players’ salaries would predict. On the international level it is more possible for a coach to make a difference, where he goes to a country with backwards soccer knowledge and he imports the latest cutting edge soccer knowledge. So if you use that model of the coach importing the latest knowledge, it doesn’t have to be an iconic individual like Klinsmann; it could be some German you’ve never heard of. There are a couple of problems or the reasons why it hasn’t happened. One is American nationalism—the belief that we play a lot of soccer, we have 25 million people who occasionally kick the ball around (of course many very infrequently, but it is still an enormous soccer-playing base), we’ve been doing this for 20 years seriously for ourselves now. We don’t need some foreigner, particularly some uppity foreigner like Klinsmann who is demanding all of these powers that the USSF doesn’t want to give away. So I understand that dilemma. I would say just get real and do it. You don’t have to get one of the biggest names in the sport, you just need to get somebody with a solid grounding in the best soccer as it is now being played today in Western Europe.

This book at times reads like a business story to me more than a sport story. Having read my fair share and worked a bit on financial journalism subjects, and college courses in statistics and whatnot, the book’s principles of buy low, sell high, don’t over pay, come off as kind of obvious to me—or obvious for sure to a business person, maybe not a sports fan. It really hit home with Lyon, which features prominently in the book maybe more than any other club. And maybe because I have followed that team as a fan, because they show me the players that are going to be the stars of the future before they go on to Man U, Madrid, and the backs of Americans’ jerseys, it seemed to almost go without saying they were the model club in doing things the right way. Were you surprised at the findings in the book as you and Stefan crunched the numbers or was it more a case of preconceptions being proved through the book?

Like you I had some knowledge of finance and worked for a time as a financial journalist for FT. And I have written about the soccer business a bit, chiefly in the mid-nineties when I was a reporter for the FT and went around to clubs that were floating on the stock market and stuff. I think what I came away surprised by was—I encountered stupid people more in soccer than in any other business I had written about, and I thought there was an incidental quality to that. And I came away thinking as with baseball apparently, the stupidity is structural. And the clever ones, like Lyon as you mentioned, are the exceptions. It’s a very bleak vision of the industry that we present.

Arsenal and Wenger is another example of the clever ones you give in the book. In Wenger’s case it’s his use of statistics, and as part you tell the story about the post-game Bergkamp-Wenger chat about him being subbed, which is just classic. The thing I’m curious to ask you about is their new American boss.

Gazidis, yeah. I appeared with him at a conference in Zurich. We had a panel together where we discussed the book. And because he is a very polite man he said that he mostly agreed with it. I liked him very much. I would dispute, actually, that he is American, because his father like my parents came from South Africa. His father left in the 60’s when he had become a radical and later a member of the Pan-African Congress, which would have been like a white man joining the Black Power movement in the US. Obviously he was a hugely impressive and principled guy who spent his own money buying antiretroviral medications for people with AIDS in the poorest regions of South Africa when the government refused to fund it. But anyway, most of my conversation with Gazidis was about his father who I was very stuck by, but what was your question—I was just so taken by him on a human level?

Maybe we can agree he has spent a lot of his business education in the States and is taking that over to Arsenal?

Yeah.

And you talk about in the book how Americans, even just through basic education, get a more economic view of the world.

Absolutely. And in sports as well.

Is that something you think we will see more of? As the US steals soccer knowledge, Europe steals business knowledge? Do salary caps and revenue sharing follow Ivan over the Atlantic? Or is MLS a special case, Soccer United Marketing (SUM) a special case?

I don’t think the details of MLS will necessarily be exported. But I think your point is an interesting one in that the US leads the sporting world in a lot of ways. One is how to make money out of sports, how to run it as a fairly serious business. And also in the medical and fitness fields, where Klinsmann helped Germany do very well at the World Cup by importing the best American fitness knowledge, which turned out to be much more advanced than soccer fitness knowledge. So yeah, I think people like Gazidis are exporting knowledge that is very scarce in European soccer. I won’t name them, but last week in London I went to a very, very big English club and spoke to an official there who had regularly flown to the Red Sox and Oakland A’s to see how they evaluated players and to sort of absorb the Moneyball thinking.

I don’t think they fit the description, so it likely isn’t Fulham, but they just announced a partnership with a marketing group that is involved with the Red Sox.

Fulham has?

Yeah.

I didn’t know that.

Yeah, from the press releases it seemed a marketing move to push the Fulham brand in the US.

That’s yet another example of how the English in particular, the place with the closest link to the States, and the number of Brits who travel to the States is larger than the number of Germans, French, or Italians who travel there each year. So I think it will be the British clubs who do this first, who say the US knows a lot of off-the-field stuff, back office stuff, ranging from Moneyball to finance and fitness that we can learn from. That is a trend that is starting, an export going the other way that the US can be proud of, having that place in soccer where the US leads the field.

Given this book project, and I don’t know if you want to make predictions, but here in the US we have these national projects, one is called Project 2010, saying we will be able to win the world cup by 2010, which few people think we have a real chance of. So I’m wondering after crunching all this data, when will the US win the World Cup?

It’s very hard to put a date on a World Cup because the World Cup is a random walk. What you really need to be, where you really need to get is the last 16. And I think the US is at that level with a decent shot of making the last 16. And then you have to win four matches, and most of those matches will be decided by one goal. So if you are one of the stronger sides in the lat 16 you can sort of stumble your way to the World Cup and do it. Germany in 2002. Korea in 2002. Turkey 2002. Partly it is when the World Cup is not held in Europe. Most of the favorites immediately have a disadvantage, which will be the case in South Africa. It’s just possible. I’m not going to put any money on the US winning next year, but if it happened I wouldn’t be dumbstruck because of the randomness. Saudi Arabia is not going to win the World Cup. Or North Korea. But if you are a plausible contender as the US is, then you can do it. The trend will be for the US to get stronger and stronger, and it may never happen between now and 2050, but I think the likelihood is that it will happen between now and 2050, with an ascending trend for the US.

You mentioned here and in your book the randomness that comes into play with soccer, especially with playoff system as in the World Cup or Champions League. One of the reasons I love soccer is that lack of statistical glut that you see in baseball and American football. Did you worry as you wrote the book that the Moneyball aesthetic doesn’t fit soccer? That it is a game beyond the numbers? Or is my romantic dream destroyed?

Baseball has always produced more data, as has cricket. Soccer has historically produced very little data. And because the most important soccer games are decided by one goal, there is a greater randomness than there is in baseball. And because baseball seasons are 162 games–the Billy Beane idea that you can lose a game or two but throughout the season your rationale will tell out works slightly less well in soccer because the season is much shorter, and in cup competitions it works even less well. I certainly don’t think we found the stat that tells you how to win a soccer game. There is not that “on base percentage” that is trumpeted by Bill James (the mind behind the statistical theories of Moneyball) as being so crucial in assessing batters. It’s been quite hard with defenders or midfield players. I was talking to this guy at the English club I mentioned, and he said with defenders, do you look at how many tackles they made? Well Maldini never made a tackle. Was he a bad defender? Clearly not, so it is not that easy in soccer to find that exact stat that tells you everything. Wenger said—I presented at this sponsors evening with Wenger in Switzerland during Euro 2008—people really kill stats. If it were clearly about how many kilometers you run in a game than you would just pick Ethiopian marathon runners and win every game. However, it’s not just about the quality; it is about the quantity. If you are a central midfielder and running 12K a match, and the guy marking you has only run 10K, then that difference will probably manifest itself in the last 10-20 minutes of the game when the first guy tires. So it may mean you pop up three times in the opposition penalty area unmarked because he is not tailing you anymore. And if in those three times you get the ball, you have a very good chance of scoring unmarked from that position. So he says, quantity that we measure in stats absolutely is important. It’s not the whole story but it is part of the story that had not been looked at very much in soccer and needs to be looked at. So I’m not saying at all that we now have the data to unlock how to win a soccer game, but if you use the data your chances of winning will increase.

Even in that one data point, the one we always get on TV when a player is substituted—how much he runs. So one gut reaction is that whoever is running the most is working the hardest, covering the most field, tracking back on defense, pushing forward in attack. And that is the guy you want. But maybe all of that running just means he has poor ball skills or game management or mental intuition. Now you don’t want that guy.

Maybe, but if my central midfielder was only running 8 kilometers I’d have a good look at that. I wouldn’t immediately sell him, but I’d think about it—why is this guy running less than the others. Now maybe his positioning is so brilliant or his function within the team is so good that he doesn’t need to run, but maybe there is a problem there. I think you use the data as important pointers. I interviewed a guy at the Milan lab who said he found—and the guy in London said the same thing—that there is no correlation between how many kilometers your team runs and whether you win. But the guy in Milan said that there is a correlation between the high intensity running—the sprinting—and whether you win. If you do more high intensity running in a game, your team is more likely to win.

A good chunk of the book is devoted to managers or coaches. They obviously have the control to pull these statistical levers on the field. Coupled with your belief in the Western European coach, besides Guus Hiddink and Wenger, who are the other guys you feel support your claims?

England is experiencing it right now with Capello. You can think of England as part of Western Europe, but as I argue in the book there was significant isolation from about 1979-1993 if you want to be pedanticly exact about it. And with Eriksson and now with Capello there is this admission that, OK we don’t have the best soccer knowledge anymore and we are going to import it. Trapattoni in Ireland. One very prominent success was Rehhagel in Greece. Troussier in Japan. My point is you don’t have to have this sort of brilliant unique figure like Hiddink. I’m not sure that he is, but he is cast as such. As long as you have someone who is very familiar with best practice and very able to explain it in a new country, he will probably achieve an improvement. And as long as he’s given more than 9 months when he loses two games.

I’m constantly stuck on the topic of American soccer’s youth development, and wondering how that fits into this game of stats. You say in the book that judging an 18-year-old isn’t giving you the data you need to know what he will become. So what are federations and clubs to do about that issue besides leave that control to the eye of certain individuals, often these so-called brilliant figures? Beyond those few, and more than anything in soccer probably, that seems to be the biggest crap shoot. Where do we find players, where do we put them, how do we train them? The Barcelonas and Arsenals of the world being two of the examples everyone likes to rave about.

Yeah. Barcelona, Ajax, and Sao Paulo are the best in the world at producing quantities of world class youngsters. I think Arsenal buys them at a slightly older age. They seem to acquire these kids when they are 16 and on, but obviously Wenger has a brilliant eye for that. I think Wenger is really the only person who consistently identifies kids who later become any good. He seems to have a unique gift. For the rest of us, the great warning is Freddy Adu. You just can not pick that one guy at that age. The body changes, the personality changes so much between then and adulthood. The warning for clubs from our book and the Adu example is by all means you need to produce young players because it is a fairly cheap way to generate talent, but don’t bet on any one of them because the predictor of who is going to make it is so weak.

So if it’s the amount spent on one given asset, is the MLS model a better way to go? Will we see caps and revenue sharing ever in Europe?

It’s never going to happen. In the US there is much more central control and much more a history of everyone getting together and agreeing that it is good for us to be a part of the NFL; and our interests are served by being an obedient member. In Europe there is no tradition like that, and you have the additional complication with everything in Europe, with different countries and cultures. It’s very hard to enforce. If you set rules and then Real Madrid break them, are you not going to let them in the Champions League? It’s not going to happen. And the vast majority of clubs break rules on debt and salary spending. In fact, when the clubs got together to suggest a salary cap, they weaseled out at the last moment, the European Club Association. The clubs wouldn’t go for it. And salary caps as a percentage of revenue favors the big clubs too, because they have the biggest revenues. So I just think Platini—I see him as a preacher figure. You can admire it. He is a romantic. He’s calling for this 1950’s soccer when the sport was composed of local boys and no one got enormous salaries and the debts were to the local butcher and baker. Maybe that is a worthwhile vision, but it’s just not gonna happen. And the regulator is weak. UEFA is not the NFL. UEFA is weak, and I get the sense the NFL is very strong on governance.

This may be a question for Stefan, but this book really took me back to my college statistics class where I felt you could find a statistic to back up any piece of information you wanted. How did you avoid that pitfall with the statistics for the book?

There are controls. Stefan is the master of stats. He is the statistician and professor of economics. My role with those more technical questions was to translate the data for the common reader in a way that Stefan told me was accurate. So I would take something he had written academically and try to turn it into journalism. If I got it wrong, Stefan would tell me that, and I would rewrite it. Statisticians are obviously aware of this and spend a lot of time arguing about: does this prove anything? And usually when one presents a stat, trained statisticians will try to tell you why it doesn’t mean anything. They try to find confounding factors. Maybe you are measuring something else. Maybe the two variables you are correlating only correlate because of something else. And so Stefan being a professor of economics is used to all of that and used to searching for confounders and trying to make arguments stand up despite them. I mean you can produce stats based on no evidence, like we won yesterday and our players ran more K’s than their players, therefore running kilometers is the crucial factor in the win. Now, there is a problem of sample size, and correlation is not causation. Just because you ran a lot didn’t mean you won. One did not cause the other. So you are right, you can prove anything with stats but it doesn’t stand up in the world of professional economists and statisticians, and that is very much the world that we tried to inhabit but take away the complexity and jargon of the language in which it is usually delivered. To present it in the normal way was the challenge. But absolutely, if I had written this thing by myself there would be no reason to trust the stats. I’m just a journalist, but I wrote it with Stefan. And Stefan’s professional reputation in that sense is on the line, and like all academics he was very anxious that there be nothing in there other academics would read and say, oh that is rubbish. It wouldn’t matter too much to a journalist, but to an economics professor that is terrible. So he is very anxious to answer those points or critique that you made.

