Izzy Morales first caught sight of the Stadium of Light from the back of an Uber. He had left his home in Canton, Ohio, a couple of days earlier. He was still coming to terms with the novelty, with the distance, of the new life he had chosen. When he touched down in Dublin, en route to the North East of England, it had suddenly struck him that he was traveling “halfway across the world.”
That jet-lagged, time-zone haze did not lift once he arrived at his eventual destination, Sunderland. The Stadium of Light, though, snapped him out of it. He had never been there before, of course. But still it felt familiar. It felt like a place he knew.
In a way, he did. He knew that it was at the Stadium of Light where Manchester United had seen the 2012 Premier League title snatched from its grasp by Sergio Agüero, Manchester City and probably the most famous goal in English soccer’s modern history. As an 11-year-old, Morales had watched it all unfold, the shock and the silence etched onto his brain from 3,600 miles away.
“That was the first memory that popped into my head,” he said. “Watching the Premier League on a Saturday morning. I would never have expected that I would ever actually be there, to be so close to it.”
The memory had been powerful enough to carry Morales across an ocean. Playing soccer abroad, he said, had “always been my dream.” Last year, as he approached the end of his time at the University of Maine, he had come to accept that it was not one that would be realized. He was planning, instead, to try forging a career in sports management.
And then, late last year, Morales received an unexpected message through his social media accounts. South Shields, a professional team in the sixth tier of English soccer, had opened an academy for international players. It was looking for recruits. Would he be interested?
The prospect was an enticing one. Morales, 23, would be able to continue his education — the academy was a joint venture with the University of Sunderland — and prolong his playing career for at least a year or two. It would, he thought, be the sort of thing that “would look good on a résumé.”
The real appeal, though, was emotional. “I’d been exposed to English soccer for so long, through the Premier League, through social media,” he said. “I just really wanted to experience it.”
He was not alone. To set up the academy, South Shields’s sporting director, Lee Picton, and the head of the club’s international academy, Adam Shaw, had painstakingly constructed a database of players who were in the U.S. college system. They were looking, primarily, for players at Division I and Division II schools who were coming to the end of their collegiate eligibility.
“It was quite laborious,” Shaw said. “We were working 20-hour days. When we’d identified them, we used social media as a mechanism to get in touch with them, to ask if they’d be interested in being part of the program.”
The idea was of sufficient interest, Shaw said, that more than 1,200 players wanted to know more. “The college season in the U.S. is only a couple of months,” he said. “So the thought of playing a full nine-month season was very appealing. But so was being part of a professional club, right in the heart of football.”
Slowly — and laboriously, Shaw stressed — they found themselves tasked with winnowing down that list. They prepared video presentations for prospective players. They combed through their performance data. They watched video. They checked players’ academic credentials. They emphasized the educational benefits, but also made plain the cost of the program. (Students in that first year would need to pay around £16,000, or $20,000, for a place on a masters’ course.)
And then, last fall, the South Shields International Academy finally gathered its first squad. There were representatives from South Korea, Mexico and Canada, though the bulk was from the United States. The results were, almost immediately, impressive.
“We would have won the league, I’m sure, if we hadn’t had injuries,” said Osman Padilla, a 24-year-old striker from El Paso. South Shields’s opponents were not just other private academies around England, but the youth systems of other professional teams. “I think a lot of them underestimated us,” Padilla said. “They didn’t think we’d be that good.”
That, perhaps, owes something to a trans-Atlantic misconception. College sports in Britain generally offer a somewhat more relaxed environment than those in the United States. “Division I and Division II teams in the U.S. have rosters of 40 players, maybe more,” Padilla said. “The season is short. You have to perform. It is competitive.”
Padilla’s motivations were a little different from those of Morales. While the South Shields International Academy contingent is not allowed to play professionally while in England because of visa restrictions, he nonetheless hoped exposure in Europe might extend his playing days a little. (A couple of the program’s alumni have gone on to play for nonleague teams.)
“It’s a way to travel for the next few years,” he said. “I think I’d like to play for another five years, if I can, maybe somewhere in Asia.” His time at South Shields will soon come to an end. His master’s degree, in business management, is almost complete. He hopes South Shields’s network might help find him a place to play.
His replacements, though, are already in place: The program is now in its second year, and Shaw and Picton have expanded their search to take in college freshmen, and even players straight out of high school. “In the U.S., freshmen tend to sit on the bench,” Shaw said. “We think that coming here for a year, playing and continuing your education, might offer a better development environment.”
Just as important, though, it can fulfill a dream. An entire generation of American fans has grown up, as Morales did, watching the Premier League, fantasizing about the possibility of playing in England, of being in or near those places that seem both so familiar and so far away.
“What you see, when you get here, is the investment in the team,” said Morales, his eyes lighting up. “We train with a nonleague team while we’re here. You see people going to the games on rainy nights, in this random division. Nobody would turn up to watch soccer like that in the U.S. But here, it’s just this pure passion. That’s what I wanted to experience.”
Just a Blip. Probably.
There is a consistency to Manchester City, even in its crises. The evidence, now, is sufficiently compelling to suggest that Pep Guardiola and his team suffer from some form of seasonal affective disorder: As soon as the leaves start to fall from the trees, City seems to be consumed by some sort of angst.
Last season, City lost three games in four in all competitions as September turned into October, and then picked up just one win in five games in late November. Guardiola’s team had a bit of a fright the previous Halloween, too, losing three of four at the end of October. In both cases, it should be noted, it shook off its ennui soon enough and won the Premier League anyway.
The likelihood is, then, that City’s slump of the past 10 days — beaten at Tottenham and at Bournemouth in the league, and by Rúben Amorim and Sporting in the Champions League — is nothing more than proof of Guardiola’s charitable side. City is giving its opponents a chance. In the case of Liverpool, it has even offered a head start.
Guardiola himself, though, has acknowledged that it is more complex than that. One of his many, many strengths as a manager is his ability to spread his players’ workload. He does not overburden his squad early in the season, ensuring that his stars are fresh — or at least fresher than their opponents — once the pressure starts to mount.
This season, that may not be possible. City is no more injury-hit than Arsenal, say, but Guardiola’s squad, by choice, is smaller. That means that his available players are already piling up minutes.
City, habitually, becomes untouchable once spring arrives. Whether it can repeat the trick may depend on energy as much as talent.
This Was Not the Idea
The new Champions League format, as we all know, was inspired by two things. Money, mainly: More games and more glamour mean more revenue. But fear was a draw, too: Europe’s elite clubs did not like the idea of being at risk of elimination, even theoretically, that was inherent in the concept of a smaller group stage.
The solution, of course, was to change the tournament to make it more to their liking, swaddling it in safety nets and second chances. Not that the members of the continent’s self-appointed aristocracy would have assumed that they would need them: Those top eight slots, the ones that bypass the first knockout round, were all earmarked for the tournament’s grandees.
What a nuisance, then, that some actual soccer had to come along and get in the way. Occupying positions two through four at the halfway stage are Monaco, Sporting and Brest. Bayern Munich sits 17th. Real Madrid is 18th. Both are below Dinamo Zagreb. Still, it could be worse: At the current rate of progress, Paris St.-Germain will be eliminated.
Even though that should change over the next few weeks — P.S.G. will, doubtless, make it through to the knockouts — it is hard not to feel that the drama has been in the tournament’s interests. Watching a procession is, ultimately, not particularly enthralling. And besides, there is something salutary in seeing the results interfere with the best-laid plans of the great and the good. Trying to rig a competition in your favor, in a game in which you already possess all of the advantages, is not really very sporting, after all.
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