|
 Chelsea Football Club, an English soccer team, trained at the UCLA campus for the second time in as many years last week. The team held closed door training sessions Tuesday through Friday and autograph sessions with dozens of fans (instead of the thousands who turn out for their training sessions in London) after the practices.
With the team holding practices on a field that was nearly impossible to see, and with Event Staff hovering to ensure the practice remained private, the experience felt less intimate to many than the team’s visit last year.
“It is kind of sad that we don’t get to watch them train,” said Keagen Priest, a twenty-one year old soccer enthusiast. “You see the end product of these practices on T.V., but it would be nice to see how they get to that level, especially for those of us that are still learning the game.”
Some lucky fans were able to duck under fences and stare through openings in the fence coverings to catch a glimpse of the team. What they saw would seem relatively familiar to most soccer players from high school on. Small games on small fields with small goals. Running, shooting and agility drills and a large inter-squad scrimmage at the end.
The level of play was, however, extremely impressive. “You see them on T.V. and it all looks so glamorous and easy. But when you come out here you really see how good they are. Their touches, the way everyone knows what to do and where to be, it’s extremely impressive,” said student Travis Ito-Stone, one of the lucky few who got to see some of David Beckham’s arrival in Los Angeles last week, coupled with Chelsea’s visit, marks an important month for soccer in the United States.
 Beckham will be joining the L.A. Galaxy, presumably making his debut for the club when they play Chelsea at the Home Depot Center on Saturday. Like Chelsea training in Los Angeles for the second straight summer, Beckham’s move to the Major League Soccer is meant to bring publicity to the game in the U.S. At times it seems as though soccer truly has turned the corner from youth sport that many children give up by the age of fourteen, to a sport that has begun to attract better athletes and has developed a strong grass roots following.
The transitional state of the game in the U.S. was apparent in the fans and onlookers who turned up to watch Chelsea train. Many screamed for the team’s big stars—Frank Lampard, John Terry and Didier Drogba, but looked baffled when the lesser known Steve Sidwell went around the whole crowd signing autographs and taking pictures with many uncertain fans. Walking back to my car I overheard a girl on her cell phone saying “Dad, I just saw Chelsea United,” (the adding of “United” probably due to her confusion of Chelsea and Manchester United, another English soccer team).
Chelsea’s tour of the U.S. is intended to gain publicity for the game and the team in the U.S. To further this pursuit, Chelsea recently signed deals with Disney and former U.S. Women’s international Lorrie Fair to help promote the team in the States. The deal with Disney is the first of its kind; part of Disney’s Wide World of Sports, it will send players and coaches in opposite directions over the Atlantic in what is described by the team as an attempt to bolster youth soccer in the United States.
However, the closed training session at UCLA, coupled with their stay at the college being relatively unpublicized leads one to question how sincere the desire to boost soccer on the whole in America is, and how much of it is a marketing ploy to further Chelsea’s stated goal of becoming the biggest soccer team in the world within five years.
|