And now for my left brain arguments for why I am rooting for soccer in St. Louis, and most particularly Collinsville in the Metro-East.

Jeff Cooper, the driving force behind the St. Louis Soccer United bid for a stadium in Collinsville and Major League Soccer team for the area, was recently quoted as saying: "You can live your dream of owning a team, but I want more. I want to make soccer more accessible to more kids in the community. I'm intent on using soccer for social change." (True to His Blue-Collar Roots, Cooper is the Real Deal: March 25, 2007 Alton Telegraph) He continued, "In the American soccer system, it's a lot of pay-to-play, and for that reason you don't see a lot of minority kids playing soccer. It's not like that in other countries. I don't want to change what St. Louis soccer looks like, but I want to establish a way for low-income kids to integrate into the soccer community, in St. Louis and around the country."

Pretty heady, ambitious stuff, and exactly the attitude and approach that I and many others crying out for American soccer and MLS to expand its support base have been advocating for years, especially now that the professional game is finally on a firm foundation.*.

Before I get more into why I feel this way, let me start by saying that I don't know Mr. Cooper in any direct way whatsoever. He wasn't one of the marquee players I remembered from his Granite City Warriors high school team, or at least not somebody I was ever responsible for marking back when I competed as a Collinsville Kahok fullback against them. When he returned to St. Louis for SLU Law School in 1991, I was headed to Columbia, Missouri for stop number 3 of my informal Midwestern Universities Tour, and from there to points East from which I've only sporadically returned to the area.

But on a completely different, metaphorical level, the level writers often prefer to interact with their subjects on, I feel I know Mr. Cooper and where he comes from fairly well.

For starters, we both played for teams that competed primarily in the distinctly less fashionable side of the river that saw the afternoon shadows from the Gateway Arch, and shared a tough, no-nonsense approach to soccer, created by blending a more physical, working class approach to the game with lessons gleaned playing against tactically more sophisticated clubs across the river in St. Louis County, like perennial youth national champions Scott Gallagher, two-time US Open Cup champions, Kutis, the second of those championships occurring while we were still in high school back in 1986, plus the various Busch-related programs.

These big St. Louis clubs were rumored or confirmed even in the 1980s to have professional staffs and far greater organizational capabilities than either of our towns could muster. A few of our coaches knew a few things more than we and our parents could pick up in books and videos, possibly having played as far as a little college ball here and there, or we could pick up things by watching the occasional game on TV, usually either indoor with the Steamers, or PBS's "Soccer Made in Germany" (Big Soccer Thread: Anyone remember "Soccer Made in Germany?"), and every 4 years the World Cup, if you could find it on TV.

To the best of my memory, I can't even recall Granite City having a single club that actually survived from when we were playing against them in junior high school through 11th and 12th grades, only occasionally running into a club in the ubiquitous summer select tournaments, or winter indoor leagues and tournaments.

Collinsville by contrast was fortunate to have at least one club at each age group that seemed to stay together from youth days through high school. One of those teams formed the foundation of the team that I played on in high school, the Collinsville Rowdies, though I only briefly played a tournament or two for them after high school.

The select team that I played for was probably much closer to what Mr. Cooper experienced in Granite City, receiving the left-overs from the elite team, who were then combined with a rotating group of players from several of the other nearby towns without enough players or organization for their own select teams: Troy, Belleville/Fairview Heights, Edwardsville/Glen Carbon, and in the last couple years even one of Mr. Cooper's teammates, a big, workhorse center midfielder from Granite City named Brett Bjorkman, whom I would eventually play with also in college for a season at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa (Stop Number 1 on my Midwestern University Tour), where I met up with another teammate of Mr. Cooper's, Billy Alexandrian, an Armenian-American, not too swift-of-foot, but with silky smooth ball skills.

