Soccer in America: why aren’t more black kids playing the world’s game?

By: Les Carpenter | The Guardian

Soccer found Robert Russ when he was in the seventh grade – not that he was looking for it. Like most African American kids at his Washington middle school, he had no interest in the game. Soccer, everyone had told him, was either for white children in the suburbs or Latino immigrants, not kids like him.

Then one afternoon someone waved him on to the playing field. By the end of the day, he was in love with a new sport.

Soon came the taunts from his friends, telling him that he wasn’t playing a real sport. That what he was doing wasn’t really black. That he was wasting his time.

“If you’re African American and you play soccer, you get picked on a lot,” Russ says. “People are going to say you’re trying to be Hispanic,” he says.

He never cared about the teasing; he enjoyed the game too much. But now that he’s 20 and working with young inner city players, Russ notices how few look like him. He’s sure peer pressure has a lot to do with that.

While soccer has boomed in the US, becoming a staple of suburban life, it has barely made a ripple in African American communities. As Russ talks, he watches a tournament played by children from Washington’s poorest neighbourhoods. Of the dozens of kids, most are Latino, and only a handful are African American. It’s hardly representative of a city that is 49% black.

It’s a picture that’s repeated across the country. One of the world’s most democratic games, played on streets and in alleys around the globe, would seem a natural fit for America’s predominately black inner cities, where basketball thrives on playground courts.

Instead, it’s almost non-existent.

For Entire Article: The Guardian