Americans following Africa’s lead
WASHINGTON DC (AFM) - African players populate Europe’s football leagues in ever greater numbers, and the trend is also picking up in the United States. A country that has been slow in adopting football in general and African footballers in particular, the USA’s Major League Soccer is beginning to turn to African talent. The change is also helping the US national team as a good number of promising internationals have found their way to the USA by way of the so-called mother continent.

American captain and all-time top scorer Landon Donovan recently took time to talk about the position of African players in America and negative perceptions toward both Africans and Americans in Europe.

“It’s interesting. Sometimes they (Europeans) use the same jargon to categorise American and African players,” Donovan said speaking to African Football Media, drawing parallels between the groups of players looking to break into the European game. “You hear a lot of adjectives like ‘athletic’ and ‘hard-working’ and ‘useful’.

Loaded language
“African players, like American players, are not always described in the most flattering terms over there,” admitted Donovan, who joined Bayer Leverkusen as a 17 year old but is currently team-mates with David Beckham and three African-born players at LA Galaxy (Kevin Harmse, Israel Sesay and Abel Xavier – none of whom line up for their birth countries).

“It’s important that we’re not naive about the whole thing,” Donovan, who was unable to turn a stint with Bundesliga side Bayer Leverkusen into sustained European success, went on. “African players have become more and more prominent in Europe in the last 20 or so years and I’m sure it was a real struggle to earn respect in a culture that can be totally arrogant toward outsiders...Now Americans are trying to break the doors down but in general there is a lot of resistance.”

There may be a lot of parallels between the American and African experience when it comes to the cauldron of European football, but there are relatively few African players currently playing in the USA’s top flight.

Few in America
Major League Soccer has only 17 African-born players as the start of its thirteenth season approaches. “There aren’t too many African players in MLS,” former DC United star and USA international Eddie Pope admitted to AFM. “I think it has a lot to do with the fact that our league is still young and we haven’t been able to explore those scouting pipelines yet.”

Their has been an increase in the number of African players in MLS in recent years, but the number is still fairly low compared to England, Germany, France and most of the high-power European leagues.

There will be two more Africans at the start of the 2008/9 season in March, however, with Gambian youth standouts Abdoulie Mansally and Sainny Nyassi joining the New England Revolution. Head coach of the Boston side is Steve Nicol, the former Liverpool and Scotland star.

When Nicol was on Merseyside in the 1980s there were hardly any African-born players in England’s top flight – teammate Bruce Grobbelaar of Zimbabwe was one notable exception, and there were players from the Caribbean and of Caribbean extraction like Anfield legend John Barnes.

Now the Premiership boasts no less than 46 African-born players with six at Portsmouth alone.

African bloodlines
As the USA’s top flight benefits more and more from the influx of talent from the continent, so too does the country’s national team set-up. African-born players and the sons of recent immigrants are making their mark despite the US Soccer Federation’s serial slowness in experimenting with the country’s vast immigrant populations.

American soccer phenom and recent Benfica acquisition Freddy Adu, who burst on to the scene after signing a professional contract in MLS at age 14, was born in Tema, Ghana and learned his football there before coming to the States at age eight. He has played in three U-20 World Cups and two U-17 World Cups for the US and, at present, he has four senior caps - all this at the ripe old age of 18.

Adu caused a stir by snubbing his birth country and turning down an offer to play for the Black Stars at the World Cup finals in Germany in 2006 -- he had yet to earn a senior cap for the US at that point and was eligible to play for Ghana.

Also Oguchi Onyewu, the son of Nigerian parents, is currently marshalling the US defence and one of few American players finding success overseas with Belgian giants Standard Liege.

New hope
U-20 starlet and recent Real Salt Lake arrival Alex Nimo was born among the horrors of Liberia’s Civil War and grew up in a refugee camp in Ghana before being discovered as a budding talent in Portland, Oregon in the North-western United States.

It’s no surprise really that African talent would be making a dent in the USA’s youth system as Africans are the fastest growing segment of the country’s immigrant population, with an estimated 600,000 arrivals from the continent currently there.

Pope, an African-American and arguably the States’ best-ever defender, sees a chance for an African side, or an African-influenced US team, to become the first non-European or South American World Cup winner.

“Anything could happen. You can have a new team go on a run and shock the world,” he concluded. “The world is getting smaller as far as soccer is concerned and the little teams are catching up with the big ones. It’s only a matter of time, and African nations will have the advantage with the finals on the continent for the first time.”

Copyright AFRICAN FOOTBALL MEDIA, 2008

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