Three years ago, employees at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown St. Louis brought an idea to general manager Alper Oztok that they said would create a common bond for the company’s international workforce.
Let’s join a soccer league.
For Oztok, there was little hesitation.
“Soccer is a great way to connect different cultures and backgrounds,” Oztok said. “I was born and raised in Turkey and grew up playing soccer, or football as we say in Europe.”
The hotel employees represent 15 nationalities, including different cultures and languages from Latin America, eastern Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Asia.
But as Oztok joins other male employees in once-a-week soccer play, the differences fall away as the ball makes its way down field at the Vetta Sports complex in west St. Louis County.
“Strangers become friends, and they share the same passion and excitement,” Oztok said.
Soccer has long been a part of St. Louis, from pickup games in parks to professional play. In the 1950 World Cup, for example, a U.S. team with five players from St. Louis defeated England in a historic upset. Today, as St. Louis, like the rest of the U.S., becomes more diverse, soccer unites in a way few, if any, other sports can.
That global appeal will be on display Friday as the region welcomes one of seven “Road to Brazil” tune-up matches prior to the World Cup next month. St. Louis will host teams from Ivory Coast and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The match is the fourth within a year putting St. Louis into the international spotlight. It started when the city last May hosted Manchester City and Chelsea at Busch Stadium, followed three months later by a match between Real Madrid and Inter Milan at Edward Jones Dome.
The appearance Friday by the Bosnian team is its second within six months. In November, Bosnia-Herzegovina met Argentina for a friendly at Busch.
But soccer’s true international reach is rooted in more modest venues. That’s true for Micah Wangia, who grew up in Kenya and plays soccer whenever he gets a chance, and at different levels, including pickup games at St. Louis University, a men’s league in Cahokia and with the St. Louis Lions, an amateur soccer team in St. Charles.
Wangia, 36, lives in Benton Park with his wife and four children. For many children worldwide, access to sports league play is nonexistent, or out of financial reach. That’s why soccer is so appealing, he said.
“Soccer is very easy to cross the bounds from really poor to really wealthy. It’s one of the few sports that is an equalizer,” Wangia said. “You don’t need much to play soccer. A ball — that’s about it.”
Sanjin “Sonny” Zigic brought that kind of simple passion for soccer from Bosnia 18 years ago.
Now, he is general manager of FC Bordo St. Louis, a semiprofessional team that began competing this month. Team members include Bosnians, Serbians and Croatians from the Balkans in southeast Europe.
“We came out of a war zone and had lingering tensions. But here we are, all in the states, all playing together, and nobody thinks about it.”
Zigic is also working alongside the St. Louis Mosaic Project, an organization that promotes awareness of the region’s immigrants. Leaders of the organization have used the upcoming World Cup as a moment to showcase how soccer is uniting St. Louis’ growing international population.
NUMBER ONE SPORT
At the Lou Fusz Soccer Club in Maryland Heights, the four artificial turf fields were packed Thursday night with players. A group of 10- and 11-year-old boys ran through a series of drills with Don Popovic, the club’s director, serving as coach.
“Beautiful! Yes, yes!” he says after a series of successful passes highlighting footwork.
Popovic, 70, came to St. Louis from Yugoslavia in the mid-1960s and began playing for the startup St. Louis Stars, the city’s first professional team. The Stars later moved to California, and Popovic played and coached for other teams around the country before coming back to St. Louis, his wife’s hometown.
In St. Louis and throughout the country, there are several sports to play and cheer for. But in many countries around the word, “the number one sport is soccer, the number two sport is soccer and the number three sport is soccer,” Popovic said.
And although St. Louis is known as a baseball town, the region also boasts itself as the U.S. amateur soccer capital.
It’s within that title that soccer in St. Louis County is teetering between unifier on the field and political battleground on the sidelines.
County Executive Charlie Dooley is supporting a $12 million addition to the Chesterfield Valley Athletic Complex, with the county funding a third of it. It runs counter to a three-year effort to get county funding for a regional soccer complex in Maryland Heights, which would include the expansion of the Lou Fusz facilities. That proposal is estimated to cost around $13 million and comes from Councilman Mike O’Mara, who is supporting Steve Stenger, a councilman running to unseat Dooley in the August Democratic primary.
A NATURAL BRIDGE
Politics aside, soccer fans here are gearing up for the World Cup, beginning June 12.
Vitaly Levin, who is in a men’s league at Lou Fusz, is headed to Brazil with five other men from his soccer team. The group includes two Russians — including Levin — a Honduran and two Brazilians. Other members of their team are from Bosnia, France, Argentina and Ukraine.
“We’ve been playing a long time together, some I’ve known for 15 years,” said Levin, 50, who came to the U.S. in 1993 as a refugee. Now many of their boys play together, including Levin’s son, Marc.
John Spanos, who co-owns the region’s six Vetta Sports complexes with his brother, Peter, said growing immigrant populations “have infused a lot of energy into St. Louis soccer.”
The region is home to about 70,000 Bosnians, believed to be the largest population outside of Europe. The most sizable refugee populations in the past few years, however, have come from Bhutan, Iraq, Somalia and Myanmar (formerly Burma).
Zigic said soccer is a natural bridge from home country to a new life in the U.S.
“I was 13 when I came as a refugee,” he said. “I’ve now spent more than half my life in St. Louis.”
Growing up in St. Louis with soccer as part of his life showed Zigic he was not the only one “caught between two worlds.”
As the FC Bordo website says, the goal of the team is to create “a feel of a unique identity and point of pride for the city of St. Louis.”
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