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SOCCER JOURNALIST ANDREA CANALES TALKS TO TIAS

ABOUT HER LIFE, WORK AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN THE TWO

Some things just make too much sense not to do them. Such was the case with setting up an interview with Andrea Canales, our first lady of soccer journalism and a writer not afraid to address subjects most media won’t. In a world where sports stories are essentially written before they happen – by men I might add - Andrea remains open to where a story takes her, even if those are dangerous waters. Even if those waters have nothing to do with soccer.

She’s written plenty of uncontroversial stuff as well, for just about every soccer publication imaginable. And it’s usually as the only woman on the masthead. I had so many questions for her. Problem is, she’s in Los Angeles; I’m in New York and at the point where I really try to avoid depending on phone interviews for a feature. So for more than a year I’ve wanted to get Andrea on TIAS.

Enter David Keyes. You may know David from his work over at Culture of Soccer, a blog that if you’ve spent any time at you know I love. One day David pushed off from his east coast home to anthropology grad school in southern California. To make a short story even shorter: for most of you reading this (and our work) it should be obvious why both David and I had interest in speaking with Andrea and why I am more than thrilled to have David interview her for his first contribution to TIAS. Their conversation is after the jump. David will be back in the coming weeks to address the second half of the Sideline Views crew, Luis Bueno.

David Keyes (DK): Can you give me a short bio of Andrea Canales?

Andrea Canales (AC): I was born in Michigan but LA is where I’ve lived the longest, so if I claim a hometown it’s LA. In LA, people ask and I say I’m from Michigan, and they say, “Oh, Michoacán [Mexico], que bonito (how beautiful)” and I’m like, “No, it’s not Michoacán, it’s Michigan.” They’re really confused for a little bit.

[When I was 4 years old] my parents moved to Argentina. In Argentina I learned to play a little soccer. When you’re that young you don’t know that girls don’t usually play soccer because I had always grown up doing whatever my brother did (he’s 2 years older). We lived in a small town, and they wanted to have enough players to have a team, so I was allowed to play with the boys. I didn’t know that was unusual.

When I came back to the United States, I was just a year older and my mom signed us up for soccer right away, partly to make us fit in. My parents thought they were doing us a favor by only speaking Spanish to us; they wanted us to learn it. But then when we came back to the United States, they both switched to English. We said, “What? We don’t know how to speak this language.” Then we started school, and soccer was something to do and a good way to fit in. We were on little co-ed teams together, which helped me a lot because you just always feel that ‘there’s my big brother, everything is good.’

In high school, I played on the boys varsity team. At that point, I did realize there were very few girls and so I was one of about three. I was still playing with my brother. I was also doing gymnastics, and I injured myself and had to quit sports for a while. That was pretty much it for my soccer career.

I started reading and writing a lot. When you can’t run around the way you used to, that’s what you do more of. And that’s actually when I started covering sports. I knew all the people on the team and it was easy for me to write up the stories.

When I went to college, I thought about sports journalism, but I also realized there were very few jobs available in it and I guess I didn’t want to be dependent on an opening coming up. It’s a really unstable field. So I got my degree in literature and I got my master’s and I started working as a teacher in high school. I came back [to LA] and taught in Compton for a couple of years. Then I got a corporate job writing for a software company. I did that for a while. It makes me sound like I’m kind of unstable. I went here, I went there … there were all sorts of things. The company got bought out; it was an educational software company so my teaching experience carried over. They got bought out and started doing more pure entertainment games. I decided to go back to teaching, I missed having students and their energy. That’s when I started teaching night school at the community college.

I started writing about soccer [when] I had some free time because of the six-month severance package from the corporate job. I had some extra time and I started reading more about soccer. I emailed a few places. I started writing for a website that did sports betting. They didn’t have anybody to write about soccer and the editor didn’t know anything about soccer. He said, “You can write about whatever you want.” They said as soon as their website started making money, they’d pay me, but in the meantime I could write about European soccer, American soccer, they didn’t care. So I started writing whatever I wanted every week, and I liked it. The two partners had a big fight and called me saying they were shutting down the site. One guy was going to start another site and said he really liked my writing. He said, “I don’t know about soccer, but you make it seem really interesting and not boring, because I always thought it was boring.” What ended up happening was that he didn’t get his site off the ground and I realized that I missed writing about soccer.

