Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Applying My Experience in Scholarly Research to Something Useful for a Change

Many of you who still read this blog must have been wondering to yourselves - WTF is all this obsession with his wife's genealogy?  I was not - as Borat would say - looking for signs of retardation in the family although it is fascinating to realize how much intermarrying was going on.  Like many things in my life it had everything to do with football or 'soccer' as they call it over here.  

My son has a dream to play professionally.  But being born with an American passport pretty much assures no possibility of ever playing at the highest level.  There are over three million youth 'soccer players' in the United States and about 360 American players in MLS.  Of those 360 no more than 2 or 3 start in a given game. Given that there are 27 MLS clubs the reality is that two million boys across the country are fighting for 81 positions.  

The place to play football of course is Europe.  But there are tight rules in place to limit foreign players.  In La Liga for instance there are strict rules about only having 5 non-EU players on their rosters and clubs can only name 3 non-EU players to their game squads.  In the second division it drops to 2 non-EU players.  

Clearly it would be an advantage to have EU citizenship and now he stands a really good chance given what I found in his genealogy:


So all that ambition to trace the lineage of my wife's family ended up bearing great fruit but not in the way I originally expected ...



Email stephan.h.huller@gmail.com with comments or questions.


 
Stephan Huller's Observations by Stephan Huller
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