The book has been out for a while in Europe. What have people been coming to you with as their big surprise or what is thing that has generated the most controversy? It’s great fodder to argue over.

To me one slightly surprising thing that a lot of the debate has focused on, and I have participated in as well, is that in English soccer the manager is probably—most managers are irrelevant. We say this briefly in the book. Put a teddy bear on the bench it would have much the same impact. And because I have realized that media coverage of the game is so much about the manager. And partly because in US sport journalists go into the locker rooms after the game, and they speak to the players as well. So when the Chicago Bulls win and you speak to the players after the game, and there’ll be about 8 voices. So if a guy scored 20 points the journalist will speak to him, and he’ll give his own self-serving account about why he scored 20 points. And you have multiple focuses for explanation after a victory. But in English soccer the players typically say nothing. The manager comes out for a press conference and he says he won because I motivated my players. This guy was not performing and I got him performing. So a huge amount of the coverage is about the manager. And just because you see the manager on TV people start to think that the manager actually matters. In our book, what we say is that in English club soccer—it’s not like international soccer where you can import knowledge to a backward country. In English club soccer pretty much all the information is out there. Everybody pretty much has the same amounts of information. So no manager, not even Arsene Wenger anymore I would say, makes much difference. Hardly any man can make much difference. And that has been quite controversial. I’ve had people telling me that’s rubbish. And because Alex Ferguson is an exceptional man, which I think he is, must be an exceptional manager, which I think he is not. The trick for managers is that it is a marketing and PR role, and you are the head that rolls. You constantly have to market yourself to the media and the fans and sponsors and players, and as soon as you lose the support of those groups you go. Ferguson is an exceptional man and because of that he has managed to unite those groups behind him for 25 years. Which is an amazing feat.

It reminds me of the way presidential politics work, at least here in the States. You’re constantly campaigning, paying attention to the needs of those who could potentially get in the way of what you want to do or eventually just crush you. And there’s probably an argument that it doesn’t matter as much who the president is as much as all the people and pieces that surround him in the federal government.

Or the economic circumstances of his time or political circumstances. I think that is a very good analogy because the great talent in most presidents is in PR and marketing. And whether their policies work out or not is a separate matter. And as you say maybe in very large part beyond their control. Although I would say a president has more power to influence a situation than a soccer manager does.

For sure.

But it is true. There is the analogy that you have all of these factors beyond your control and for example, at the end of the president’s tenure the US GDP will not be vastly different, it’s not going to fall into South African levels. And similarly if you are Manchester United, your club is not going to become Red Bull.

I’d be remiss not to ask a journalism question or two of you and you hit on one earlier, the idea of access to players. What has been your experience with that and do you wish that working in Europe you had more access. Would it matter?

I used to think that it was this amazing thing, that you could speak to a player and it would unlock the secrets of the universe, and I think a lot of journalists think that. They have these mixed zones after the game for the World Cup, and the players take part. Hundreds of journalists press up against the rail and try to get the players to say a few words, usually senseless garbage. I will say I think US players are better about giving good answers than English soccer players. But I came to realize I didn’t want to be part of that, and they don’t add anything. I remember the ballet critic in the Financial Times who was this octogenarian. He said, what do I care about what the ballet dancers said. It’s not my job to assess what they say. It’s my job to assess their performance. I thought that was a very good insight. I was on my exercise machine the other day, and I put on this podcast of BBC Sport after England and Scotland had played. And John Terry came on and said, yeah well I was very pleased with the victory and hopefully next week we’ll win again, etcetera. And then the Scotland manager came on, and he said, yeah you know they shouldn’t have given them a penalty. And I had to switch it off because it was such a horrible insult to my or anybody else’s intelligence to listen to this stuff. So although it is enjoyable and interesting to interview a player when he actually able to say stuff, mostly it’s just not worth the effort. And the effort involved is enormous to get to them. I just don’t want to waste my time on that.

I think it’s also not just access. For me it’s more about time. If you can get real time, days, a few days over the course of months. Real time off the field so that you can tell a story beyond any politically correct soccer quotes, then you have something I can work with. Because I can’t blame the cliché, they don’t want to get in trouble. And now they can go right to the fan through their own websites and Twitter accounts and marketing machines to deliver news quotes and factoids and other tidbits. All that leaves a writer is the chance to spend real time to get a story no one else has. How do you see that relationship between journalist and athlete shaking out as we move on?

As you say there are these layers of protection now, so the effort to get to the participates is just not worth it. What we tried to do with this book is take it in a different direction. Which is to say there has been really good soccer books written in the last 20 years. And so much has been written that it’s only worth writing a new book if you are going to take a new approach. And what we tried to do was say OK let’s line up all of the clichés that exist in soccer and have a go at them. Because I didn’t want to add to the vast libraries of books about this glorious player or that glorious club or this strange season. Even an investigation of a country’s soccer culture has been done very well by many people. I just didn’t want to do another book. I wanted to write a different book. And a book that took the way soccer is discussed and said it’s wrong, let’s discuss soccer in a different way.
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The TIAS Diary Project returns with the 2nd part of a series put together by a young man in Southern California. This is his life’s story, his soccer story in words and pictures. Consider it a stab at a TIAS graphic novel.

For the first installment, I referred to it as a stab at a comic book, but “graphic” now seems to be a better fit, as Noe’s story takes a turn for the darkness…

A Life Toward Soccer, part 2

by Noe Valladolid

We know that futbol is called the beautiful game. But it can be an ugly game. It can bring out the absolute worst in fans and players. I was told a long time ago in school that I shouldn’t speak in absolute terms. There are supposed to be no such extremes in the human condition. But I’m not so sure.

My parents warned me about it. They warned me about being a fanatic. For as much passion as the Mexicans had for futbol–passion that elevated the game in reverence of the old gods–so too do we have those that carried the passion too far. It wasn’t solely the Mexicans I was taught. Central and South Americans, English and Europeans had their own evils determined to make the game ugly.

When I began following futbol I was free to pick and choose from any team… in Mexico. My parents warned me of one group that I should never be affiliated with. One team whose identity was bold, even among futbol fanatics, a team whose following would be spoken like a curse in our house. Although the name is romanticized among the community, I could never become one of the Rebaño Sagrado–members of the sacred flock, the dedicated followers of Las Chivas de Guadalajara.

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The team has a long and honored history. Considered to be the best club in all of North America for decades. They could proudly say that the team has fielded nothing but native Mexicans in their 103-year history. The only other team to even rival their greatness would be Club América. The 90-year-old upstarts with a questionable pedigree. The rivalry between the two clubs was introduced to me through the Súper Clásico, a rivalry the likes of which I could not find a parallel. Imagine the biggest rivalry in baseball, hockey and American football combined. The best part was that these teams played twice a year to cement their status in the annals of futbol history. Many times the two teams played on Mexican Independence Day. My parents tuned in for only a few minutes on the TV. We watched sporadically because the game could get ugly very quick. They wanted to protect me from the passion of the great game, especially the crazed fans that shamed the sport.

They warned me that Mexico was a turbulent country filled with people that wore their passion on their sleeves. Although we all celebrated our ancestry and history with futbol, some of these people took it too far, got too wild in the stands, and did things that most abhor, even the most die-hard USA sports fans. I recalled many of these things when Adam wrote about his experience with Mexico vs the USA in World Cup qualifying. Many reporters highlighted the barbaric ways in which many Mexico supporters treated the visiting fans. I’m not here to defend their actions but instead to explore the ways in which they reflect the ignorance of futbol and social culture.

Fans from the USA might think that that the missiles hurled at players and fans were simply pent up frustrations from Mexican hooligans, and there is some truth to that, but there is also tremendous animosity between Mexico and countries in North and Central America. Some of the grotesque behaviors from the USA v Mexico match happen to Mexican fans when they visit their neighbors to the south. The smaller countries always view themselves as “David” to the visiting “Goliath.” Thugs in attendance think that throwing bags and bottles of piss or vomit are acceptable forms of retaliation for a real or imagined transgression against their country, their flag or their team. Some fans and clubs don’t even have to leave Mexico to get similar treatment. The gross stories of bodily fluids in various missiles thrown from the rafters were relayed to me by my cousins living in Mexico.

But the most frightening story was relayed to me by my mother, a nightmare from her past.

In Mexico some of the tabloids don’t rely on sex to sell. Many of them, like La Alarma, get by on graphic violence. The more gross and disturbing the image, the more likely they are to run it. Pictures of traffic accidents and burn victims are not quite as shocking as murders and drug deals gone bad. A country whose population, drug and poverty levels increase by the minute, whose social and political level of corruption is among the most notorious on the continent can churn out these shocking photos without even trying. When my mother was a child many of these shocking images were played on television. But the one that stuck with her and gave her nightmares came from watching a futbol game on TV.

Fans were cheering the local club when some hooligans began lighting flares in the stands. The cameras moved to one group in particular; they were jumping up and down in the rafters waving a flare. One of the thugs grabbed a child and shoved the flare into his mouth. Within a fraction of a second sparks began shooting out of his nose, eyes and ears. In a great deal of pain and fighting for his life the boy began flailing as if in seizure. One man turned and threw a cup onto the burning child; he seemed to do it without regard as he faded into the panicking crowd. The cup of “soda” was filled with alcohol and instantly caught the child on fire. His face bored out by the intense heat of the flare; his body contorted into a grotesque figure. The child was burned alive, murdered on national television. My mother had repressed that footage for a long time. The ending of the 1989 film Dead Calm brought back the memories. When the satellite TV channel began replaying the movie, she told me about what she had witnessed as a child, and why she’s been unable to shake those images since.

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The origins of these manic fanatic behaviors are unknown. They don’t seem to be reflective of global futbol culture or even all of the Mexican futbol clubs. However I’ve heard many horror stories of violence, racism and other equally disturbing behavior from games all over the world. We all know it exists but why? My parents said it came down to passion. They warmed me of the pitfalls of fanaticism, of passion without restraint.

My parents said that while passion could be the demise of many a futbol fan, it was also the glue that bonded modern Mexicans together. The youth movement of the 60’s was not limited to the USA. Protests, rallies and civil unrest took place all over Mexico as well. Those that protested channeled their passions into a direction. Whether it was good or bad would be up to the scholars to determine. My mother said that my uncles participated in many protests that turned violent while staying in Mexico City. They believed in the cause and were willing to stand up to corrupt politicians and police officers. My mother said it was important that I became passionate about the things that I believed in, to always say what I thought and be proud of the colors I flew, even if those colors were just from a futbol club.

The newspaper clipping of students protesting, throwing rocks and carrying signs was stored away in my grandmother’s house. Many of these students wore dark shirts, but the occasional protester had on a loud team kit in the brightest colors, defying the police with an easily identifiable target. I was assured by my uncles that they were in the fray too, fighting the good fight. They warned me to be careful if I decide to protest for the things I believed in. They would be proud of me no matter what, but expected me to never resort to violence and always protect my fellow brothers and sisters on the street.

It was then that I decided which of the clubs in Mexico would be my favorite. The Pumas of UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the university in Mexico City where my uncles had studied. One became an architect and the other a doctor. Both maintained a proud tradition, celebrated their heritage and never let their passions go unchecked–living examples for me to follow.

The family still makes time to watch the occasional matches, which remind us of why, despite the tragedies and the ugliness, the game is still very beautiful.

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See more of Noe’s work at 1Up.com

Have a story to tell? Join Noe and the others who over the last four years have produced their Diary Projects for TIAS. Send stories, photos, and ideas to thisisamericansoccer@gmail.com

What almost started in London, only to become a gift to New York, is now taking the show on the road with the second installment of the Kicking & Screening soccer film festival in Washington, DC, October 15-18. With three new films that were not shown in NYC, the DC edition still includes Les Yeux dans les Bleus, but adds in a personal favorite, Sons of Sakhnin United, the cult classic Victory, and The Big Green.

After the jump, an edited version of the story behind the film festival, originally published in May.

In a soccer game, as in a movie, a narrative unfolds for the viewer. There are action scenes and sad scenes, comedy and drama. But unlike other sports that stop and start, aiding in the collection of immense data, soccer builds a non-stop story that can challenge the viewer—full of dialogue that may seem meaningless until the entire tale unfolds. And even then you may not get a final payoff; as fans of soccer and Woody Allen films know, you must enjoy the ride. Life follows the same path, so I guess it’s no surprise those three things converge into one around the first-ever American film festival dedicated to soccer.