So, for the first time, I started to send out query letters. I had been doing some freelance writing anyway, mostly human interest and travel so it was just a continuation of my freelancing. When I started to hear back from people, I started to get a lot more opportunities with the soccer writing. It was kind of interesting. I think part of it was, number one, I knew about the game and I was willing to go to stuff in LA, and there was lots of stuff happening in LA. Number two, being bilingual gave me a unique opportunity to talk to some players that they didn’t usually get input from. Like if Mexico came into town, I could talk with the Mexican players.

And then it was also some really nice people who were involved early on who gave me opportunities. Rob Ziegler with Top Drawer Soccer. Sometimes the favors you do for people really come back. I started with ESPN.com when Jen Chang was out here for the Real Madrid game and I offered to translate for him so he could ask Guti some questions. That led to a conversation afterwards and he said, “We’re kind of full up on writers but if you want to cover women’s college soccer and then pitch me any other articles you have.” I started pitching articles, he started accepting some, and women’s college soccer became one of my regular gigs. Later on, I moved to MLS. ESPN.com remains one of my main outlets.

DK: Do you teach now?

AC: Yeah, I teach at a little college downtown. That’s why I’m here [at the Home Depot Center] on a Saturday, but it also means that I can no longer be everywhere, where practices are, when breaking news is happening. I know it’s affected my ability to cover the game, but you have to make practical considerations for your own security.

DK: What do you teach?

AC: I teach ESL (English as a Second Language). I teach from literature to all sorts of English-related stuff. When you have a master’s in English, it’s a very general sort of thing.

DK: Can you tell me all the places you write for now?

AC: Actually, I’ve cut down. I write for ESPN and I write for Soccer365 and I write for US Soccer Players. At one point I was writing for six different sites, but now I’ve cut down to half that. (editor’s note: Later Andrea realized she had forgot to list Futbol Mundial, which she still writes for.)

DK: And then, of course, your blog too.

AC: Yeah, I feel bad because I think there are some people who go to our blog and expect it to be much more profound than it is. I just told Luis [Bueno, her partner at Sideline Views], “Hey, I got some leftover stuff, I think it’s kind of funny or interesting. We should start a blog and throw some things on there. I mean, sometimes it happens that we have a substantial nugget of hard news that we put on there, but generally we try to get paid for those kinds of things. So, that’s going to show up on ESPN or that kind of place. I don’t want to run down the blog, I’m proud of the blog, I like the blog, but I don’t want anyone to say, “Why isn’t the blog deeper or more meaningful?” It’s just a reflection of what Luis and I feel like and have time for.

DK: So, really, it just started as you guys thinking you had some things that weren’t getting put out in other areas and you could put them together?

AC: Yeah, pretty much. I had been reading a few blogs. Not soccer blogs, just LA-centered blogs that I thought were fun and interesting. To do this hardcore would take a lot of time that we don’t get paid for, but it might be fun to have our own little soccer equivalent. Luis was really skeptical, like, “We don’t have time for that.” He’s such a good sport. I have these kooky ideas and he says, “Okay, let’s give them a try.” The nice thing about it is when I go through a busy spell, when I have midterms or whatever, he posts stuff so there’s some content on there. Especially now, there’s a lot less content because I can come out to games less, but he picks up the slack. It’s actually kind of tough for both of us because with me working another job and him living in Riverside, we can’t be on top of things as much. If I lived in the homes over there (points across the street from the HDC), I could run across the street, and if I also didn’t have another job.