We were mostly a collection of farm-boys, kids from the wrong side of the tracks or whose parents didn't always play well socially with their peers, or as in my case who just moved to town well after the Rowdies solidified their roster. My family was from the St. Louis area, but we briefly moved to Memphis, Tennessee for a couple years prior to returning and settling in Collinsville during my fifth grade year. I had never even played soccer prior to that following Spring, and only found a team because my first rec league coach, the late Don Niebrugge, noticed me running the obstacle course race at our local Unit 10 Junior Olympics in the old Football Bowl on Main Street.

In some of my first experience around soccer players at Maryville West Elementary School I saw that it seemed like the soccer players got most of the good-looking girls, or at least the ones I was interested in, so I was pretty receptive to the encouragement of my club and high school coaches, not that it did me personally any good with the girls until much, much later. You'll have to ask a more recent graduate to see to what extent that remains the case, still I'd be pretty surprised if things have changed all that terribly much.

But ironically, despite all of that, plus getting a partial soccer scholarship at Drake based more on my general athleticism and some basic rather than high-end skills (I joke that the only soccer recognition I ever got before the scholarship was being named "All-Collinsville High School, First Team," when then-Head Coach Jim Stranz made me a varsity starter during my senior season), I only realized when I arrived on campus in Columbia, Missouri, how valuable the path that Mr. Niebrugge and my select head coach, Vic Trybinski, put me on all those years ago. Coincidentally, that's also when I started to really learn the nuances, rhythms and joys of the game, unfortunately a couple years after I stopped competing at the highest levels then available for my age group.

On the lawn outside of my dorm, Hatch Hall, a collection of 5th floor honors and international students, most of whom also seemed to live a double-life as semi-professional drunks, gathered almost every afternoon that was reasonable, and many that weren't particularly so, to play free-form, pick-up games of soccer. Japanese, Russians, Brits, Mexicans and Americans, men and women, though the women were exclusively American to the best of my memory, mixed it up in games of wildly varying qualities, depending on who showed up, as we never really turned away anybody who was interested simply because they couldn't walk and kick a ball at the same time so long as they weren't overly competitive jerks out to hurt anybody.

Those pick-up games lead not only to the usual intramural leagues and tournaments, and the typical male-bonding over competitive sports, but also to an invitation from a Caribbean exchange student from St. Lucia to join him on an Arab team that only featured one other American. The Arab players were also all students, but they existed in a parallel universe to mine, one without alcohol and girls, and included praying regularly even if they had to do it at the soccer field. I distinctly remember hanging out in downtown Columbia late one boozy Saturday night and seeing a group of my teammates drive by honking, hanging out the windows of their cars and yelling like a bunch of schoolkids just out having a good time, completely different from my world.

They were to a man extremely warm, kind and hospitable to me, glad that I was willing to lend my infidel legs to their team, though the next season when I was playing for a competing team in the club league I received just as many kicks as my teammates when in the heat of battle, as I should have.

When I arrived in New York City after leaving Mizzou in 1993, I found myself in a city of 8 million people, of whom I only knew 3, and 1 of them wasn't too particularly fond of me for perfectly understandable girlfriend-related reasons. Lonely doesn't really begin to describe the feeling I had, lying on my futon mattress on the floor of my 15 by 15 foot un-air conditioned studio apartment in the East Village, where I could hear my musician neighbor and his German girlfriend frequently either argue or have loud sex through the bathroom grate. The high price and cockroaches for such privileges were simply the icing on the cake.

One of my two friends in the city eventually introduced me to a friend of his who played in a pick-up game in the outfield of a softball field in McCarren Park out on the border between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. So every Monday night during the almost two years I lived in New York I headed out for rock and dust-filled kick-around, usually divided primarily between Europeans vs. Latins, with a few people who crossed-over between the teams to fill out the numbers like myself. After the game we retired to Mugs Ale House for more than a few beers and drunken confused, multi-accented conversation over loud music and pinball.