When Kicking and Screening comes back alive in DC, that moment of success, that convergence of soccer, film, and life will not be lost on the festival’s founder, Rachel Markus, who had the red carpet pulled from underneath her festival in London before the idea’s resurrection in New York, and now DC. “Soccer is art,” she says. “Film is art. It’s not a question of the final outcome, but how you got to that final outcome where the beauty lies.”

After graduating from film school at NYU, the native New Yorker, now 38, tried her luck in the industry, covering film festivals as a journalist and working on a French film production in California. Eventually unable to support herself, Markus leaned back on her two other degrees, from Cornell and Stanford, and returned to work as a marketer in the financial services industry. In 2007 that took her to London.

She had been to London a few times previously, once waiting out a layover in 1998 en route to Marseille and the World Cup semi-final between Brazil and Holland. Markus is a soccer fan, played in her youth before club teams existed for girls in her area of Long Island. She worked as a referee in her teenage years and helped run a youth team while in college. So when she was given a ticket to the semi-final, she took one day off from work—her first big corporate job—and made the round trip from New York to Marseille and back in 24 hours. “I’d do it again,” she says of the tiring journey. “I always was a soccer fan, but from that point on, I was hooked, done—it was the Mastercard moment, priceless. From then one I was the person who read every book and watched every film about soccer.”

She wrote fan letters to Simon Kuper, the popular English soccer journalist and author of two books; he responded via his personal email address. Up to that point Markus was like countless American soccer players (and soccer writers), following her passions in the moments between supporting herself in some other way. So in January of 2008 when she thought it would be a great idea to have a soccer film festival in London, it wasn’t a moment of clarity; it was just another creative idea that probably wouldn’t materialize. Then she e-mailed Kuper again and threw out the idea to him. He loved it, referenced 11MM, a successful soccer film festival in Berlin, Germany, and wondered why there had never been one in London. “He put it in my head that I could really do this,” Markus said. She needed someone to tell her it was possible. Game on.

Markus was living in the southern section of London at the time, working for JP Morgan, and had been to a few Fulham soccer games at Craven Cottage. “It could have been Chelsea,” Markus says. “But I had been to a few Fulham games, so I emailed them.” They too liked the idea and offered to host the festival. She began chasing filmmakers and distribution rights, soccer writers, and potential sponsors. Before long she was speaking with the president of FC Barcelona about FC Barcelona Confidential, a film documenting the Catalan club that she desperately wanted to include in the festival. With absolutely no budget, she did what she could to secure films, even once bringing back six bottles of steak sauce from the famous New York chophouse, Peter Luger’s, because she learned one pair of filmmakers were big fans. Steak sauce got her In the Hands of God, a film that follows a group of English freestyle soccer players to Argentina in search of their hero, Diego Maradona. “From there it just sort of snowballed,” she says.

By September of last year the program was set and the festival just a few weeks away. The phone rang. The economy was dropping into recession and Fulham was worried about sponsors and losses. They issued an ultimatum: if the festival didn’t sell out a week prior to its opening, it would be canceled. “And that’s what they did,” Markus says remembering the next phone call. “Just like that it was nothing. Game Over. I was shattered.”

From July to September 2008 she had been working full-time on the festival because she was laid off by JP Morgan. When the festival collapsed, she returned to New York jobless and too emotionally exhausted with the failure to take another stab at creative success. “I like to think that deep down I knew that it would happen again,” Markus says. “But I didn’t know when I would be confident enough to put myself back out there.”

Then she went on blind date with Greg Lalas. Romance didn’t find a spark, but “Kicking and Screening” did. “She started telling me about this film festival she was putting on in London last fall,” Lalas says, “and how it was canceled last minute. I could hear in her voice and see in her face the disappointment, and so I said, ‘Well let’s do it here in New York.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Really?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’”

“I just needed someone to believe in me again and this festival,” Markus says. “And Greg really stepped up.” For Markus it was a quick lesson on the insular world of American soccer. If it snowballed in London, it was an avalanche in New York.

As a former professional player and present day writer, editor, broadcaster, and website director, not to mention brother of Alexi, it didn’t take long for Lalas to rally the troops. “There is just something about film and soccer,” Lalas says. “We love seeing soccer up on film. We all grew up watching Victory over and over and over again. I actually learned how to play the theme song to Victory on my guitar–it’s such a big part of my life. [American soccer] is insular, you’re right. But it’s also giving. That’s the other side of it. Everyone wants to help. But Rachel is the real cinephile—the only one who can spell cinephile. She’s doing all the heavy lifting.”

In short order North American film rights were procured and soccer friendly locations chosen that connected the global appeal of the sport with the international culture of New York and each film’s subject–a French lounge for a French film, the Spanish Benevolent Society for FC Barcelona Confidential, and the glitzy Tribeca Grand for the Cosmos expose Once In A Lifetime.

They obtained the rights to Victory, but decided to hold on to it. DC gets that little gift as part of the modest line-up for the burgeoning festival and another chapter of Markus’ life.

Soccer. Art. Life.

“At a movie or soccer game, you go and sit for 90 minutes,” Markus says. “You sit and you watch because somewhere in that 90 minutes something brilliant might happen to make it all worth it. It’s a story. People are drawn to stories, and you’ve never seen enough stories or enough games to be satisfied.”

That’s not to say Markus doesn’t feel satisfaction, only that she knows it is short lived, and tomorrow, the next day, the next year, she will have to do it all again. But that’s the beauty of it.

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The trailer for the festival:

The TIAS Diary Project returns with the first part of a series put together by a young man in Southern California. This is his life’s story, his soccer story in words and pictures. Consider it a stab at a TIAS comic book.

Speaking of life stories, maybe you’ve heard that journalism is in a tough spot, facing obstacles both financial and technological. It hit me hard last year when I was laid off from my fulltime editor job at a magazine. Since then I’ve been searching for my next chapter, piling on the freelance work where I can get it.

In an effort to be fully transparent, this month I added NIke to my list of freelance clients by writing some projects directly for the company. TIAS will remain as the place for my independent journalism stories, essays, and deeper discussions, and I hope you will continue to follow along (and maybe submit your own Diary Project).

Now back to Noe’s life. Following is the first in a number of serial guest posts that I have been working on in the last month in an effort to expand upon and deepen the discussion of my single biggest editorial question: What is American Soccer?

A Life Toward Soccer

by Noe Valladolid

This is my true story of futbol. The game that I remember and love. A game that has managed to find its way into my life and the lives of my family for several generations. The first part of my story recounts the very first time I discovered the game and the first time I kicked the ball around.

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My earliest sports memories revolve around my height. In every class picture beginning in kindergarten and going all the way up through high school I always stood out. Line us up shortest to tallest, and I would always find myself at the end of the line, sometimes beating the next tallest kid by a quarter-inch but more likely by a head and a half. You would think that the biggest kid in school would be a natural for sports.

Size, skills, and passion are mutually exclusive elements. You can’t teach size but you can teach skills. Well, you can teach skills up to a point. If you are born without passion then size and skills don’t matter. I was a tall kid with no passion for sports. I preferred the arts, playing music and illustrating. Friends and teachers always pushed me towards sports but I resisted. I didn’t have many good memories of playing sports as a kid.

Games of basketball were routine in elementary school. I’d get the rebound 99% of the time and look for an open teammate to pass to. It saved me the humiliation of attempting consecutive missed lay-ups. On full court games I’d get the rebound and take off running in the other direction… with the basketball tucked under my arm. My classmates would fall down laughing. I kept forgetting to dribble the ball. If there was ever a turnover in the game chances are it was 99% my stupidity as well. The simplest rules of the game, which were second nature to everyone else on the playground, evaded me. My classmates said it was understandable. Mexican’s weren’t supposed to be good basketball players.

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I got older and taller but the game never got easier. Opponents soon resorted to hanging from my arms, or climbing on me to steal the ball. It was one thing to be laughed at on the playground, another thing to be the jungle gym. It was fun for everybody else but not for me. I stopped playing sports for the remainder of my time in grade school.

There was the sole exception of a game between the school’s band and orchestra in my senior year of high school. That game showed how little things had changed since my days on the playground. The clumsy guy with glasses could still upset the most dedicated ballers simply because he was the tallest guy out there. I managed to get most of the rebounds, miss most of my lay ups and suffer the indignity of having classmates climbing on me. Of course I also helped team orchestra build an insurmountable lead and was asked to take the bench for the next 20 minutes. We won by a wide margin and a few band members stopped talking to me after that.

I learned years before “Band v Orchestra” that the best games weren’t always the ones played in school.

One day after school I was sulking around the house looking for something to do. I turned on the television and flipped it to the Spanish stations. I there sat mesmerized, seeing adults dressed in bright colors - like superheroes, running full speed while passing the ball back and fourth with the softest of touches. The stands were packed with people chanting, whistling, playing drums and unfurling massive banners. It was a spectacle, the likes of which I couldn’t find an equal to on English sports channels.

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My mother and father always wanted their kids to play outside and be active. They encouraged us by taking us to the park, teaching us to ride bikes—the usual family stuff. It was the odd black and white ball that dad bought us from Mexico that held the most intrigue. They taught us that in this sport you were supposed to use your feet rather than your hands. You could juggle the ball with your knees, shoulders and hips, but never ever touch it with your arms. They both told me it was a fun game once I got the hang of it. I wondered why if the game was so much fun, how come none of my friends played it. They said it was because schools don’t teach the sports that the USA didn’t dominate in.

What countries were good at this sport then?

They told me just about every other country south of the border and over in Europe could beat the USA at fútbol, even the poor little countries.

C’mon, if the game was so big then how come it wasn’t on TV.

They told me I had seen it, only the American version of football wasn’t the same version that the rest of the world played. This country had built a sports empire under false pretenses. They explained to me that the most popular sports in the USA didn’t have the following of fútbol. No basketball, football or baseball star could rival the most famous fútbolero.

If I was expected to idolize athletes like my classmates were then the least I could do was get my heritage right.

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As a Mexican-American I was part of a proud tradition that supported and excelled at fútbol, going back to the foundation of the country if not even earlier. If not for Mexico, the game that we know it would never have come to exist. Mom and dad assured me that the ancient settlers of Mexico, the Aztec’s and Mayans had practically invented the game. Only the most courageous warriors, bronze men of stature (hey, that sounded a little like me) participated in the game. In modern times their ancestors were idolized and sought after for their athletic ability. Latin American men ended up playing baseball in the USA and fútbol everywhere else.

I was a member of a very privileged class. Even if I didn’t play I could still claim a real connection to the culture. Fans of “American” sports only talked amongst themselves. I was given a passport to the rest of the sports world. I could travel abroad and be able to talk to them in the universal language of fútbol. Even countries suspicious of my accent would welcome me with open arms. All I had to do was mentioned that I was Mexican rather than American or that I was there for a fútbol game.

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My parents taught me that if there was one thing that the other countries enjoyed more than competition, it would be knocking the USA off its high horse. The double identity I held was finally beginning to pay off. I could get into the club simply by knowing the right words. Of course using those words meant I’d have to leave the country. They said that I could stick with the games played at school, the ones that us Mexican’s weren’t supposed to be good at, or choose to honor my ancestors by playing the game that all Mexicans were naturally gifted at.

My mind was blown.

I took the fútbol out to the yard in front of the apartment complex. Dribbled that ball for 10 minutes, bouncing it off the walls before breaking my uncle’s window.

Naturally gifted my ass.

I lied to uncle Alfredo about what happened. I’m certain he knew but didn’t call me out for it. I learned my lesson and haven’t kicked a fútbol since. Time would eventually unravel the other fables my parents taught me about the game and what it means to be a fan.

I’ll save those stories for another day.

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Noe blogs over at 1Up.com

But as should have been obvious in the previous post, there is more to life than winning.

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sunrise over Zocalo Square

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Teotihuacán

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pyramid of the sun

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view from the top of the largest pyramid

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scarf on top

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Minnesota meets El Paso on top of the pyramid of the moon. Why can’t we all just get along?

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would love to see something like this in NYC

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no smiles on eve of big game

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there were plenty of friendly smiles around Azteca…

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but there was plenty of anger too. This photo was the first of three I took from this vantage point. The others, once the crowd saw me taking photos from above, are not fit to print.

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Azteca’s version of tailgaiting

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let me in

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luche libre turned broadcaster

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view of USA fans from the press area. I’d say box, but the press sits amid the crowd. The only difference being a few table tops. It would result in several suit coats and laptops covered in beer.

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pregame. Frankly, Azteca was a let down. It’s a big dirty stadium without charm. Walking around the seats is like rock climbing–it is so steep; there is so little room I wanted a harness. Whereas older stadiums in Europe have charm, Azteca just has poor design, poor construction and mass disorganization. The crowd was loud when they screamed or blew their horns, but nothing special. Nothing more than a NFL or MLB playoff game. Seriously, was it just this game? I don’t get it. The field–the actual grass–was beautiful, but I cried at Craven Cottage. There were no tears at Azteca.

