Outcasts United: An American tale, in more ways than one

Sean O'Conor

The power of football to transform the lives of children seems to be a particularly American concern.

Browse the shelves of the soccer section in any Barnes & Noble and you will find coaching manuals heavily outnumber books about the professional game. And what sets American manuals apart from their European equivalents are their emphasis on the life skills that soccer can equip you with - commitment, discipline, teamwork, respect and other noble attributes. In fact the weight Americans give to child-rearing in general has always struck me, which makes those soccer books seem deep down to be more about America than football.

Against this background, I was expecting to be a little jaded by Warren St. John's "Outcasts United", a tale of alienated kids finding a common identity through playing football and of one woman's struggle against the odds to transform lives and be a winner by herself. But instead I was pleasantly surprised by its universal insights and engaging style.

The territory is a well-trodden one: An embedded reporter follows the ups and downs of a football team throughout a season, inviting us to feel part of the gang by chronicling their private lives as much as their public performances. Joe McGinniss' wonderful The Miracle of Castel di Sangro did this memorably with a tiny Italian club's unlikely adventure in Serie B.

The football club in question are the Fugees, a group of children rescued by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees from various war-torn corners of the world before being deposited in Clarkston, Georgia, a small town on the outskirts of Atlanta. First picked up by the New York Times, the story of the Fugees has now been covered by a number of US TV stations and the film rights have recently been sold. Add to that a popular book and the tale has certainly got something which has struck a chord.

At the centre of the story is the heroic Luma Mufleh, a doggedly determined Jordanian woman who, after studying in the States, took the painful decision to never go home again, and instead start a new American life alone. Entrepreneurial and single-minded, Luma became an unlikely saviour when one day she stopped her car and decided to do something for the immigrant children who listlessly hung around Clarkston.

In forging from scratch an oasis for refugees in a foreign land, Luma ironically re-penned a classically American myth - a hard-working immigrant building an empire from scratch. The obstacles in this case came in the shape of the barely-veiled xenophobia of a conservative native population with a typically soccer-hating old prune in charge. Clarkston was unprepared for the 'foreign' sport of football, let alone the dark-skinned masses babbling indecipherable tongues on its streets.

The small town stands its ground, before it bows to the inevitable and begins to open up to its newly-arrived population. The local Baptist church sees its congregations swelling once it offers international services while the local corner shopkeeper' profits rocket once he bites the bullet and agrees to stock ethnic food.

These are tough questions about assimilation and multiculturalism, which are never satisfactorily answered, but Clarkston, as a microcosm of the world we are all already living in or moving towards, makes this tale a memorable one. The denouement is life-affirming, even if all the creases have not been ironed out. And the moral of the story appears to be that we have the answers to all our problems inside ourselves, or as they said in the Shawshank Redemption, salvation lies within.

Like McGinniss, St. John is an American journalist and appears to come from a non-soccer background. His descriptions of the Fugees' matches sound sometimes a little odd to European ears, but are still colourful. Football certainly plays second fiddle to immigration as the story's major theme, but the game is always there in the background as a glue to the sub-plots. Once more football is shown in American eyes as an unbeatable unifying and humanising force in a way we have not really cottoned on to in Europe.

But it is not soccer which ultimately defines the lives of the various characters in 'Outcasts'; their battles over 90 minutes on the field cannot hold a candle to their horrific life histories and jaw-dropping experiences before coming to America. After reading this book, I will certainly stop to think of the human lives behing the veils of those I see every day but never speak to.

Football, as the background to the Fugees' lives, proves it can go some way to replacing the love of the families they lost, and provide a few lost souls with the sense of identity and belonging that we all deserve, whatever our origins. Lumah unwittingly becomes the leader of this disparate group of outcasts, but in a sense it is football itself, with its rituals, rules and organisation, which is the real adoptive mother of them all.

Sean O'Conor

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