My time in New York City happened to coincide with the 1994 World Cup, and since at the time I worked for MasterCard, a World Cup sponsor, I was able to reserve tickets to just about any game that I wanted. I got to see 1 first round game, Italy vs. Norway, plus the Germany vs. Bulgaria Quarter-Final and Italy vs. Bulgaria Semi-Final. I also got to watch the Ireland vs. Italy shocker in an overflowing Irish pub with both an Irish and an Italian Monday-night companion. I even gave the Irishman my extra Semi-Final ticket, purchased six months prior under the optimistic hope that by then I'd have some sort of female companionship, since even though we weren't long-time, close friends, it was much better to share an experience like that with someone who'd truly appreciate it that I knew than scalp it to someone I didn't.

As great as all of that was, my most recent and greatest treasure that was a product of the introduction that Mr. Niebrugge and Mr. Trybinski gave me to soccer was during my time in Paris, France for my wife's job a few years ago. Though I had studied French at Stop Number 2 on the Midwestern University Tour, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, it was over 10 years prior, and even then I wasn't even remotely fluent, having never spoken it with anyone outside of class, nor had I ever read anything other than my text and workbooks in class.

Yet there I was in Paris, able to find not just one team willing to put up with my general state of complete confusion as to what was going on around me, a team attached to the Irish Embassy and run by the Paris Gaels, which obviously meant plenty of pints of beer, but I also found a second team through a friend of my wife's. Most importantly this second consisted of native Frenchmen who generally refused to speak English to me at the games in an effort to help speed my learning of the language. As a result most of the vocabulary that I could speak for my first year there couldn't be repeated in polite company (mostly about girls, drinking and sports), which was a much more familiar experience to what I knew from back home in St. Louis than what I might have found had I played with more international Frenchmen. Even better, the team was centered around a group of guys from the Northern coast of France, a small town called Wimereux, that knew how to appreciate beer drinking in addition to the ubiquitous bottles and carafes of wine.

View Larger Map

So that's my long way of saying that despite the fact that I haven't made millions as a lawyer due to my introduction to soccer in Collinsville, I understand where Mr. Cooper seems to be coming from in his stated desire to give back some for all the riches soccer can make possible in life. The desire to give back to the game is one big reason in addition to my love and passion for it why I started and continue to work on this web site despite not making dime one in 4 years off of it, albeit sometimes the updates are a bit sporadic due to "fixture congestion" in my family and professional life.

I don't know that people who come from a more privileged background would really get that, just as they generally don't have the same aggression and passion that comes from the desire to escape that people on the bottom of society's rungs have. As the great French striker Thierry Henry put it in when talking of current fellow greats of entertaining, attacking soccer, Brazil's Ronaldinho and England's Wayne Rooney: "People talk about Ronaldinho smiling but I can tell you, inside there are no smiles. You always get trouble when you play on the street, that's why you get tough and why I always say there's no better school than the street. When I see Rooney and Ronaldinho, I see players who, in different ways, are from the street. You cannot teach that, you need to have that in you."

Whether race and class barriers need to be broken down in American soccer may be up for debate to some, but it's hard for me to understand how our soccer programs will ever mature to the level that baseball, football and basketball have achieved without tackling that very glaring hole in its player development. Every other one of those sports has paths to careers for people at all socio-economic levels and geographic areas. You've got poor farm-kids from Indiana and Kentucky vs. inner city street kids from Philadelphia and New York City in the NBA; kids from the middle of nowhere Nebraska or Texas or Virginia vs. the children of sporting dynasties in the NFL; Latino immigrants vs. good old boys and kids who could afford the thousands of dollars it can cost to spend a whole summer playing travel tournaments in baseball. But judging from the products of our college, pro and national teams, soccer in America by contrast seems to come from donut-shaped fields of White-flight around empty urban cores bereft of organized leagues and usable fields, with the occasional international immigrant who happens to live in the suburbs thrown in for good measure.