I feel really lucky by and large to have had these opportunities. I could go to the [2006] World Cup, I went to Peru for the [2005] Youth World Cup. That was actually kind of fun because there are a bunch of players who have transitioned to other things, like Jozy [Altidore] and Preston [Zimmerman]. I remember when they were 16, 17, and they remember me. It’s nice to have that history with a player. It’s put everything on a comfort level. That makes things like interviews and asking tough questions easier. They know I’m not out to get them or [think], “Who the heck are you, do you know anything about soccer?”

DK: One question going back to your blog. Do you have any plans to make it into a brand or have advertisers? Ives Galcarep has transitioned into that mold. What do you guys see as the future for your blog?

AC: We don’t know. We talked about that once upon a time when I was completely freelancing and I thought I had more time to put to the blog. Part of it is that we’re both bad technically. That’s why it’s on Blogger, because it’s just point and click. I remember the first time we figured how to add an audio clip. We were like, “Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh!” If we expanded it, we’d have to bring someone in as a technical person and of course we respect their work and would want to compensate them. But of course there’s so little to go around anyway. We have one little tiny ad on our blog and in a year and 8 months it’s made us $116. I don’t think that’s going to be enough to support us.

We post stuff almost every day. Obviously, if you get a soccer-specific advertiser that knows about the blog it could work, but so far no one has approached us. We’ve talked about putting something together, maybe as a partnership. Part of it kind of depends. I think we’re both at a point where we’re trying to figure out [things]. Luis has talked to me a couple times about going back to school to get his master’s to teach and have something more stable to support his [daughters]. I know that I don’t want to do the blog by myself. A lot of the things that make soccer writing fun are the people you get to associate with. Ives is an inspiration; I met him at MLS Cup. He’s a great guy and he works hard on his blog; it’s really inspiring to see what he’s done. But he’s also had the guts to take the plunge and say he’s going to do that hardcore. Luis and I are still like, “We don’t know if we’re at the place where we can afford to do that yet, jump off that cliff, hustle advertisers, and see if we can make it.”

DK: You freelance now. Do you have any interest in joining the staff somewhere should the opportunity present itself?

AC: It has not yet. I’d be a lot more interested if I could see what the offer was. Luis and I at one point thought, “Hey, you never know, we might be on television.” There’s the sports reporters kind of thing. We thought, “Maybe one day soccer will be big enough that there will be a soccer equivalent and we’ll get invited on.” And so we thought, “Why don’t we practice?” So we set up our digital camera and put a little episode up on the blog of Sideline Views TV, which had us commentating. We thought we could do this every week, just get our little comments out there, and give us a chance to practice in front of the camera so we wouldn’t be so nervous or awkward. We did one episode and then right after that Luis’ schedule with his girls changed and he couldn’t drive out here for practices. And then a month after that, I got the teaching job, and now I can’t drive out here for practices. We thought, “If we’re going to do this, we should have a new episode every week.” But we can’t do that. So that remains the only episode.

• Sideline Views TV

There are some times when I’m watching the sideline reporters and I think, “I could do that.” But I also know quite a few people who are involved and I do think they’re doing a good job. It’s more like thinking that I could do that sort of job. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m so much better.” I just think, “Yeah, I could do something like that too.” But the opportunity hasn’t presented itself.

DK: Do you have a favorite story that you’ve written?

AC: I was really proud of my first ESPN story because it was my first story for ESPN. And I guess I have David Beckham to thank for that because it was kind of a different take on the David Beckham angle. He and Jovan Kirovski had been teammates way back in the youth team of Manchester United. So I asked him about that and of course, all the other reporters around me had no idea what I was talking about, they didn’t know who Jovan Kirovski was. So, that was something that was kind of unique and helped me get my foot in the door.

