Constructing Lives off the Soccer Field

Latino League Team Owners Attract Athletes With Jobs, Housing

All season long, El Destroyer had been winning, demolishing the competition in the Liga de Manassas with flair and ease. But with the soccer team stuck in a late 1-1 tie last Sunday, Jorge Morales, El Destroyer's owner and coach, was stalking the sideline, hand on cheek, worrying, worrying.

"Nerio," Morales yelled in Spanish, "give it to Nerio!" Moments later, striker Wilmer Zapata saw a chance and centered the ball perfectly to the team's star, who buried it in the net with the suave precision of a professional.

"Incredible," Morales said.

But not surprising. After all, Carlos Nerio was a professional three years ago, when he played on one of San Salvador's elite clubs. Now, when he's not scoring goals for his coach, he works for Morales's company, J.K. Carpentry Inc. of Sterling.

As the Washington region's Latino soccer leagues continue to grow in popularity and competitiveness, it's no secret anymore that the top players are paid and the best teams are amateur in name only. With few rules and little oversight, the big, unregulated market for soccer talent is creating rather unusual arrangements between freelance footballers and the owner-coaches who pay them.

Eager to boost their stature on and off the soccer field, owners lure players from far and wide with offers of steady jobs, free housing and money, turning people such as Morales into weekend coaches, weekday bosses and all-the-time landlords. With no rules to keep the cash out, the owners spend large sums with little expectation of financial return, even with $10,000 prizes at stake in the top leagues.

"These guys want to be champions, and they invest a lot of money into their teams," said Armando Portillo, president of the Maryland International Soccer League, based in Beltsville. Some owners cover their expenses and players' salaries by soliciting donations from fans and supporters. But if the owner can afford it, Portillo said, he pays the costs himself. "That way, the owner can do whatever he wants," he said.

In return for the chance to make money, on the field and off, players live in cramped, dormitory-style accommodations and spend almost all their hours together, either working, practicing or playing in games.

They are a mix of Central American pros moonlighting in the off-season and journeymen with multiple loyalties, shuffling between teams in the Washington area and in New York.

The best-positioned are players such as Nerio, who have leveraged their talent to land jobs that will serve them long after their soccer careers are over. Paid $16 an hour, Nerio makes more in a week installing windows and doors than he made in a month as a pro fútbolista in El Salvador.

"There was no future for me there," said Nerio, 28, who lives with his wife and two children in Woodbridge. "I thought: 'What happens in a few years, when I'm 32?' At least I learned something there that's helped me here."

Many of the owners are men in their forties and fifties who immigrated to the United States decades ago and have risen from hard-luck labor to own successful construction and restaurant businesses.