That's not to say that you throw out the current players and system at all, as the successes of many current professionals and internationals from St. Louis currently plying their trade in MLS and abroad can attest, from future all-time goal scoring leader Taylor Twellman and his fellow St. Louisians and New England Revolution and US Men's National Team teammates Pat Noonan and Steve Ralston, to Frank Simek whop plays in England for Sheffield Wednesday, who was recently also called up to our national team. Just glance at the "Testimonials" page on the St. Louis Soccer United site for a pretty-good "Who's Who" of the current elites of St. Louis soccer.

But what I'm suggesting is merely that a successful team needs to have many different personalities present, each playing their own unique part to create the winning whole. Just as you need to have reliable, athletic work-horses, willing to give everything for the cause, a team also needs to be able to harness attacking, creative flair, a quality that when present can sometimes make a player look absent for large parts of the game, until the moment comes and he strikes and magic is made.

We've got plenty of the former players, but all-too-few players like Kansas City's Eddie Johnson, from what could politely be termed a more modest background in Florida (wikipedia bio | YouTube Highlight Reel), and Nacogdoches, Texas native and sometime rapper, Clint Dempsey, currently playing in England for Fulham FC (wikipedia bio | YouTube Highlight Reel). To date we have had no significant players arise from our burgeoning soccer-mad Latino community.

The irony that it would take a team in the supposedly insular Midwest to show the stereotypically more ethnically and culturally diverse cities of the current MLS how to integrate itself through all classes of its community would be extra special.#

But then again, it isn't that ironic to have one of the first generation of born-and-raised American soccer people to want to finance a team be from St. Louis. Where else were the roots sufficiently deep enough during the days of the NASL that poor kids could see the game as their path out of poverty and a life at the mill and not have it ring patently false? Drive through Mr. Cooper's Granite City today and you can still see plenty of evidence of what the departure of the American manufacturing base has done to small towns. Soccer helped him escape that, and now he wants to give back, while of course making some money for everybody at the table besides, and isn't that what sports, and indeed towns, need more of to grow and prosper?

Back to Part 1: (Crunching the Numbers on a Collinsville/St. Louis Soccer Stadium)
Back to Part 2: (Handicapping the Major League Soccer Race to 16 Teams)

Think I've got it all wrong or just have a comment? Let me know here and I'll make any modifications/corrections necessary, giving credit where requested.

* As recently as 2002 Phil Anschutz owned 5 of the then 10 teams (DC United, NY/NJ MetroStars, Chicago Fire, Los Angeles Galaxy and Colorado Rapids), while the late Lamar Hunt had 3 more (Kansas City Wizards, Columbus Crew and Dallas Burn). Both Anshutz Entertainment Group and the Hunt family currently only own two teams with AEG operating the Galaxy and Houston Dynamo, and the Hunt's still holding the Crew and the re-christened FC Dallas.

In addition to the much greater distribution of the financial risk from the multiple owners, there is also a line of investors and international clubs rumored to be actively examining joining Mexico's Chivas de Guadelajara in operating teams in the league, including Argentina's powerhouse Boca Juniors, Spain's FC Barçelona, and Chivas's Mexican arch-rivals, Club America.

MLS also is finally actually being paid money to broadcast their games by multiple networks, including the ABC/ESPN family of channels, Fox Soccer Channel, plus Spanish Language Telefutura, Galavision and Fox Sports Español.

UPDATE When this was originally written, I mentioned that the Chicago Fire was rumored to be sold soon, which has since been completed to Andell Holdings of Los Angeles for $30 million has been confirmed. See all articles indexed for this topic here. I also had erroneously left out the Houston Dynamo from the list of franchises AEG owns.

Eddie Johnson YouTube Highlights

Clint Dempsey YouTube Highlights

# For those needing a refresher on St. Louis's place in American soccer history, either of the items below are pretty good places to start. Being a bookworm I prefer the printed version of the story to the celluloid one, but both are entertaining, though the DVD apparently is already out of print so may be difficult to track down. Obviously much more historical detail and accuracy makes it to the former version for those so inclined.