• Beckham and Kirovski

I’m trying to think of stories I’m especially proud of … I like a lot of my stories! There’s a couple that I feel bad about because I feel like I rushed and could have done a better job if I had had more time. That’s really the thing my editors get on me the most for: they want me to be faster; they want me to deliver on deadline. Of course, when you’re covering international matches, you go downstairs, there’s a [press conference], you have to wait for the players to come down from the locker room, and it doesn’t leave a lot of time. And I like to think about things. I really like the stories that I’m able to think about. Some people say that my strength is feature writing. But I’ve tried to work on my game articles. I think I have good observations so I think I’ve improved on that. But if there’s one thing I have to say I still need to improve on, it’s speed.

I appreciate some players being really honest with me, it helps me to write good articles. Herculez Gomez telling me his whole story of being down in Mexico, Landon [Donovan] is always really honest, but he’s sort of that way with everybody. But it helps to make better articles.

I guess I’m proudest of the stories I’ve gotten a lot of flack for, but I feel like were valid points. I wrote one about Bruce Arena and that I thought he should move on after the 2006 World Cup, but I wrote that before the World Cup happened. There were so many people that were like, “Oh, Arena’s great, maybe he should just be coach for life.” It really seemed to me that the US national team had kind of gotten stuck, wasn’t progressing. Even Arena didn’t have the same daring that he’d had in 2002. I thought, “Even if he has a good World Cup, he should parlay that into a club job abroad. He should let a fresh voice come into the national team.” I got tons of negative email: “How could you? He’s done so well, he’s the best coach ever.” That sort of thing. And of course, after the 2006 World Cup … I got exactly one email saying, “You know what? I remember you wrote about Arena needing to move on and I think you were right and I just wanted to tell you because I remember I wrote you a negative email.” I was proud of having a little foresight there.

• Bruce Arena needs to leave

I had a lot of other reporters tell me that they agreed with me, but they wouldn’t write something like that because they were afraid that it might give too many negative impressions from people involved. I think I’ve talked to Arena since then. I’m not sure that I can say he was any less friendly than he normally was because he doesn’t really like the press, and it’s not like I could have told a difference between his hostility before and his hostility after. But I thought it was interesting that other reporters who had been in the game a lot longer were telling me they wouldn’t write something like that because of the repercussions. I’m proud that I wasn’t afraid.

DK: One major difference between you and many reporters is that you are a woman. How does that play a role in the work that you do?

AC: You might have to ask the players that. I don’t know. Sometimes I ask different questions because I think about things a little bit differently than guys do. I think it makes it easier for me to feel camaraderie when I cover the US women’s national team, which I do. That’s the nice thing about soccer in the US, there are really valid programs across the board for men and women. I’ve liked the opportunities I’ve had to cover women’s soccer.

The reporters in the press box are pretty welcoming, they don’t make a big deal out of it. Sometimes players look a little surprised when they visit [LA for away games]. I guess the biggest assumption I get is that I’m on TV because most of the female reporters here are the TV reporters, like from TV Azteca or something like that. [The players] are like, “Where’s your camera?” And I say, “No, I’m print.”

DK: Is being a woman or the fact that you’re Hispanic ever a roadblock for you?

AC: Well, I like to think of it as an advantage. My Spanish has gotten pretty rusty, I’ll admit, but I do write some articles in Spanish and I can interview players in Spanish and translate what they say into English. I like to think that’s been a neat way for some people to hear some players that previously they might not have heard from. I try to take the opportunity to interview new players in the league. Obviously, you’ve seen that there are a lot of South American players coming in and they haven’t learned English [yet]. I had one of the first interviews with Christian Gomez outside of the press conference where everything is translated for him. It was one of the first 1-on-1s where he could talk freely.

I have had a couple of other reporters say, “Okay, I’m standing next to you in the mixed zone because I know the players will stop to talk to you.” I’m not sure that’s true because I’ve gotten blown off plenty of times by players who don’t want to talk to anybody. That’s [the other reporters’] viewpoint anyway, but maybe they were just teasing me. I’m kind of gullible that way.

