When I travel abroad, people often tell me that the United States is good at soccer only because they import foreigners to play for the national team. While this strategy was key in our development as a soccer nation, it is far, far less common today. The 1990s saw the US scour European leagues for players with American connections, coming up with gems such as Ernie Stewart and Thomas Dooley (both of whom had American servicemen fathers) and duds such as David Wagner and David Regis (the latter was a Frenchman whose late call-up into the 1998 World Cup squad led to great friction within the team and was a large part of the team's horrible showing in that tournament).

Click to continue reading...

The issue of immigration and soccer is bouncing around the internet recently; several articles have come out on the issue in regards to the US National Team. I haven't completely wrapped my head...

Click to continue reading...

By: Paul-Denys Calixte
Soccer City FC is honored to present our summer series -- Fútbol In Costa Rica. Harvard student, Paul-Denys Calixte, graciously agreed to offer up some cultural insight regarding how the game impacts the people, from the individual to the nation as a whole. In 2009, he spent time studying abroad at the Universidad de Costa Rica. Click to continue reading...

Real Salt Lake hope to rebound this weekend as they take on the New England Revolution in a stopgap home match sandwiched between road games. It will be a welcome return to the friendly surroundings of Rio Tinto Stadium as RSL face their fourth straight Eastern Conference opponent of the season. Unfortunately, Fabian Espindola remains in Venezuela due to immigration hassles. Click to continue reading...

From Behind the Shield The Official Blog of Real Salt Lake:

Do Your Backflips Now
Major League Soccer has agreed to contract terms with Fabian Espindola and the Argentine striker will rejoin Real Salt Lake. The agreement comes in time for the close of MLS' winter transfer window, making Fabi eligible to play for RSL once the immigration process has been completed.

Click to continue reading...

It's tournament time. What does this mean? It means that once again the France blog will be taking more than it's share of racist and/or xenophobic comments due to the fact that a number of players are not white. Some of the comments are just uninformed, like the people Click to continue reading...

The only thing more incredible than the fact that brother and sister Alexis and Amber Hernandez both play for youth national teams is the fact that both represent Mexico. The Hernandez siblings have lived their entire lives in California, but in the past year both have worn Mexico's famous tricolor. Children of a Mexican-born mother [. Click to continue reading...

The case of Chivas' Jesus Padilla is not the only example of a soccer team in Mexico struggling to define who is, in fact, Mexican. The national team has been embroiled in controversy for much the same reason. The previous national team boss, Argentine Ricardo Lavolpe, angered some in Mexico by using naturalized players for [. Click to continue reading...

What LA-based journalists Luis Bueno and Andrea Canales uncovered about Jesus Padilla was not that big a deal. Their reporting showed that Padilla, a young forward for Chivas of Mexico, was born in San Jose, Calffornia, not San Miguel de Alto in the Mexican state of Jalisco, as stated on the club's website. Click to continue reading...

When Kosovo declares independence on Sunday, the number of countries to have risen from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia will reach seven (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia being the other six). Kosovo's independence – supported by the US and many EU countries, but strongly opposed by Serbia, along with its [. Click to continue reading...

In the past few years, the number of American players plying their trade abroad has increased exponentially. It wasn't that long ago that knowledgeable American fans could easily count all of the "Yanks Abroad" (personally, I remember scouring for newspapers that would have a one-sentence blurb on the exploits of Tab Ramos at Real Betis). Click to continue reading...

This is part 2 of this article. Part 1 can be read here. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a dramatic change in American soccer. It moved out of its almost exclusive home in ethnic communities and was adopted by suburban families across the country. Soccer became the sport of choice for [...] Click to continue reading...

Note: This article ended up being quite long. As a result, I have broken it into two parts, the second of which will be published tomorrow. A book came out shortly before the 1994 World Cup whose title almost perfectly summed up many Americans' ideas of soccer. It was called Twenty-Two Foreigners in Funny Shorts. Something [...] Click to continue reading...

For years, businesses have tested new products in the city of Columbus, Ohio. The capital city is known as a good test market because its population largely resembles that of the United States as a whole. So perhaps it's not surprising that in the past few years, like many places that did not traditionally have [...] Click to continue reading...

People of Croatian ancestry make up less than one-half of one percent of the population. But the influence of this small Balkan country on soccer in the land of Oz has far exceeded their numbers. Of the 23 players on Australia's 2006 World Cup squad, 7 had Croatian heritage. Croatia's team had 3 Australian-born players. Croatian-Australian [...] Click to continue reading...

The United States men's and women's national teams both took on their respective Swedish counterparts recently. The men lost 1-0 in a friendly while the women won 2-0 in the first round of the Women's World Cup (if a tie-breaker were needed, perhaps we could use the Davis Cup, where the American tennis team beat [...] Click to continue reading...

Note: This is the eighth part of my American Soccer Road Trip, which will involve me traveling across the country, finding stories that exemplify the diversity that exists in American soccer. Check back soon for further updates. The final chapter in Sam Quinones's book Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream is titled "A Soccer Season in [...] Click to continue reading...

During qualifying matches for the 1998 World Cup, I had an argument with some friends about how to pronounce the last name of Costa Rican forward Paulo Wanchope. They said that since Wanchope (who just signed with the Chicago Fire) was from a Spanish-speaking country, the e at the end of his last name had [...] Click to continue reading...