I follow football (aka soccer) only occasionally, familiar with some of the international stars of the last decade or so and then the true icons of the sport like Pele. Even as someone who doesn’t necessarily apprehend the nuances of the game or have a very good knowledge of its history, something struck me int he post-game discussion between Bob Leigh and Landon Donovan. They were talking about how to make the US soccer program better, but Donovan wasn’t mentioning the immense talent already here in immigrant communities.
There are tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of families who arrive here from towns and cities whose soccer traditions are deep. We have immigrants, children and grandchildren of immigrants who love and play this game. You can talk about cultivating a program, but part of that means recruiting (and honoring) immigrants and the skills they bring. Seems to me, if we want to achieve things that have international significance, we should draw on our international communities.