I did put on the blog an incident I had with a player. It’s kind of depressing to think about. Actually, when Adam first called me for an interview, it was soon after that. I didn’t want to do the interview because I thought it would end up being too much about that. But I do think it’s part of the reality of being a female soccer reporter. The simple fact is that you get people who come from different cultures and that means they’re not used to the US style of doing things. If you go to the blog, you can read through the comments and there’s some negative stuff there. To me, it was just being fair. I have no problem with a mixed zone. It’s not like I want to be in a locker room, but that’s just the way things are done in American sports. If other reporters want to give up locker room access and do a mixed zone, then that’s fine. But that’s not the way professional sports want to build an audience. Even the big sports want to build an audience by giving fans the in-the-moment glimpse of the first reactions of people in the locker rooms. But inevitably this sets up a little bit of conflict. I say inevitably, but that’s the first time that happened to me. Except for Dema Kovalenko. He was just like, “Hey, you can’t be here,” and I just walked away and talked to somebody else. I hardly see him [now] and I just don’t interview him. There are some players who will tell you that they don’t want to be interviewed, they just don’t like being interviewed in the locker room, and they just don’t give interviews. There are some players who have their favorite reporters they talk to and they’ll blow the rest of them off. And there are a couple of players who are uncomfortable with female reporters and won’t ever give me an interview. And that’s okay, that’s their right and their preference. But they can’t try to order me out of the locker room so I can’t talk to anybody else. I shouldn’t say they don’t like female reporters, maybe they just don’t like me.

• Marcos Gonzlez incident

DK: I don’t think it’s that.

AC: In most cases, I’m the only female reporter so it could be that. I don’t want to assume incorrectly.

DK: Do you see an East Coast bias in the soccer world, given that you’re out here in LA?

AC: MLS headquarters is out there, and I’ve always had the theory that it allows the reporters out there to build some relationships. It’s not like I couldn’t call Don Garber, but with the time change and whatnot. And a lot of the agents are on the East Coast and reporters get to meet them and know them personally. There are a couple of big-time agents that are here on the West Coast. But I’d probably say they are, like Richard Motzkin, the most professional and old-school about not too much information getting out. I don’t know what to say. Bias in terms of whom? Do people think East Coast teams are better or do East Coast newspapers spend more money on soccer? I don’t know. People are going to talk to who they know and if they’re around more East Coast reporters, then East Coast reporters are going to break more stories, inevitably.

And if you’re talking exposure to people, this is one disadvantage I have of working another job. I’m not able to be around here all the time and build relationships with all sorts of people that might give me some interesting tidbit of information. Even if someone did call me, I could very well be in class and they could leave me a text with breaking news. I’ve kind of resigned myself to trying to work on my strength as a feature writer. I don’t look at it as a bias, I look at it as trying to make the most of the opportunities I have, and being glad if news breaks that somebody out there does have it and is informing people.

DK: Can you sum up Beckham’s first year in one word? Or, give me one word and then you can expand.

AC: Tantalizing.

DK: That’s a good word. Why was it tantalizing?

AC: I think we saw a little bit of what he’s capable of both in drawing power and exposure, and ultimately in terms of skill on the field. Some games he was involved in, I think you could easily say, were some of the most exciting in MLS history. But, obviously, there weren’t that many.

It’s like, what is it? It’s not Sisyphus … what’s that one guy? (DK: it turns out it’s Tantalus, not that I had any idea.) I’m trying to think of the Greek metaphor and the guy who has the thing right in front of him but every time he reaches for it, it disappears. We got a little taste, but not enough to satisfy anybody, including Beckham. Some people have probably gotten disappointed and disgruntled and don’t want to wait around for more, but there are other people who are still curious. They got a little taste and they want to see what happens when he’s healthy.

DK: I saw on Amazon that you guys are writing a book about Beckham. I know it’s not something you’ve talked about on your blog. Is it something you want out there?

• Forthcoming Beckham book. (editor’s note: certainly not the only one).