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ready, set…

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goal.

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coaching inside the box

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fighting outside the box

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the sun finally set on Azteca, and the USA would leave with another loss, 2-1. My lasting thoughts revolve around every US v Mexico game I have been to. The beer tossed on me at Giants Stadium, Crew Stadium, and Azteca. At some point some portion of Mexican fans turn on their American counterparts and spew hate and throw liquid. It taints the entire experience, and I’m not willing to accept that it is just the way it is. That it is normal, for example, for a crowd to blow their horns throughout a visiting team’s national anthem to the point where you could not hear it. This wouldn’t happen in the US. Maybe if I experienced real soccer hooliganism it would be easier to ingest.

Luckily, the same hatred is not true of my experience in the country at large. I know the relationship between these neighbors is complex and contentious, but I think most realize there is more to life than winning, than beating your rival. I just wish it showed at the soccer stadium. I love this rivalry; I hate what it degrades to.

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cover photo of Du Nord’s Bruce McGuire amid the Azteca pregame madness

now what gringo? welcome to the TIAS and Du Nord travel special

Across the Rio Grande River, through the Sierra Madre Mountains, in the Basin of Mexico, next to the Volcano Popocatépetl cultural beauty sits amid chaos, built layer upon layer through history. If a city was soccer, it would be Mexico City and its 19 million inhabitants—history, brilliance, art, and madness.

Walking out into the thin air of Estadio Azteca you are greeted by the jeers of 100,000 Mexico fans. It is both incomprehensible and exhilarating, like the city itself. How can so many people fit in one place, and how is it possible that an American can find himself in the middle of it all? Azteca may be the best backdrop for a World Cup qualifier, Its wall of sound encircling a field, buzzing like a beehive.

This is Mexico City, a junction of history and people so big that you can’t understand it all, yet you can’t help but want to try. What better way to see one of the world’s largest cities than to combine it with a visit to Estadio Azteca for a World Cup qualifier? And what better way to take in a USA v Mexico than to mix it with Mexico’s fascinating history, outstanding food, and rich and diverse culture? Would it be too much to hope for a USA victory? Regardless of the result, this is the best trip a US soccer fan can take. Will you be there?

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Orientation

Before reading the guide, get an idea of the layout of the city and some of the areas we’ll be referring to by reading about them here. Andy Wattenhofer created a map which locates many of the places mentioned in this guide. We suggest a tour book such as Daniel Schecter’s Mexico City (city guide) for greater detail on the places and history of Mexico City.

Benito Juárez International Airport [map]. The airport is located on the eastern side of the city. It seems small for an airport that serves one of the largest cities in the world. There are various restaurants inside the terminal, including the mandatory McDonald’s. After disembarking from your plane, you will be guided to the customs area for the usual passport stamping activities. When you walk out to the arrivals area, you will be greeted by throngs of people waiting for their family members and business contacts. Most of the signs are in Spanish, but there are easy symbols on them to help you along. The taxi stand and the Metro station will be well off to the left side but just follow the signs to find them. For more information on ground transportation to and from the airport, see the ground transportation section below.

Centro Historico (sen-tro ees-to-ri-co) [map]. This is where it all began, the historical center of Mexico City located to the west of the airport and right in the middle of Mexico City. At the core is the Zócalo (SO-cah-lo), with the expansive Plaza de la Constitución, Metropolitan Cathedral, National Palace, and various other Spanish colonial buildings. There are many museums, street markets, and restaurants also located here. Take the Metro to the Zócalo station.

Zona Rosa (so-na ro-sa) [map]. Continuing west and slightly to the south, is the Zona Rosa (pink zone), a hotel, shopping, restaurant, and entertainment district. We’ve stayed at hotels in this area and found it to be clean and safe. Take the Metro to the Insurgentes (in-sur-HENT-es) station.

Polanco (po-lahn-co) [map]. This is the expensive, upscale area of Mexico City north and west of the Zona Rosa. We only include it here because some people suggest it as a safe place to stay for foreigners. We’d recommend the Zona Rosa as a better alternative for its location and options. The National Anthropology Museum is located here so you will want to visit the area. Take the Metro to the Auditorio station.

Condesa-Roma (kohn-day-sa roh-ma) [map]. This is a freshly revitalized housing and entertainment area south of Polanco and the Zona Rosa. There are fashionable clubs and restaurants here if you’re looking for a night out. Take the Metro to Chapultepec station and walk south and east to find the fancy joints.

Estadio Azteca (es-TA-dio ahs-TE-ca) [map]. The big stadium is located in the far south of Mexico City, to the south and east of UNAM, the national university of Mexico and home of UNAM Pumas.

Xochimilco (so-chi-MEEL-co) [map]. Further south and east of Azteca is Xochimilco, a town of canals that you may recognize from Anthony Bourdain’s show on the Travel Channel. This is where the Island of the Dolls that Bourdain visited is located. For details on getting there, have a look at the suggested itinerary section below.

Teotihuacán (tay-o-ti-wah-KAHN) [map]. This is the complex of pyramids and ruins dating back to Aztec pre-Columbian America. Take a day trip and spend some time walking around the complex, it is well worth it. For details on getting there, have a look at the suggested itinerary section.

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Estadio Azteca

The Experience. It is difficult to be inconspicuous in the stadium when you’re wearing the colors of the USA. When you walk out to your seats with a group of Americans, the entire stadium will whistle in disapproval. People will yell things at you. Some will approach and pose amongst us while their buddy a few sections away takes a picture. Have fun with it and try to take it all in. Most Mexicans are polite and friendly, just like us.

There will likely be one or more points where a large American flag will be unfurled in the section: during the national anthem and after any goals we might score. This is where we’ll hear the loudest jeers, and we may have a few things thrown at us from other sections. Keep your eyes open and watch your back and your neighbor’s back.

If you choose to buy tickets on your own and sit amongst the Mexican fans, you’ll be a lot less conspicuous. As long as you’re not in the midst of a supporters club, we don’t see any danger in doing this. A good personality and sense of humor will help you.

Tickets. US Soccer is holding a lottery in order to supply tickets to US fans. The lottery is past and was only opened to Supporters Club members. After filling those orders, if tickets remain, they will be made available to the general public. This will be in addition to the option provided by Ole Ole for transport-and-ticket packages. if just purchasing a game ticket, you’ll have to get to the stadium by Metro or a cab set up through your hotel. Grabbing cabs on the street as you do in the U.S. is strongly discouraged.

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Getting There. If you are with Ole Ole, you’ll get a bus ride to and from the stadium. Don’t hang your flags out the windows or they will be set on fire. Do open the windows to purchase merchandise from the street vendors as you approach the stadium.

If you are taking public transit, take the Metro blue line (a.k.a. line 2) to the Tasqueña station. From there you must transfer to the Tren Ligero, the tram. There is a separate fare of MEX$2 for the tram. Take it all the way to the Azteca station.

Security. We’re still waiting on details from US Soccer about security details. In past years they have worked with the Mexican authorities and the US State Department to have police guarding the section where the bulk of the US fans are located. There will probably be empty buffer sections separating us from the Mexican fans. Don’t be surprised to see German shepherds in the trench in front of our section. The field is surrounded by a chain link fence and there are fences between the side and end sections. Don’t be too concerned. The main threat is cups of beer flying down from above. Just be aware of your surroundings.

Tours. We’re still trying to determine if we can do this the week of the qualifier. The tour walks you through the museum with a lot of historic items from Club América, gets you onto the field, the stands, and into the changing rooms, while giving the history of this footballing landmark. There is also a souvenir shop. See Visita Viva America (translated).

UPDATE: Azteca stadium will be closed (no tours) Monday and Tuesday, 8/10-11, for preparation for the game. The stadium opens again to the public Thursday and Friday, 8/13-14, from 9am-4pm. No reservation needed; just show up; cost is 20 pesos, about $1.50

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Mexican League Soccer

“For people who are coming in a few days early or staying a few days later,” Grant Wahl wrote over email when asked for his travel suggestions, “there are some other decent games going on.”

It’s in Spanish, but Medio Tiempo has the run down on schedules.

“The FMF league game on the 9th (Toluca-Pumas at Toluca),” wrote Wahl, “should be fun. Toluca’s got a cool stadium about 30 miles outside Mexico City at a killer altitude, Pumas is a DF team with lots of support and the Toluca Red Devil fans are a hoot. (I’d suggest watching the game with those guys.) First round Copa Sudamericana games are also going on from the 11th-13th. On the 16th you’ve got Pumas-Tigres (Mex City) and América-Atlas (Azteca) as two more pretty good league games.”

General travel rules from the stalwart reporter? “I’d say to just be smart and aware. In that way it’ll be good training for going to South Africa next year. If I can get clearance to go, I plan on staying in the Condesa neighborhood again. It’s a cool part of town.”

Added the Washington Post’s Steve Goff over IM: “Don’t enter a renegade taxi — your life depends on it. Prepare for high altitude (7,350 ft). Not hot, but air is bad. Visit Zocalo, Plaza San Jacinto market and Floating Gardens/Xochimilco. Eat well. Worship Azteca.”

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zocalo square

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Accomodations — Where To Stay

Finding available rooms should be a lot easier with the slump caused by the swine flu paranoia. We chose three options to fit three styles and price ranges. There are many similar options out there so don’t be afraid to check others. But care should be given to selecting a location for safety and convenience reasons. If safety is your main concern, consider the Zona Rosa, Polanco, and La Condesa areas; be prepared to pay the same prices in these areas that you would in the U.S.

Budget/Hostel: Hostel Catedral [map]

The last time we were in Mexico City, a visit to this hostel to meet some other USA fans was all the convincing we needed to add it to our 2009 trip itinerary. Located in the Zócalo area and named for the nearby Metropolitan Cathedral, Hostel Catedral is a good choice for its amazing location in the historic center of the city, its cleanliness, and its low prices. Join us won’t you?

Hostel Catedral has shared dorms and private rooms. Dorm beds may be booked online. If you would like to reserve a private room, there is a contact form on the site to do so. They may request that you book a dorm bed and then email the confirmation number to them so they can upgrade it to a private room reservation.

The Hostel has computers with paid internet access, a rooftop terrace with a bar, a cafe with doors opening out to the street, and free breakfast.

Location: Take the Metro to the Zócalo station.
Hostel Cathedral
4 Calle de la República de Guatemala
Ciudad de México, DF 06000
01 55 5518 1726

Mid-range: Apartamentos-Hotel Avilla [map]

Although we have not visited this place, the reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor and Kayak give us reasonable confidence that it is safe and clean. It is located in the Centro Historico district three Metro stops from the Hostel Catedral. The rooms are more like small apartments, with separate kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom areas. Cable TV and free WiFi are some additional amenities.

Location: Take the Metro to the Hidalgo station.
Apartamentos-Hotel Avilla
Calle Sombrereros
Ciudad de México, DF 06030
01 55 5518 5618

Upper-range: Galería Plaza [map]

This is the place we stayed at the last time we were in Mexico City. It is exactly like a four star American hotel with all of the amenities one would expect. It is located in the Zona Rosa area, with lots of bars and restaurants nearby. Choose this if you are looking for a comfortable room in a safe and convenient area of the city. Or there is always the Four Seasons.

Location: Take the Metro to the Insurgentes station.
Hotel Galería Plaza
195 Calle Hamburgo
Ciudad de México, DF 06600
01 55 5230 1717

Four Seasons
Paseo de la Reforma #500 Colonia Juárez, México, D.F., México, 06600
Tel. 52 (55) 5230-1818

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Ground Transportation

The subway system, known as the Metro, is so easy and cheap that there is little reason to use anything else. You can ride it from the airport to the hotel areas and to the tram that goes to Azteca. It may seem unintuitive, but the Metro is as safe if not safer than a taxi.

The usual rules for safety and crime on subways apply here. Don’t ride in empty or nearly empty cars, travel with a group, watch for pickpockets, and don’t be antagonistic. If you ride the Metro to Azteca, you will be a target. Stay with a group and have fun with it.

The cost of a subway trip is 2 pesos, about US$0.15. The ‘$’ is used in Mexico for pesos, so the price will be denoted as $2 and it will throw off your internal budgeting computer a few times. They’ve recently updated the stations with ticket machines and rechargeable fare cards (translated) are available for 10 pesos plus 2 pesos per ride in any quantity. At those prices, US$6.00 should be enough for a week of travel. Can it get any better than that?

The subway works like most in the world. Each line has a color and a name and the directions are indicated by the names of the end stations. The system was designed when illiteracy was high in Mexico, so there are also symbols for each station and it is easy to use even if you don’t know Spanish.

To get to Azteca, you take line 2 (blue line) to Tasqueña and transfer to the Tren Ligero (Xochimilco Light Rail). Go nine stops and get off at the Estadio Azteca station. There is a separate fare of 2 pesos per ride and the Metro fare cards are not valid.

If you must take a taxi, follow these rules: never hail a taxi on the street. Always have your hotel call a trusted taxi. If you are at the airport, there is a taxi stand where you can buy a ticket for a licensed taxi. Know exactly where you are going and don’t expect the driver to speak English.

