Walking with purpose to the back of your local bookstore you come to the shelves containing sport books. Containing various tomes about baseball and football is a small section on soccer. Looking further, you find that most of these books are about coaching youth, a few are about the history of the game. One or two might be about a famous European team or player. Very few give you an idea of what it is like to play on a professional soccer team. Dave Ungrady has written such a book.
Unlucky - a season of struggle in minor league professional soccer, details the first season (1998) of the Northern Virginia Royals. Playing in D3, the lowest division of Professional soccer, the author trains, travels and drives the team across the Southern states all the time hoping to make his professional soccer debut at the age of forty. The book is written in much the same spirit as George Plimpton's Paper Lion, a novel about training with the Detroit Lions football team.
Ungrady was a middle distance runner in college and an active player in the Washington, DC amateur soccer leagues. After being one of two media representatives that attended the first meeting of the Royals, he decided to write a book. As he trains with the Royals, he gives some details about what it is like to play in D3. What it means to train, juggle family and job commitments and the dedication it takes to play soccer in America.
Those of us looking for information about the day to day office activities of running a team will be disappointed. Although Ungrady does give some information about the structure of the league, player salaries, and how D3, as well as the rest of the USL is run, it is sketchy at best. Although he treats everyone fairly and presents the facts in a consistent manner, many of the principle characters and front office staff of the Royals are not cast in a favorable light. Owner Mo Sheta appears cheap and untruthful in parts, although no one would doubt his love of soccer. It is reported that he lost some 20,000 dollars operating the team during its first year.
Coach Silvino Gonzalo appears to play favorites at times and has questionable coaching ability. However, considering that he has an ever changing line up from week to week and the fact that his players needed to work second jobs to survive, this is a forgivable weakness. Much of how the team was run appears amateurish. It is up to the reader to determine if this was because the Royals were a first year team, or the management in general.
How these two gentlemen and the management of the Royals are portrayed in the book has lead to some controversy; the book was originally available on the USL website, but was pulled after complaints from the Royals owners and management. Interestingly, current USL President Francisco Marcos appears early in the book and sounds very much like a snake oil salesman. However the book was sold for a brief time on the USL website.
Ungrady does not touch much on the lives of the other players. Some, like former DC United keeper Mark Simpson, have played at the highest level of soccer and are seeing the end of their careers. The author only touches briefly on this aspect. Others are trying to move up the ladder of professional sports and Ungrady does give us some more details about their lives and dreams. He also goes into detail about his own career in sports. Ungrady truly has a love of the game and it comes across in his writing, but frankly the book seems to be more about his efforts to play professional soccer at 40 than about the trials and tribulations of a first year soccer team.
I would recommend this book simply because it provides the reader with an aspect that is soulfully missing in the world of sports publications. Dave Ungrady has written an easy to read, informative book about playing professional soccer, however for the fan that wants more information about the day to day operations of a team or more human drama, I would look elsewhere.
The book is available from the author via his e-mail address; Djungrady@aol.com. The cost is $15. The book is is also available on amazon.com.