AC: I’m sure [the publisher] wouldn’t mind some publicity. I guess we didn’t think about it that much because we haven’t finished it. We delayed the book a lot and that’s actually one reason why we’re not pushing ahead on the website so much. I asked Luis, “Do you want to do the book and the site at the same time?” Because if we’re even going to look around for someone to help us with that and try to get advertisers, we don’t want to do that while we’re still working on our book.

We talked to our publisher and he accepted that we [delay the book]. Luis and I thought that there just wasn’t enough actual soccer content. We’re sports writers. So much of what we were compiling from Beckham’s first year was Beckham goes to this club because he wasn’t playing! It also felt very second-hand. We thought that what we could offer is really good firsthand [perspective], talking with people who were there and had felt his impact directly, his teammates and things like that. But when he’s not playing, it’s all secondhand tabloid news reporting, what he’s doing wandering around and whatnot. So, we got an extension. I actually forget exactly when it’s coming out, that will depend on the editing. But we wanted to get more of when he’s actually playing into the book and the impact he’s having on the US.

DK: Do you ever get tired of writing about soccer? If you had to cover another sport, what would you be interested in doing?

AC: Back in college, I covered basketball. I’d like to cover basketball again. I’m not sure exactly how to transition into that. Honestly, a lot of the opportunities I’ve gotten in soccer are because other reporters didn’t know the sport that well and that’s not true of the other sports, frankly.

That said, it’s been done before. I talked to Dylan Hernandez a couple weeks ago. He was a reporter up north for the San Jose Mercury News and he was a soccer writer but now he’s doing baseball here in LA. If you’re a good writer, you’re a good writer. And I do know about the other sports. But it just depends. When do I have the opportunity go looking for another job? I’m trying to keep up with doing this one part-time. A lot of the opportunities that have come into my life, I didn’t look for. I just grabbed them when they came along. So, who knows if that’s going to happen again?

DK: I remember as a kid searching through the box scores in the New York Times for soccer results. But with the internet a lot has changed. Do you support the idea that soccer is the sport of the internet?

AC: I’d have to say a qualified sort of yes. What I think is that soccer, more than other sports, creates a dividing line experience here in the US. I think if you follow basketball, no matter who you are, you’re watching the Lakers. If you follow soccer, if you’re an expat in Santa Monica, you’re watching the EPL early in the morning at the King’s Head Pub. If you are Hispanic, you’re reading La Opinión and other papers that focus on teams back in Mexico. They provide very good coverage of the Mexican league, more so than MLS by far. If you’re an American soccer fan, then your experience once again is unique and the media you go to is also unique. For the American soccer fan, and when I say American I mean of the domestic sport, the MLS fan, I would say it’s very internet-based.

I know a lot of soccer writers who have blogs sometimes through their organization, and they’re able to provide more information there, and editors want to give them stuff. I know some writers, like Grahame Jones, who are involuntarily online sometimes because Grahame will write an article and the LA Times will say, “Oh, we’ll put it on the website because we don’t have any room in the print edition.” And he was frustrated because that’s not how it used to be. He used to get in the actual paper. Some writers are being forced onto the internet. Some do it as an outlet.

But yeah, I think if you pick up a Spanish-language paper, you’re going to find a lot more soccer coverage. It’s interesting because sometimes there have been articles I’ve read and later on I want to reference them but they don’t have an online equivalent because they haven’t really developed a Spanish-language paper website with full archives. I guess I’m so used to researching stuff online but you can’t find old issues. You can’t do that with Spanish-language [papers] as easily because they don’t archive the same way. You have to buy that paper, take it home, and file it away really neatly, which I’m always really bad about.

So, I do think it’s the sport of the internet for a large segment of the population. And I have to say, for the Hispanic fans, some of the best sites that I think do things really well are mediotiempo.com and ESPN Deportes. They have great videos and their message boards are really lively.

DK: Yeah, I’ve seen you guys post a few videos from ESPN Deportes recently.

AC: Yeah, we translated a few of them because we thought they were good and the English sites didn’t have them. So, we thought, why not? Sometimes I get a little tired of that, though. Sometimes I’ll just put things up and say, “Hey, isn’t this cool,” but I don’t have time to go back and translate all of it.