Our Google map of Mexico City has all of the subway stations on it for your trip planning pleasure.

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Suggested Itinerary

No itinerary should be set in stone, but these are the things we hope to be checking out during our stay in Mexico City. This is a lot to do, so be prepared to be exhausted when it is all through. We hope to see you there!

** Note most museums are closed on Monday

Sunday

National Anthropology Museum (hours 9am-7pm; cost MEX$51)—This is the perfect introduction to the history of Mexico and a great place to start before going to see the pyramids in Teotihuacán. It is very big, so focus on “Sala Teotihucana” if you’re planning on visiting Teotihuacán.

Time permitting, visit Templo Mayor—This is a ruined Aztec temple in the Zocalo, with an attached museum.

Mexican league game: Toluca-Pumas at Toluca

Monday

Tuesday

Xochimilco—This is the area of canals at the southern edge of Mexico City. It should be a good way to relax. You can hire a gondola to take you around. To get there, take the Tren Ligero to the Xochimilco station. Walk north to the Embarcadero to hire a trajinera (gondola). Prices should be posted. There is also a tourist office nearby should you need help.

**After some discussion, it seems the unfortunately named sports bar, Yuppies, will be the site of Tuesday night’s USA fan party. Yuppies is popular with Mexicans and tourists alike for its sports on TV, including the NFL, which is rapidly becoming more popular south of the border.

Wednesday

USA-Mexico at Azteca! Get breakfast and then start making your way to the stadium.

Thursday

National History Museum (hours 9am to 5pm; cost: MEX$51)—Not to be confused with the anthropology museum, this is the history museum located next door.

Friday

Centro Artesanal la Ciudadela—If you would like to do some shopping, this crafts market may be the place. Take the Metro to Balderas station and walk north along Calle Balderas to get there.

Lucha Libre at Arena Mexico, 8:30 PM—From the New York Times: “the city’s top lucha libre site is Arena México (189 Calle Dr. Lavista in Colonia Doctores; 52-55-5588-0385). Tickets start at MEX$40, but spring for a ringside seat (up to MEX$210). Matches last about two hours, although an hour is more than enough time to get your fill.” Take the Metro to the Cuauhtémoc station. Or, from Centro Artesanal, walk south along Calle Balderas through two intersections and then take a right turn (go east) on Calle Doctor Lavista one block.

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Places To Eat and Drink

Cafeina: Corner of Av Juan Escutia nd Av. Nuevo León in La Condesa; several blocks directly south of Sevilla Metro station. This is a relaxing place for drinks and is co-owned by Mexican actor Diego Luna of Y Tu Mama Tambien fame.

Doña Anastasia (Quesadilla lady): Corner of Calle Segunda Chilpancingo & Calle Huatusco in Colonia Roma Sur; directly south of Chilpancingo Metro Station. Fans of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” show on the Travel Channel will recognize this place. This is the street vendor where he got the hand-made blue tortilla quesadillas.

Fonda Margarita: Calle Adolfo Prieto 1364B; far south of La Condesa; about halfway between the División del Norte and Mixcoac Metro stations. Another Bourdain spot, this is the place where he got the amazing looking breakfast that was prepared in the giant pots in the early hours of the day.

Taquería el Huequito 2: Calle Simón Bolivar 58; one block east of the San Juan de Letrán Metro station; just south of the intersection of Calle República de Uruguay and Calle Simón Bolivar. This is another Bourdain joint, this time a taco stand. Actually, he did not visit this one, he went to “Taquería el Huequito (the original one)” couple of blocks to the west. Either one is fine, but #2 has seating.

La Ideal: Republica de Uruguay 36; two blocks east of San Juan de Letrán Metro station; just south and west of the Zócalo. A highly praised bakery (no relation to Pastelería Ideal a few blocks away).

Pastelería Ideal: around Calle Dieciseis de Septiembre 3; just two blocks north along Av. Lázaro Cárdenas. This is a highly acclaimed bakery for breakfast or just cofee and a treat.

Restaurante Arroyo: 4003 Insurgentes; a couple miles south and west of Estadio Azteca; for this one you’ll probably want to arrange a taxi to take you there. This one comes as a recommendation from Chicago chef Rick Bayless: “huge and raucous and specializes in pit-cooked lamb barbacoa and tender pork carnitas; it’s rarely filled with less than a thousand people (especially on Sunday afternoon, prime time) and there’s always a traditional mariachi floor show, as well as roaming bands playing in different regional styles.”

El Baijio (Polanco branch): Alejandro Dumas 7 in Polanco; north and west of the Auditorio Metro station. Another recommendation from Rick Bayless: “it’s homey and wonderful and has a menu filled with the flavors of Veracruz (in spite of its West-Central name).”

Fonda El Refugio: Calle Liverpool 166; just west of Insurgentes Metro station on Calle Liverpool. This is a traditional Mexican place with reasonable prices and good service. A great place to unwind after a long day.

More Links

• Our Google map with all of these places and more
• National Museum of Anthropology site in English
• National Museum of History (Spanish)
• Templo Mayor museum site (Spanish)
• Good summary of Teotihuacan
• Mexico City tourism guide
• New York Times 36 Hours In Mexico City

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I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this article was almost fully put together by du Nord’s Bruce McGuire and fellow Minnesotan Andy Wattenhofer. All due praise. Trip of a lifetime.

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“Senator,” someone needs to tell him, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Not that it would do any good.

After the jump, we pick up the second half of my conversation with Grant Wahl, author of The Beckham Experiment, out now from Crown publishers. Read part one here.

I have two words followed by three exclamation points written in my notes. Yallop partying!!! Break down that scene for us. Were you there?

I was there. That was the first stop on the first road trip with Beckham that the Galaxy took. It was in Toronto, a horrific game. Beckham didn’t even play. It ended 0-0. But Toronto is a pretty fun town, and the Galaxy had made this deal with a local promoter, which allowed them to stay for free at a really nice hotel downtown, and they had all of their meals at this club, called the Ultra Supper Club, which was the hottest club in the city. Part of the deal was this big blow-out party the night of the game. In return for all these freebies, the club was allowed to promote the fact that Beckham and the Galaxy were there. Beckham’s people ended up getting upset about that, and the Galaxy never did those promoter deals again.

It was a pretty amazing scene. I was there, I think, with Allen Hopkins from ESPN. He had somehow located some wristbands, so we didn’t have to stand in line forever outside. It was what I imagine it must have been like to be at Studio 54 with the Cosmos in the 70’s. This was a huge huge event in Toronto, and it was fascinating to see that this was all for one person. I remember talking to Galaxy players about that – guys like Pete Vegenas wondering what it must have been like to be in Beckham’s shoes, knowing that if you suddenly got up and went to the other side of the club that so many people would just gravitate toward you. That was the first time the Galaxy experienced what it was like, at least off the field, to be a SuperClub.

The way you have it positioned in the book, it plays like the climax, because from then on it begins to unravel. You write that it was strange to see Frank partying with the players because it was not the personality you expected out of him—as if drinking that night in the club is where he and maybe the whole team drank the Kool-Aid.

Keep in mind that Frank was the guy who did the deal with the promoters. He has contacts in Toronto, and the Galaxy signed off on it. But Frank is known as a players’ coach and, you know, people noticed he was out that night, and some people had a problem with that and some people didn’t. Frank is a really good guy by the way; I love Frank. But I also don’t think he was a good fit. Once Beckham signed it was a hard fit for him. He wasn’t really in a position where he could tell David to do something he didn’t want to do. That really came back to haunt Frank when Beckham played two days in a row in London and Los Angeles, 90-minutes each.

In regards to American coaches in general, what kind of coach would it have taken to make that situation work? They had two polar choices in there back-to-back and neither could get it done. Does a lot of it just come back to the special beast that is the MLS structure?

Yes. That is one of thing that definitely comes out of seeing what happened to Ruud Gullit. It’s no coincidence that the only foreign-born coaches who have had success in MLS had spent time in the United States for quite awhile and got a sense of how this league works, which is very different than any other league in the world. Guys like Steve Nicol have been around forever. Nowak, Rongen, guys who have won MLS Cups. Juan Carlos Osorio, even though he isn’t doing well now, has had success in this league and has been in MLS at a level below head coach and knew how the league worked. Then you look at guys like Gullit, Carlos Alberto Pereira, Bora Milutinovich—these guys were failures, pretty abject failures in MLS, and I don’t think that is a coincidence at all, because these guys are wired to coach in a different way, which is the European way.

Is that a problem for MLS?

I don’t know. In the end, I think it helps American coaches. Most of the guys who have had success are Americans. I don’t think you want to get a reputation as a league, though, that every European or South American coach that comes in is going to have a real problem. I think you want as many influences as possible, but for big name foreign coaches who come into MLS, there are no exceptions—they always fail. So I wouldn’t mind seeing a guy come in and have success. As for Gullit and the Galaxy, you had, in a sense, someone in Terry Byrne that didn’t really understand these issues picking a coach. But also Tim Lewieke is at fault for making the final decision in going down the road of hiring a big name foreign coach, and he knew the history of those coaches in MLS.

How much of it is the handcuffs MLS places on their teams and how much of it is this often discussed idea that the American player is different.

I think the American player is different. They are more educated in most cases than foreign players. The American has been conditioned to not just accept everything but ask, “Why are we doing this?” I found it interesting that a European player, Abel Xavier, really came around to what MLS was as a league and how as a coach you did need to have a different relationship with the players than you do in Europe. You needed to be in contact with them more often; you couldn’t just not talk to your team. And because there were so few veterans on the Galaxy, you really needed to create a sense of leadership in that group instead of exiling guys like Pete Vegenas for two months at a time, when here is a guy who knows more about the Galaxy and MLS than just about anybody on that team.

The controversy over the captaincy speaks to the team leadership as well, and it gave you another great series of anecdotes, which for me still stand as the brilliant part of this book. Take me through piecing that together.

So the full story is what you read in the book, and I think I got it pretty close. But even the principles didn’t know the full story for a long time. Landon Donovan did not know until the Spring of 2009 that Beckham’s handlers had anything to do with requesting that David take over the captaincy from Donovan.

Where does he find that out?

I told him. It’s kind of crazy because it’s such a sensitive issue but like Alexi Lalas says, it’s also a bunch of high school BS. But the captaincy can be such an important thing on a team—not stepping on people’s toes or showing a lack of respect. So I remember in reporting my SI story in 2007 before Beckham even arrived, asking Frank Yallop, what are you going to do about the captaincy? And Frank got this look on his face like, “I don’t know.” The funny thing was that I didn’t know until over a year later that Terry Byrne had asked the same exact question in Madrid when Lalas and Yallop had visited him there. That is a different question coming from Terry Byrne, because it comes with the power of David Beckham behind it. Now Beckham’s side may say that was not coming from David Beckham, but it has the force of Beckham. It certainly spurred Yallop and Lalas into action, telling Donovan in separate conversations almost right as Beckham was arriving that he needed to give up the captaincy. It’s fascinating to me because Yallop and Lalas—all they said to Donovan was people from above want this to happen. They didn’t say anything about it being Beckham’s handlers. And then when it actually does happen, and Beckham is the captain for the first time in August of 2007, the story that is given to the media is solely that Donovan wanted to do this—even from Donovan himself. There was so much more to the story, so much going on below the surface. Several weeks later Landon was the first one who told me. He said that Yallop and Lalas had come to him about it. And he was upset at first. But this is very different from what was coming out in the daily media stories.

It really speaks to the worth of the medium, writing a book. You’ve said it over and over again, but the time you had and the repeated access you got—we wouldn’t have these stories were it not for that schedule, that expanse of time.

I had so much information. Almost 1000 pages of interviews in my computer shorthand from transcribing recordings. I spent a good two weeks just putting things into a real-time chronology. That took forever, but it was important to organize all that information and get a sense of when things happened and when people were aware of things, so that you could make sense of it for the reader.

Breakdown the time line of the writing process.

I knew all along that the manuscript was going to be due the first of March of 2009. The Galaxy season ended in October of 2008. I wrote the first chapter in October, and then I had to do a lot of work for SI for college basketball and for MLS Cup in November. I arrived in South Africa on Thanksgiving day and knew I would have three months from that point to hand in a finished manuscript. So, I spent just about two weeks outlining and organizing and began to get a little nervous, because I don’t think I started actually writing the rest of the book until December 18th. I ended up writing about 105,000 words in 71 days. When you hear that you are kind of frightened, or at least I would be. I mean, is that going to be any good? But I felt like I had such good material and that always helps. Thankfully I don’t really suffer from writers’ block and didn’t here. I just worked seven days a week, and in South Africa there was no one to bother me; I was on leave from SI. I would get up at 5:15 in the morning and write until about 6pm. It was painful sometimes, but thankfully it worked out. I made my deadline. And then the book was originally supposed to come out in October, in time for MLS playoffs, which was kind of the time hook. But once it turned out that Beckham was going to come back to MLS in mid-July, Crown made the decision to have the book come out then. Which I am very happy about because it gave the book a really good time hook. There are very few books that come out almost in real time. The book goes all the way through early March 2009.

