Constructing Lives off the Soccer Field
Latino League Team Owners Attract Athletes With Jobs, Housing

By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 7, 2006

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.

Growing up in El Salvador, Morales played for another El Destroyer, a professional team in his home town of La Libertad. He left for the United States in 1990 at the peak of his career, fearing for his life in the midst of civil war, and promptly went from kicking goals to digging ditches for $8 an hour.

"I've never gotten over the nostalgia," said Morales, now 40.

Juan Navarrete, the owner of El Salvador de Manassas, El Destroyer's main rival, said he sank $40,000 into his team last year. Navarrete owns a home remodeling company, and this year he's imported five professional players from El Salvador for the season, paying them to play and stabling them rent-free in a house he owns. Working for him is not an obligation.

"They can work for me if they want to," Navarrete said, "but I'd rather have them concentrating on soccer 100 percent of the time."

To keep even with his rival, Morales got athletic visas for three Salvadoran pros who will soon join El Destroyer for the championship run. They'll get $200 per game and free room and board in his home. And most weekends, Morales pays $200 and bus fare to bring two or three ringers down from New York, including Honduran soccer legend José "Chepo" Fernández, a 36-year-old midfielder.

As owner, landlord and boss, people such as Navarrete and Morales hold considerable power and influence over their players. What happens, for instance, when they stop nailing those winning goals? Do they lose their jobs as well as their spots on the team?

"It's never happened before," Morales said. "As long as they're productive, they're welcome to stay with the company." Soccer and carpentry are separate things, he said flatly. "I wouldn't fire someone who works hard."

The players agreed and, to a man, they spoke of their coach with a kind of veneration that can sound rote or rehearsed. With the team undefeated, construction contracts plentiful and another championship in sight, they weren't thinking their arrangement could collapse. And if there's anything unseemly about the players' relationship to their fatherly provider, it wasn't immediately apparent on the job site or the soccer field.

Eight players on El Destroyer double as employees of Morales's 45-person company. Most of Morales's workers are Salvadoran, and he maintains that everyone who works or plays for him has legal permission to do so, either through residency or a temporary protected status extended to Salvadorans and nationals of other countries in a state of crisis.

But on some rosters in the Washington leagues, green cards can be as rare as high-scoring games. Some players get to the United States with tourist visas and never go back, although plenty of others, including professionals, come like so many of their compatriots, with a dangerous hike through the desert and a long bus ride. And for many Americans, soccer fans or not, that's a red card.

"Anybody who is in the country illegally shouldn't be here at all," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "It doesn't matter whether they're coming here to play soccer, work in a restaurant or program computers."

More than 30 mostly Latino men's leagues jam the Washington region's parks and fields on summer weekends. Some are loosely based on nationality, such as Oxon Hill's Liga de Guatemala or Arlington's Liga Boliviana . Not all are as stacked with pros as the Liga Internacional de Virginia or the Liga de Manassas , but with roughly 20 teams in each league and up to 20 members on a team, 8,000 to 12,000 players take to the fields on any given weekend.

Every Sunday in Manassas, the games produce a kind of impromptu soccer festival, hidden from the rest of the community on the fields behind Stonewall Jackson High School. Concessionaires run a brisk business, selling pupusas , carne asada tacos and Gatorade. Armed security guards keep the booze and troublemakers out. The marquee matchups draw more than 1,000 paying spectators and are broadcast live on local Spanish-language radio.

Two major prizes are at stake. One is the $10,000 prize for the Manassas League's top team (El Destroyer won it last year). The other is in the Copa Taca, a long-running regional tournament sponsored by the Salvadoran airline, with a one-week, expenses-paid team trip to El Salvador up for grabs.

But the big buzz in the Manassas league this season is the group of six young Afro Honduran players Morales relocated from New York last year. They work for Morales year-round, play for his indoor team and live in another house he owns. Few had carpentry experience when they landed in Sterling.

"If I don't make it as a professional player, at least I'll have other options," said Jason Guity, 22, shouting above the din of a circular saw at a job site in Gainesville, where he'd spent the week installing baseboards, windows and doorframes on new townhouses.

Guity moved to the Bronx from Honduras when he was 11, and after high school, he drifted between teams in the New York area, picking up $100 per game. "I wasn't doing so well," he said.

Morales convinced him to move to Virginia last August to play for El Destroyer, and he now receives $14 per hour building subdivisions. Living with his teammates is cramped but free, he said. "I feel like the doors are wide open for me."