There is a men’s national soccer team that fields more players born in the U.S. than the U.S. national team itself. This team has won every World Cup qualifier this cycle, and its last victory came against a nation whose population is a billion people greater than its own. Well, 1.2 billion. And rising.
The team is Guam, and it represents about 160,000 residents living in an island territory of the United States in Micronesia. Guam itself is a speck of land nearly six times smaller than the state of Rhode Island; almost 1/7th of Guam’s total area consists of U.S. military bases.
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Despite the country’s small size, its team has been one of the early surprises in Asia’s 2018 World Cup qualifying campaign. The team’s success should perhaps be less of a surprise than it is, given the amount of change the last decade brought to Guamanian soccer. The country now has a quality pitch, for starters, plus a growing interest in the game. And in 2012, the team secured the services of a new coach, an Englishman by the name of Gary White.
Guam’s location in Oceania. Credit: TUBS/Creative Commons
White was previously the technical director of the Seattle Sounders in MLS. Before that, at the age of just 24, he coached the British Virgin Islands national team. His focus since moving across the Pacific has been recruiting.
“What I needed to do was make sure we put the best team on the field that we could,” he says by phone from his base in Tokyo. “So we spent a lot of time on recruiting players.
“My question to the technical department when I took the job was: have we seen every single eligible player? And the answer was no.
“And the answer still is no. There are so many players out there who are eligible to play for Guam because of the American connection and the military connection.”
It’s such an obvious way of improving a squad, but White insists it’s no easy thing to do. His first target was Ryan Guy, whose form with the New England Revolution also had him on Jürgen Klinsmann’s radar. “I knew [he] would be a key for us, because I’d be able to use Ryan, who is a well-known player, to recruit the next guys,” White says.
Ryan Guy with the New England Revolution. Credit: Greg M. Cooper, USA Today
Convincing Guy to join the Matao was a matter of “selling the vision, selling the philosophy, selling a long-term project, selling the fact that with us you can be an impact player. With America, you might get one or two games, but you’re never going to be the key player for that team. His father still lives in Guam [and I told Ryan] there’s a long-term benefit here in terms of impacting the next generation of players in Guam.”
It worked.
White’s next heist was even more audacious. A. J. DeLaGarza had already played a couple of games with the U.S. team when White came knocking. But the LA Galaxy defender was not yet cap tied, and White proved to be an irresistible force.
“He told me I need to get a tattoo across my forehead that says, ‘persistent,’ because basically I wouldn’t leave him alone,” says White. “It got to the point where he said, ‘OK, I’ll come for one game. Now leave me alone.’ And once [the players] come in, they get addicted to it. Because they know that what they are doing is brand new. And there’s not many things in the world you can do for the first time.”
A.J. DeLaGarza with the L.A. Galaxy. Credit: Tim Heitman, USA Today
Those firsts include a winning (so far) World Cup qualifying campaign. It began in June with home games against Turkmenistan and India. It was the first time the Guam Football Association ever had to sell tickets, and Guam won both games. The team now sits undefeated at the top of group A, which is not a bad effort for a team that used to lose competitive matches 16-0, is the lowest seed in the group, and whose captain works days in a bank on the island.
The team’s toughest assignment of the campaign is next: a trip to Iran that will pit the smallest country in Asia’s World Cup qualifying against the best. Just a couple of years ago, it would have been a mismatch on a grand scale. But these days?
“They won’t be naive enough to take us lightly,” says White. “We played some very, very high level football; we’ve got some good players; and we’re not an unknown commodity anymore.”
“That’s what we wanted,” White continues. “We wanted to come up against a World Cup-level team, in a packed stadium … and that’s what we’re going to get.”
This is the second part of White’s sales pitch, coming around the bend. At first, he sold potential players on a chance to be a part of something that had never been done before; it’s quite a pitch, and he’s quite a salesman. So far, it’s worked. And it’s even easier to sell when you’re winning.