Can we expect an epilogue in the paper back edition that sews up the story after this season, if and when Beckham leaves MLS for good, as many think he will?

Everybody but him, which is funny. If it was him calling the shots, I think he would finish this season with the Galaxy, return to a European club to prepare for the World Cup, and then come back to MLS and finish out his playing days. But sure, I’d do that, I guess it depends on if anybody buys the book. I am curious to see how things go for Beckham with the Galaxy and how the fallout goes with what has been said in this book. Very few Beckham teammates have ever been critical of him, especially the way Donovan is in this book. These are guys who have lockers next to each other in Los Angeles, so I am very curious to see how that plays out.

How do you think Donovan is going to handle this? Surely he knew as he was telling you these things that there was going to be a discussion that needed to take place or a cold shoulder received.

I think the best way to put it is that Landon is not going to be blindsided by what is in the book or what he is saying in the book. How that plays out publicly or privately between him and Beckham, honestly, I have no idea.

That’s the $30 question.

Yeah, and Lalas says a lot of things about Beckham and his handlers. How will that play out? I don’t know. I do appreciate the time those guys spent talking to me for the book and their fearlessness in what they said.

Those two really do in many ways make the book. It’s so rare these days, when athletes prefer to talk publicly through Twitter or their websites. Articles have been written about the death of long form sports journalism and how it affects a fan’s relationship with professional athletes. And I would by lying if I didn’t think this book could scare Donovan away to some degree. But in your experience, how unique do you feel this project was in that regard?

I hope it’s not too unique, in that I hope people will want to talk to me in the future. I think I have been straight up with everyone involved, and maybe it was a sign of the dysfunction in the Galaxy locker room that a guy like Donovan would be so candid with me. A lot of that stuff wasn’t being shared to the rest of the locker room or all the guys. I think the level of communication between Donovan and Beckham was in particular pretty low last year. And I know Donovan wants to improve that this year. It’s important to say that as angry as Donovan can get at some points in this book with Beckham that he would tell you that he wants to have a good relationship with David on the field this year and that Beckham can be useful for the team. It was important for Donovan all along—we had this conversation many many times—that it was not a personal thing with Beckham. He simply wanted him to do what was right for the team. By the end of 2008 season, Donovan was very upset because he did not think Beckham had been committed to the team in the last half of that season.

This book will pull the cover off soccer for a lot of people. It’s a sport that doesn’t get a lot of attention, full of players who see equally little attention. I’ve argued that makes soccer ripe for this kind of treatment from writers. Do you agree? Does that help in player access, as opposed to say, a NFL team full of famous, rich guys potentially more leery of media?

I think it is a reflection of where soccer is. It is at a stage where maybe it is kind of like where the NFL was in 1960’s. And soccer probably is not there yet, but I think of the photograph of Joe Namath sitting by the pool before the Super Bowl, talking to all of the writers. It was possible to do that back then. With so many professional athletes today, it is next to impossible to have that kind of access. Landon Donovan is the best soccer player in America as far as I’m concerned, and yet here is a guy who I ate a lot of meals with; we had interview meals in New York and Providence, Rhode Island. I was at his house in Manhattan Beach. He is a very busy guy, but he made time. And because it was over a two-year period, you are talking about a lot of hours at the end of that. And quality hours with his willingness to talk about this stuff. Maybe he also noticed that I was willing to fly across the country all the time while I had a fulltime job at SI, in order to do these interviews and follow the team. Maybe I earned some respect from him on that part.

Does Landon win the award for giving you the most time?

I would say Donovan and Lalas were at the top of the list, but there were other guys, too. Chris Klein and I talked a lot. Alan Gordon, Pete Vegenas, Greg Vanney, Edson Buddle, Joe Cannon. Kyle Martino was a great interview, but he got waived by Gullit. From my purely selfish perspective, I was really upset when Martino got waived because he was such a good interview. Albright also. Great interview, but he got traded. There are a lot of guys on that team who gave me quite a bit of time, and I’m curious to see how they feel about the finished product. But I do hope they know I appreciate the time they took.

Could this happen in any other sport? The book? The story that unfolds? I don’t think it could, and that speaks to soccer’s place in the world of professional sports as well.

I think it does, too. And I’m not sure it could happen elsewhere. We’re at this middle ground where MLS is not just starting, but it also is not where some people would like it to eventually be. It’s a very strange situation where someone who is this global icon comes into the team, and it gets back to the whole worlds colliding stuff. If you had some previous relationships like I did with people inside that team, and they were willing to talk about having this whirlwind come into their lives, then you knew there would be something good there, no matter how it played out. And there is so much more than what is in the book. Someday maybe I will have to unleash the outtakes on my blog or something.

Give me one.

One of my favorite moments was having Abel Xavier yell at me for 10 minutes in the Galaxy locker room’s bathroom at RFK stadium. It was the very first road trip with Beckham, and he was upset that I was writing a book. At that time he was very much coming from a European mentality of, you don’t write books unless you are paying all the people involved, to have their stories. I had to try and explain to him as he was screaming that American soccer was a little bit different, and I was a little bit different in a sense because I knew a lot of the other guys, though I didn’t obviously know him. He had a habit of getting really upset after loses—they had lost that night—and he also had this habit of whenever things didn’t meet his standards saying (in Grant’s best Abel accent) “This Is Not Correct!” He is a total character with a volcanic temper. He kept saying that over and over again. It was funny because after a while a lot of the American players on the team had a lot of respect for Xavier, even though he didn’t play very well for the team on the field. By the end of it, about a year later, Abel, who at one point was going to write his own book about it, agreed to a détente set up through Pete Vegenas, who had put in a good word for me. But he was gone before it could happen.

Further to the point, can you imagine what went down over the last two years with the Galaxy happening at any other franchise in any other pro sport?

I can’t.

I’ve been racking my brain, and while certainly some franchises have been run poorly, I can’t think of one place where this sort of dysfunction has taken place, much less explicitly chronicled in a book. Which will be another test for the place of MLS in the American sporting spectrum. If this story was about the Giants, fans would be furious. But with MLS and the Galaxy, will anyone care?

I guess we’ll find out.

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My immense gratitude goes to Grant Wahl for taking the time to discuss his book with me. Just as in his work, I can’t do anything if people won’t talk to me. Got a story? Email me at thisisamericansoccer@gmail.com

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Why do book reviews have to be summaries of the book? I never got that. I understand it but don’t get it. I do get jacket blurbs, though. Those few sentences of praise on the back of a book–I’m always curious what names are there and what they say.

“Through the prismatic window of its most famous player, Wahl masterfully traces every intersection, follows every turn through the disjointed world of American soccer’s season on the brink… of what exactly is the lasting question.”

“There’s your jacket cover blurb” I wrote in sappy jest to Grant Wahl, when he asked my opinion of his book this past Spring. It was a joke—as if I’d be chosen over Foer, Deford, and other famous writers who praise the book on its back cover. But I have gotten to know Grant a bit over the four years I’ve been producing TIAS (Wahl was my first in-depth interview as I began to position TIAS as place where soccer journalism, not just the sport, was a topic of discussion). So after signing my life away, I was able to procure one of the first galley copies of the book back in May. And before the mainstream got its grubby hands on him, Grant talked his publisher into allowing him to speak to me before the deluge of requests.

“Given the title, the player, and the hype,” I told him when asked for my first impressions of the book, “I’m very happy with how you balanced Beckham with other Galaxy players, MLS as a whole, and American soccer in general. You know I wasn’t excited for a book about Beckham, so I’m thrilled that this really isn’t one. I love how it reads like a magazine piece and how many times you were able to retell specific conversations, moments, etc, that really pull the larger issues out while having the reader feel as if they are standing next to Alexi or Landon when they’re arguing. Three times through it and I’m still blown away by how much people talked and what they said. I would guess at first that as Beckham’s injury persisted, the idea of writing this book could have been difficult, but in the end it turned out to be a better story than if it had gone to MLS, AEG, and 19 Entertainment’s plans. I know at least one other Beckham book was all but scrapped for that reason, and it goes to show what access is worth, and what it can deliver in the right hands.”

There is a reason why Grant Wahl went from researcher to senior writer in just a few years at Sports Illustrated, and there is a reason why this book and all that is held within its pages exists today. Wahl is without equal in the soccer world, and American soccer is without equal in the sports world. Both of those statements speak to quality in their own way, as well as soccer’s place in this country. Publications and writers and the nation on the whole don’t care about soccer, but thankfully Wahl does; he’s the only true narrative writer working in the industry.

But to say Wahl wins due to lack of competition doesn’t give him enough credit. What Wahl produced after following the Los Angeles Galaxy for two seasons is American soccer’s best chance to explain itself to an unknowing world once and for all, even if in that story explodes a soap opera. It will be interesting to see how the book sells in a world where a soccer story can blow up the front page of the Sunday Times but then completely fail as a popular book, as happened with Warren St. John’s flash in the pan about the Fugees down in Georgia.

If this one can’t do it, no one can.

Every aspect that goes into this book—the reporting, the stories that evolved, the fact that soccer allows for this sort of in-depth interaction with the country’s professional players—add up to deliver what may be the best sports book of the year. Part of that lies with Wahl, and part of that rests in the book’s rarity within the changing universe of American sports journalism. This book could not have happened in any of the “big 4″ American sports.

From the minute details of recreated scenes to the wide angle lens that captures this moment in American soccer history, to the fact that the book is essentially being released in real time, Wahl has delivered a masterpiece that no one else working in the sport could have done. There are many fine reporters working in soccer. Even a good satirist or two. And probably too many aging curmudgeons and former Europeans. Unfortunately, there are almost no fine writers. Like everyone involved in the Beckham experiment, a writer wants to get paid too. And like too many players in MLS, very few writers can earn good money with soccer. This book, this story, this writer come together for the perfect storm.

The following conversation took place over Skype on June 3rd, as Wahl was finishing his 7-month sabbatical from Sports Illustrated in South Africa.

(for more on David Beckham’s impact on the American game, join me, the Lalas brothers, and others in New York this Thursday evening for a panel discussion as part of the 1st annual Kicking and Screening Film Festival and then stay around to watch RBNY take on Beckham and the Galaxy.)

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Thanks so much for taking the time Grant.

I’m excited. This is actually the first time I’ve been allowed to give an interview for the book. Glad it was you, because I have a feeling I won’t have the same energy as future interviews and reviews come in.

Yeah, I’m thrilled. I don’t think any piece of media this year will be more in my wheelhouse than this. I’ve read it three times, and I’m gonna keep you for about 9 hours if that’s ok with you. So so much to cover, so right into it. Starting general and moving toward the specifics, I wanted to know if while writing it you saw this as your only book on American soccer.

I hope not. This is the first time an American publisher—a big New York publisher—wanted to do a soccer book. You know what, that’s probably not true, but as far as I know, there hasn’t been a book that gets heavily into MLS. The Women’s team has had a book, Mia Hamm has a book, but I cover two sports for Sports Illustrated—college basketball and soccer—and I always thought that my first book would be about college basketball or something other than soccer because there may not be enough demand in the U.S. market. Obviously in this case, it’s different. When Beckham came to MLS, the publisher, Crown, was interested in doing a book to the point that they came to me instead of the usual way of me going to them as the writer with a pitch. So, that’s fantastic. It gave me a chance to write a 300-page book—it’s hard for me to find a lot of space to write about soccer in Sports Illustrated magazine.

What was your reaction when the publisher came to you?

Surprise, a little bit.

Kind of like when Charlie Rose called?

Yeah, exactly. For me it was great. I was looking to do a book right around that time for several reasons. One, I have been at SI for 12 years now and wanted to do a book project that I was really excited about. And I knew I was going to be living in South Africa for 7 months because my wife is working here as a doctor. The advance that I got for the book allowed me to pursue the book and take a leave of absence from SI and write the book over here in South Africa and not have to really worry too too much about finances.

I won’t ask you to name the actual figure, but I’m curious given it is a soccer book, where did that advance fall in regards to your knowledge of what it was worth or what other SI writers had received for books in the past. Did it being soccer affect the advance at all?

I don’t know a lot about the market for that sort of thing. I signed a two-book contract with Crown. This is the first of those books—I don’t know what the second book will be yet. From what I am told, I should be thankful this came around in 2007 because of the economy and book business these days—if I were to get a book deal now, it would have been for a fair amount less. It was enough money for me to follow Beckham and the Galaxy around for two years and then to take off six months from SI and not take a pay cut. So that’s how I judged it.

This book is about much more than Beckham. How did you balance the idea that this is a book about Beckham with its expansion into a larger story of MLS and American soccer? Was that just how the story unfolded, or was that a conscious effort on your part?