DK: You should just put it up there are have one of your readers translate.

AC: Sometimes they do, sometimes they’re really nice. In fact, when Sweden was here, I posted a couple of things from a Swedish blog and said, “Can anyone help me out?” A couple of our readers did come on and translate it. That was nice because I didn’t know what they were saying. The nice thing about knowing Spanish is that it’s a Latin language and it allows you to figure out a lot of stuff. I’ve been to Brazil a couple of times and I can get by in Portuguese. Even stuff that’s in Italian I can figure out. But Swedish, I don’t have any chance there.

DK: Where do you see the future of soccer journalism? It’s growing in some areas, but budgets are dropping, especially in print media. Is there going to be more work for people like you? Or less work? What’s the situation likely to be, do you think?

AC: I don’t know. I wish I did because then I could plan better. I could give up on it and just do teaching but I keep thinking, “Hey, maybe something’s coming around the corner.” I think a lot of us were hoping that the arrival of Beckham would [help]. It sort of did, I mean, Luis and I have a book on the way. I’m not going to say that it didn’t open up doors. But did it open up enough doors for us to do this full-time? Not yet.

I think soccer media coverage is kind of in a transition point where some of it’s growing and yet newspapers, for example, are struggling so that cuts into [soccer]. The sports editors are looking to cut budgets. A lot of times, they’re not going to put in the soccer story. At the same time, there are a lot of signs that interest is growing. You can see signs like expansion, but I’m not sure that it’s necessarily going to trickle down to the soccer writers. I myself have gone back to teaching. I did take a year off during the World Cup and tried to do nothing but write. Obviously, the main part of that was soccer, though still freelancing for some other things. I did okay, but it’s just so unstable and I had so many assignments pulled out from under me. When you’re a freelancer, nobody is obligated to you. If it turns out that they’re low on budget for something, then they just call you up and say, “Sorry, we just can’t make this story.” You’ve got to say, “Okay, well, let me know if there’s anything else.” I found it stressful.

I think there are some people who are going to try to figure out what sort of model works to make people money. That’s kind of what Ives is doing and I do think, like any entrepreneur, having the guts to blaze may ultimately pay off for him. Buzz Carrick, I’ve met him out here at the combine a few times, and he’s put together a really nice site that focuses on FC Dallas.

FC Dallas, I have to say, is one of the conundrums. I think they have a lot of good people working down there and a lot of personable players. But yet, they don’t really draw well. So, ultimately, soccer journalism depends on people really being interested and being willing to pay. Soccer is still cheaper than a lot of other sports, but too so many people still see it as a backyard sport. Until there’s the support and people go crazy over soccer shoes and things like that, will the advertisers think it’s worthwhile? I’m just not really sure where it’s going to go. That’s really ambiguous.

DK: It does seem like there is potential, but there are also many potential pitfalls .

AC: There have been times when soccer writers have been told they can’t blog about certain things because they are owned by a parent company that says, “You have to put it in the paper because this is something you got while working for us.” I’ve been told sometimes that I can’t blog about stuff if I’m writing an article about something. Or if I’m writing an article and I have leftover quotes, I can’t use them for an article for somebody else. I’ve been really lucky that some editors are very understanding. Jen Chang for ESPN lets me put a link to the blog on my byline. But other papers, they don’t let their soccer writers freelance for somebody else.

It actually makes me think. I had a friend who was a journalism major who went out to start a newspaper in a little community called Temecula (California). He was the main editor and his friend was the publisher, and they started this newspaper. And Temecula at the time had a bunch of little newsletters. He and his friend called a meeting and what they proposed to everybody was that they consolidate everything and make the Temecula Times a real paper. They said, “If we take all of this, your focus on parenting and your focus on sports and put it in there, we could have one really good paper.” But the meeting fell apart because everybody wanted to do their own thing. Sometimes I wonder if that’s part of the thing with soccer journalism.