‘White soccer teams don’t pay upfront’: how race unlevelled US playing fields

By: Les Carpenter | The Guardian

Wealthy, mostly white soccer clubs in the US have long snatched up the best pitches – but in liberal Seattle, one official is taking a stand.

A few years ago, Exequiel Soltero wanted to rent two soccer fields in a well-to-do Seattle suburb. Finding places for his Latino immigrant soccer league to play matches had become quite a challenge: the area’s soccer fields were always snatched up by wealthy, mostly white clubs who had the money and expertise to navigate the city’s leasing process. It was a complaint he often heard from other clubs in Seattle’s lower income communities.

They felt shut out.

So Soltero was thrilled when he found two fields that were clean, well-maintained and available at the times he needed. But when he called the local recreation scheduler, he was told the fields had been rented. Suspicious, he drove to the park on the day he had requested – and found the fields empty. They were available. Just not, it seemed, to Mexican immigrants.

“I went to his office and confronted him,” Soltero says. “I said: I went by the fields and I stayed there for over an hour and nobody was there.”

The official eventually leased Soltero the field, but only after demanding he pay the rental fee upfront. Soltero says he was also asked to provide a list of the players along with their home addresses to prove they were “local”.

Sitting at a table in the Mexican restaurant he owns in the mostly African-American and immigrant Seattle neighbourhood of Dunlap, Soltero still seethes.

“If you were a white team they wouldn’t ask you for addresses,” he says. “I don’t think the white teams have to pay upfront.”

By now, he knows the stereotypes of immigrant soccer leagues: that they won’t pay; that players bring their families and stay all day with coolers of food; that they leave the fields a mess. It doesn’t matter that Soltero has lived in the US for four decades, his restaurant becoming a Seattle institution with a fleet of catering trucks. Or that he demands his teams clean the fields before leaving.

Too often, he says, he is judged by his accent.

Read Full Article: The Guardian