Well I knew the guy on the cover was going to be David Beckham. And that is what drove the interest in the book. but at the same time I was confident that there would be a lot of other really good stories to tell in this book because you had a lot of people’s lives being effected by David Beckham coming to the United States. Whether it was Landon Donovan dealing with Beckham’s arrival or someone a lot lower down the recognition scale, like say Alan Gordon—what would it be like for him? How will his life change going from a pretty unknown player to a guy who was going to be seen on broadcasts around the world. So I thought there was going to be a big world’s colliding theme with the world’s most famous athlete suddenly spending all this time and playing with players who were making in some cases less than $20,000 a year, and actually playing. How those worlds collided on the field and maybe more interestingly off the field was going to give up a lot of stories to tell. I thought it would be the case, and I think that is the way it turned out.

There was at least one other Beckham book in the works—by Andrea Canales—that has not been shelved, but the publisher tells me they aren’t sure of its future. What was your thought process after the book was assigned and the story unfolded and the success of the experiment coupled with Beckham’s injury appeared derailed? With the worlds colliding theme being premeditated, was it just part of the story or did you worry at that point? I could argue all of those negatives actually helped the book.

I knew from the start when he arrived in 2007 that none of us knew how it was going to play out. No one knew if it would be a success on or off the field. I have to admit when he was injured so much at the start there, I was beginning to get worried. The original plan for the book was just for me to follow that first season—first half season really. And do it in real detail and write an 80,000-word book about that. The only thing that was going to cause a problem for that was if he was injured for any significant amount of time, which ended up happening. In the end I think it was a blessing for the book as long as Crown continued to support it, which thankfully they did. I owe a lot to Crown for sticking with it. I ended up spending a full year more than was planned reporting the story and following Beckham and the Galaxy through the 2008 season as well. In my mind that is where the best parts of the story come in. A lot of good stuff happens in 2007, what with the players and team dealing with a completely different universe—from travel arrangements to a worldwide crush of media. But then there is an entirely new set of plot lines that take place in 2008 that I think make the storyline of the book much richer.

I couldn’t agree more. As long as we are admitting our reservations, as I told you before I don’t have a lot of interest in a book about David Beckham, so it was a pleasant surprise when I got my hands on it and found it to be so much more. In some ways it is the Galaxy Experiment more than the Beckham Experiment, although the two are impossible to separate. The second half of the book and the unfurling of the Galaxy machine is a treasure trove of stories and behind the scene anecdotes that are unique not just to soccer and MLS but to professional sport franchises the world over.

I have to give a lot of credit for people who had agreed to speak to me one-on-one in 2007 at the start of things when everyone was so optimistic, and then when things started falling apart on the field, at least in 2008, a lot of those guys could have just told me to buzz off, and they kept sitting down with me and talking—guys like Landon Donovan and Alexi Lalas, Chris Klein, Alan Gordon. They continued to answer my questions even though there were a lot of losses and ties and bad vibes piling up.

That speaks to my #1 question for you. Access. It appears you had tremendous access to players and some management. The candidness of your sources is unbelievable. Take me through how you negotiated those usually tepid waters for sports journalism as you went along.

With Beckham I had done two major stories about him for SI. One in 2003, kind of introducing him to the American audience, and then a cover story in 2007 for his arrival to Los Angeles. We had a good relationship based on the time we spent together. Both stories involved significant one-on-one interviews with me and him, about an hour each time; photo shoots in both cases. I didn’t know going in how much one-on-one access I was going to get with Beckham, but I knew he would do media availabilities before and after every game, which is more than he had ever done in Europe. But when I brought the idea of the book to Beckham’s people, even though we had always had a very good relationship, their stance was that David had done books before that were “by David Beckham, ghost written by somebody else” and that he got significant advances for those books—over a million dollars. The implication being, if I wanted to have special one-on-one access to David Beckham for this book itself, that was the sort of money that had to be paid. That wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t angry about that, and I would not have accepted the book deal if I thought that was a possibility. I knew that Beckham’s voice would be throughout the book, and I would be able to ask him all sorts of questions because of the access before and after most games. So I wasn’t all that concerned to be honest because Beckham is not the most colorful source ever, and I don’t know how much I would have gained one-on-one.

But I did know that everyone else within the Galaxy, just because of my relationships that I developed over the last 12 years at SI, would be interested in sitting down with me throughout the reporting process, and that is what happened. It worked out really well in the end. Hypothetically, I guess if Beckham’s handlers wanted money they also wanted approval over what went into the book, and I don’t work that way. I’m a journalist. No past stories I’ve written about Beckham were subject to the approval of Beckham and his people, so the best way for me to put it is that this is neither an authorized chronicle or an unauthorized chronicle. It’s just a straight-up chronicle of what happened, good and bad, from the inside.

Going from the big fish to the minnows, one of the lesser players that ends up playing a big role in the book is Alan Gordon. You could edit out his story from the book and have a stand alone feature on him. Why did you decide to go with Gordon over some of the other players?

From the start the plan was to follow this apartment of three Galaxy players. There were three guys all making less than $50,000 a year, which is why they were rooming together in an apartment in Redondo Beach. That was Alan Gordon, Gavin Glinton, and Kyle Veris. The plan was to follow those three guys and see what happens with them. I had spent enough time around the team at that point to know that these were three guys who had pretty interesting stories, and who were pretty good interviews. They may not ever be quoted in the LA Times or many media accounts, but a lot of these MLS guys are college educated, they’re thoughtful, and they don’t have big egos because they aren’t making a ton of money. It was really good to talk to these guys and get a sense of their stories and how they were experiencing all of this.

When we decided to push the book back one year as far as the release date, Gordon was the one of those three guys who ended up sticking around. Glinton was taken in the expansion draft by San Jose, and Veris got waived and went to Norway last year. So that left Gordon, and the more time you spend talking to Alan Gordon, you just realize that here is a guy who could tell a great story and wasn’t self conscious about his situation and was just funny. He was one of the funniest guys on the team. My feeling was that Alan Gordon and Peter Vegenas were the two funniest guys on the team, so I wanted to get as much of them in the book as possible.

Those stories open up that larger story of American soccer, and the realities of life in MLS for a player, team, franchise, and even the league. How different would this story be if those situations didn’t exist?

I think it would have taken out a big, interesting part of the story—this world’s colliding narrative. I found it fascinating. Going in I knew that would be one of Beckham’s biggest challenges to try and relate to teammates who were making such a microscopic fraction of his salary and his income and whose fame was minuscule, nonexistent really, compared to him. And yet a guy like Alan Gordon was going to play a lot and be relied upon to finish a lot of the passes that Beckham was giving him. That to me was a crucial part of the story. Alan Gordon to me is very symbolic of the MLS player. So many players in MLS, most of them American, make almost no money—Gordon made $30,000 for four years and only later got a bigger contract, which was still not guaranteed. But he kept performing and was asked to do a lot of things in front of crowds of 66,000 people in New York when he is getting paid $30,000 a year. He represents this huge section of MLS players who don’t get a lot of recognition and probably deserve a lot more.

In a lot of ways this book once and for all explains American soccer, or at least MLS, to foreigners who up to now may not be very familiar with it. Is that something you thought about while writing it?

Yeah. I wanted to give a sense of what American soccer and Major League Soccer was at this point in time. Someday it may be a more lucrative enterprise for a lot of people, but this is a real stage of this league’s development that is, I think, a pretty fascinating thing—what it is like to be a part of this league that is very different from one of the top European leagues, from the on the field product to the travel accommodations. The idea of David Beckham staying in some pretty dreary, mediocre hotels with his teammates is a far cry from what he was used to over in Europe.

You knew you needed Landon Donovan to participate in this book. What was Landon’s reaction when you told him about the book and asked for his participation?

With Landon, it’s weird because I have written about him a lot over the years and gotten to know him pretty well. But I had never written a major piece in Sports Illustrated about him—not a personality profile. And yet, I know he respects my writing. It was just a matter of sitting down with him once the book came about and explaining what it was I wanted to do. That ended up being something that he was intrigued by and was willing to do. I’d be curious now to hear how he feels about his participation in the book. He’s tremendously candid in the book. Landon has always been a very candid interview, and I think he is a fascinating character in the book as a result, and is completely honest I think. As a journalist, as a writer, you totally appreciate people who are honest with you.

Beyond the outrageous candor in this book, I was struck by the way you recreated private scenes that happened when you clearly weren’t present. Break down for me how that information comes to you and then how you decide how to present it.

Sometimes when I’m quoting Donovan or whoever it is in sit-down interviews with me. There is a scene late in the book after the Milan loan deal comes out, and that came over lunch with Landon. A lot of the things in the book are scenes where I was not there. What you end up doing as a journalist is talking in extreme detail with as many of the people there as possible to recreate the scene. People have different recollection sometimes of the same scene so you have to sift through the parts that don’t agree and try to find the best way to show where they do agree and get the closest thing to the truth. Thankfully, a lot of people did participate with me and spent a lot of time, many hours, going over memories and answers questions that I had because it can get pretty detailed when you are trying to recreate conversations.

Adding to that, the book is basically in chronological order, but that isn’t the way I would pick up information. Like the information about Donovan and Lalas arguing over his team MVP bonus or lack thereof at the end of the 2007 season—I didn’t find out about that for probably 8-10 months. And then I did find out about it and got Lalas and Donovan to speak in detail about what happened. That was a real benefit of doing a book because sometimes people are really sensitive at the time and are much more willing to talk about it a few months later.

That’s a great point I’m glad you made. And that is also probably the best anecdote in the book. Beyond the intimacy of it, I thought it captured many of the different characters and problems of that time that didn’t have anything to do with what were the stereotypical Beckham Circus issues. And of course Landon and Lalas are at the center of that.

Yeah, that was the thing. I knew going in that two guys in particular, Lalas and Donovan, were two of the main reasons I wanted to do the book. I thought that they would continue to do interviews no matter what happened, and they would be candid. And they didn’t hold anything back. Ever.

Maybe its obvious because they are two of the larger personalities in American soccer, albeit with very different personalities, but from the opening page I was wondering where those two would begin to steer the narrative. It was sort of inevitable.

Yeah, sometimes that was connected to Beckham, sometimes it wasn’t. But you definitely leave the book knowing how they feel about Beckham.

How did you first find out about the MVP money? (Landon was upset the MVP was given to another player after most votes went his way. It cost him the monetary reward.)

One of my sources told me about it, and I asked Donovan about it and Lalas. It’s one of those things that you hang around enough and spend enough time with the team—I traveled to cover the team a lot, so process wise I was around and people got comfortable talking with me. I did a sit down every two or three weeks with everyone involved and had a nice regular schedule going. I think Woody Allen said 99% of life is showing up. Well, if it’s not 99, its pretty close to it. Just being there really paid off. A lot of times you wouldn’t get anything but sometimes you would. I live in Baltimore normally, and it was not easy to cover a team that was based in Los Angeles, but I made a lot of trips to LA and their road games. I kept constant contact on the phone and in person. You keep gathering string and eventually you will have quite a bit.

One of the players I knew very little about, and that I enjoyed reading about was Peter Vegenas. And I think he may be one player who doesn’t come away psyched about the book, not necessarily because of your portrayal of him, but just his having to relive that part of his life where through no real fault of his own he became a lightning rod for a lot of issues.

Yeah, I think the 2008 season was really hard for Pete. He was the longest reigning Galaxy player at that point and had been the captain of the team when they won the title in 2005, and he really bled for the Galaxy. He just had a rough time with Ruud Gullit. I remember Pete saying he would remember 2008 because of the birth of his first child and how great an experience that was, but other than that, 2008 was pretty tough. Pete was working a real difficult locker room situation where everyone knew he was really close friends with Alexi Lalas, and because there was built in tension structurally between Lalas and Gullit, that extended to Pete, who Gullit thought was feeding negative information to Lalas, who would then go to Tim Lewieke. Pete ended up getting in the doghouse after the first game of 2008 and then played something like 13 minutes total in MLS games [over the next two months]. That was, he felt, retribution from Gullit for these supposed exchanges with Lalas. So, look, the Galaxy became a completely dysfunctional organization, especially in 2008, and I think Pete as much or more than any other player got caught up in it.

MLS never seemed to get involved with anything Galaxy, which bucked the trend of the reporting out there about them meddling in every little soccer affair that goes down throughout the league. Did that lack of oversight surprise you?

I think a lot of the ideas about MLS meddling are probably overblown. I think as the league has gone on through the years, MLS Head Quarters has had less and less influence on what goes at individual teams. Plus the Galaxy was the flagship organization in many ways for MLS once they signed Bekcham. Tim Lewieke is a very big personality and so were just about all the people he hired and signed from Lalas to Gullit to the influence of Simon Fuller and Terry Byrne by 19 Entertainment and Beckham’s management. Maybe also too it’s a distance thing. LA is on a different coast from MLS HQ, but I don’t think Don Garber was going to spend too much time trying to influence Lewieke’s organization.

You mention Fuller and Byrne, both largely shadows in the book. You spoke to Fuller as Beckham arrived, but never attribute a quote to Byrne. What was your overall access to those guys and how did you deal with the lack of access to Byrne who ended up playing a big role in the book at the end?

