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.
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.
The Cityscape: get the best of Guardian Cities delivered to you every week, with just-released data, features and on-the-ground reports from all over the worl“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.
Seattle is known as one of America’s most liberal cities, famous for its green initiatives, robust unions and taxes on the rich. In recent years, it has grown into one of the country’s biggest centres of soccer. On match nights, thousands of fans of the city’s Major League Soccer team, Sounders FC, march through the old streets of Pioneer Square to CenturyLink Field, where attendance over the last few years has averaged more than 40,000 a game.But a three-decade tech boom has also gentrified Seattle in ways longtime residents could probably never have imagined. Last year, Seattle was the nation’s fastest-growing big city, adding more than 50 people a day. Rents have risen 57% in six years. A city with a nominally socialist soul now has a skyline filled with construction cranes erecting luxury condominiums.
In this new economy, poorer and non-white players have been pushed away from one of the world’s most democratic sports. Public schools refuse to share their immaculate fields with the public, citing concerns about litigation. Parks are overcrowded, and immigrant players who come to play pick-up games are chased off pitches by well-funded leagues who pay to practise there.The problem is hardly Seattle’s alone. Field access is becoming a serious problem in American soccer. A game played freely around the globe is regulated in the US, controlled by a sprawling network of expensive youth leagues that can often cost parents more than $10,000 (£7,420) a year. The leagues are well-funded, heavily white and sometimes so sophisticated they employ people to find fields. They are also the primary feeders to colleges and national teams.