It was interesting. Even going back to May of 2007 when I was getting a lot of one-on-one access to Beckham and I had a long one-on-one conversation with Simon Fuller as well for the Sports Illustrated story, I asked if I could speak to Terry Byrne, because here is a guy who is Beckham’s best friend and personal manager. I have never seen Terry Byrne quoted in much of anything, and he seemed like a figure who could provide good perspective on Beckham and his experiences. Quick Background: Byrne and Beckham had been good friends ever since the 1998 World Cup when Byrne was a masseuse on the England national team and on the bench when Beckham got the red card for kicking Diego Simeone. Beckham obviously went through a horrific process that night and the months following from the British media, but the first guy to greet Beckham as he left the field was Terry Byrne. And he walked him to the locker room while Glenn Hoddle and other players gave Beckham the cold shoulder, Byrne was there and supported Beckham, who never forgot that and repaid him by being best friends with him. In 2003, Byrne became Beckham’s personal manager. Knowing all of that, of course I wanted to speak with him. I found it interesting that Simon Fuller was made available to me—a much more famous and wealthy guy, creator of American Idol—but they did not make Terry Byrne available to me. He has never done an interview that I know of since Beckham’s arrival in 2007.

Maybe you can’t answer this next question because who knows what Byrne would have said, but how much did his exclusion hurt the book? or how much did you worry about that?

I did everything I could to get the Beckham side’s take on a lot of events in the book, and I did in part from talking to people from his side on background. Beckham’s side didn’t really want to have their names on a lot of stuff because they viewed that as making this an authorized book. I wanted to get as many takes as possible on things, so thankfully I was able to talk to sources on Beckham’s side and get their take on stuff, but I do think Beckham’s people and Terry Byrne will wish that they had maybe been a little more available and willing to talk to me for the book, because they would have had probably a bigger influence on the narrative.

There is more to it than monetary value I guess I would say. I think going into this they only viewed their participation or lack thereof as a monetary situation. But why does everyone in Washington talk to Bob Woodward when he does a book? They know that everyone else will, and they know there is a value that comes with speaking and actually shaping the narrative. I’m not saying I’m Bob Woodward, but there is a similarity in that Beckham’s people could have realized more clearly that everyone was talking to me for this book, and there would be value for them to speak that had nothing to do with getting paid.

Getting paid seems to be a giant string that runs throughout the entire book, whether it is the salaries of the lower MLS guys or the misinformation 19 put out about Beckham’s contract’s worth to the whole relationship between AEG and 19 and why it is beneficial for them to be in business together. Looking back on it, would this story exist if it wasn’t for the AEG-19 braintrust?

Beckham would never have come to America if Lewieke didn’t spend five years building a relationship with Beckham and all the people around him. No matter how you look at it now, the whole Beckham experiment, Lewieke’s efforts to land Beckham for MLS are remarkable. Here’s a guy who is very smart and leveraged contacts he made in the music industry with Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment. AEG is one of the top concert promoters in the world and owns dozens and dozens of concert venues around the world. So the Beckham signing never would have happened otherwise. Lewieke is an extremely heavy hitter, and MLS and the Galaxy may not be quite at that level but because of the personalities involved and how big AEG is, it allowed a deal like this to get done, which allowed a book like this to get done.

Do you see this book as a positive or negative for American soccer?

I don’t know. Positive and negative are hard terms sometimes. What I feel very good about with this book is that I think people can read a 300-page story and come up with very different responses to the people in the book that run the gamut from positive to deeply negative. I’ll be very curious to hear from reviewers and readers especially what they think of Landon Donovan or Alexi Lalas, and I think you are going to get very divergent viewpoints in some cases. But most of the people I have talked to have come away with a lot of respect for Donovan and Lalas and a lot of the stuff that went on behind the scenes that hasn’t been known publicly yet. It will be interesting to see, after a lot of the details of MLS’s travel arrangements are made public, the players’ thoughts on them. To see what happens there and what impact it might have on the collective bargaining agreement that is going on right now between the players union and the league. This isn’t the first time someone has written about what it is like for a low level MLS player day to day, but I do think it will get a fair amount of attention, and it could maybe have a positive impact for the players. For American soccer itself, and I say this upfront in the book, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the American soccer player. And I do think that comes through. So many of these guys have to be playing for the love of the game because of the salaries. Those guys are the ones who know they will have to be working when their playing careers are done to earn a living and many of whom work during their playing careers because they have to make ends meat. Yet they still in most cases give everything out on the field for not a ton of attention compared to other sports leagues in the U.S. I hope that readers come away with a greater sense of respect for the American player.

It’s funny, I have in my notes—“what will this do to the CBA next year?”

Yeah, I don’t know. I think that a guy like Landon Donovan who is actually very involved with the players union—he’s not going to be upset that a lot of this stuff is going public. Nor will a lot of the players who are living it. But I don’t think the players are in a position to go on strike; I really don’t.

Here’s some practice for future interviews, the question you will get from everyone. What’s the lasting effect of the Beckham experiment?

I think Beckham coming to MLS is an important part of the development of the league, in that a lot more people around the world do know about MLS now. And from a business perspective it has become a tremendously successful venture for Beckham, the Galaxy, and MLS. They all made good business decisions from the start. One of the problems with MLS, and I think they really need to address this moving forward in the development of the league, is that too often it is not about soccer. I think this Beckham thing is not really about soccer. It never really has been, except for some decent attacking soccer in the first part of 2008. Even the deal that brought Beckham back to the Galaxy for July was a really good business deal, but it was really hard to see how it was a good thing for the Galaxy as a soccer team. So often as a journalist covering American soccer, I feel like a business writer. That’s something that is important, but sometimes you really feel like that is more important than just about anything, especially what is taking place on the field. I think the people who read this book will see that it’s about the soccer. It’s about what goes on in the Galaxy locker room and the management of the team from a soccer perspective. The business stuff is important, and it has been tremendously successful, but sometimes we lose sight that it has to be about the sport at some point, you know?

OK, so at some point in the book we get to this point where you quite plainly state that one of two things is afoot. Either David Beckham is a liar or he is completely ignorant to nearly everything around him. When did you come to that choice?

Given how much influence his representatives wielded behind the scenes with the Galaxy, engaging in essentially a shadow take-over of the team in 2007 when Gullit was hired on the recommendation of Terry Byrne, David Beckham’s best friend and personal manager… I mean my experience with Beckham is that I don’t think he is stupid, I really don’t. In fact I have thoroughly enjoyed the interviews I have had with Beckham over the years. When you get through the layers of people around him, I think he is a pretty good interview and fairly stunningly normal acting guy. That’s why it is sort of hard for me to believe he wasn’t aware of the influence Terry Byrne had with the Galaxy, or that Terry Byrne wouldn’t share some of David Beckham’s views about the players on the team and the direction the team should go in. You always got from Beckham, “I am here to play to soccer and not do anything else.” And you know, either he was lying or he really was total head in the sand as Terry Byrne and Simon Fuller controlled so much behind the scenes of the Galaxy.

You retell the takeover largely through the eyes of Lalas. What were some of those conversations like, given Lalas’ well-known personality and the fact that such a thing has never happened in any American sport that I can thing of? Can you?

I can’t. It’s such a strange deal that Beckham’s personal manager would be paid to come in as an adviser for the Los Angeles Galaxy and take over the hiring process for the coach, which is probably Lalas’ most important job. For this to happen and for Lalas not to be fired and not to resign and be there for it as the public assumes that he was the one doing the hiring of Gullit is just bizarre. It’s the only way to describe it. It was certainly a process how I learned things, even with Lalas, who was extremely forthcoming. I’ll be honest with you; I learned a lot more after he was fired. Once he was fired he was a lot more willing to speak in detail about what had really happened and what he had been dealing with. Even publicly when Gullit was hired, Lalas said all the right things about this being a perfect hire when in fact, he had counseled Tim Lewieke and Terry Byrne against hiring Gullit. It’s just such a bizarre turn of events, and I know Alexi is a very emotional guy, and I think it was a really hard spot to be in professionally. Lalas gets a lot of criticism for how he has done as an executive in MLS over the years, but I also think he gets unfairly blamed for a lot of things that he didn’t have much to do with, like with the hiring of Gullit, which he had absolutely nothing to do with. Believe me, Lalas had a much bigger influence over the Galaxy in 2006-07, and those teams didn’t make the playoffs, so it’s not like he deserves to get off scot-free. He deserves a lot of blame for that, but what happened in 2008 he deserves very little blame for.

It really is just baffling the whole affair.

And nobody knew about it. Nobody ever made it public that David Beckham’s personal manager was brought in as a paid consultant to the team. You can understand why they didn’t because it would have looked really really bad. But then it got even worse when Lewieke bailed on Gullit because by pushing him out the door in August of 2008, he really risked ruining the relationship with Beckham and Simon Fuller, because Gullit was their choice to take over the Galaxy, and they thought he deserved more time to try and make it work.

You said you had some sources within Beckham’s camp. Was there ever a time when they just shut the door on you?

I don’t think so. I guess that is one benefit of having a pretty good reputation from the people I cover. People answer your phone calls. But still, a lot of the time those people would talk only on background without their name on it, and that was kind of just the way it had to be.

As I was reading this book I couldn’t help but think of Selena Roberts and all the flack she received over her anonymous sources in her A-ROD book. I don’t know how much you followed that from South Africa, but I was curious how you dealt with that in your book, as there is very little if any anonymous sourcing.

One thing I feel really good about as a journalist in this book is how much of the most controversial stuff and quotes are named. People aren’t ducking. People are saying these things with their name on it, and to me I think that makes it stronger. I think Selena is a really really good reporter, and I haven’t read her book yet because I can’t get it over here, but I also think her’s was a different case, where she came in to write this book about A-ROD after all of these things had happened in his career. My approach was different because I was coming in saying, “I want to chronicle this experiment, and none of us know what is going to happen.” I just hoped that everyone would be willing to sit down and talk to me about their experiences, and then we’d see what happens. I’d write it not as good or bad, but just that it happened. Of course a lot of it is bad. I think too that the people I was interviewing were aware of that, that I didn’t come in with any agenda.

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check back tomorrow for Part 2 of my conversation with Grant Wahl.

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Lost in the whirlwind tour of South Africa and the Confederations Cup, which brought outlets from Harper’s to Deadspin to what seemed like every newspaper in the country out for a week-long soccer columning festival, was the demise of Brad Friedel’s once heralded (here at least) soccer academy in Ohio. So why does that matter?

In the last two weeks I’ve received emails asking why I didn’t write anything about the Confederations Cup or when I would. I’m still wondering, what really is there to say? Dan Loney did the best job I’ve seen of basically saying just that while pointing out the US MNT is not that good and doesn’t have any depth and doesn’t have the best coach they could. Too many of the rubberneckers came with, as Loney put it, “nonsense like winning games and getting good performances out of our players.” So where should the attention be going?

The U.S. national team is a roller coaster ride that will continue up and and down and through next year’s return to South Africa for the World Cup, and probably for years if not decades after that. There will be occasional miracles as happened against Spain, and the team will be able to carry the underdog momentum through another game or two, but when you need every player on your team to play at their best to win a trophy, you can’t expect much.

It’s never as good as the first time. The rain, the grand stand bleachers, the wet turf, the steady cam man on the field, the crane cam hovering over the crowd. What was an underground experiment last year became the mainstream mainstay as Steve Nash and Claudio Reyna hosted their 2nd annual Showdown in Chinatown to benefit each of their namesake charities. The line-ups, tweaked a bit from last year, will star in a Fox Soccer Channel documentary about the game.

That’s not to say it won’t be the best sporting event all summer in New York City. Standing over Thierry Henry’s shoulder while he watched the first half from the bench is not something one takes lightly. It was a mid-eighties Michael Jackson moment for some, which is why this event will forever be, no matter how many times they play it, a once in a lifetime experience.

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Besides the FSC cameras and grandstands, there was a PA announcer as well. And this guy in the suit from the city.

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Mathieu Flamini with a young Arsenal fan.

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Bosh took the role left vacant by Baron Davis. The crowd cheered louder for Bosh than anyone. And he hammed it up appropriately.

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Chris Bosh had the best time.

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the point guard

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the swing men, Grant Hill and Chris Bosh.

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Edgar Davids and Reyna, who actually still had plenty of skill left in his newly fresh legs. Davids had more than enough, held the ball longer than probably anybody. Overheard in New York: “Egdar Davids is a ball hog.”

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New York, New York

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tricks galore…

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larger, yet still rudimentary, PDF filmstrip here.

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Salomon Kalou, best player on the field, same as last year.

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Kalou header

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half time

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basketball buddies

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So maybe Steve Nash had the best time.

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Nash was gifted a PK after attempting a failed but A-for-effort bicycle kick

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He sat out the entire first half, but Henry’s health looked fine once he took the field.

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near-miss emotion from Tony Parker in response to Henry’s heckling.

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flash

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Don’t you just love the off-season?

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still photos exclusive to TIAS by Nick Werner.