The Little Saigon Soccer Assn. had everything it needed to get started: four teams, soccer equipment and a zeal for competition.
But when the budding league tried to find a field to play on, the grassy lawns, soccer fields and baseball outfields were always taken. In the crowded core of Orange County, the demand was simply too high.
So when an established league offered to give Little Saigon members field time for $150 a game, they jumped at the chance. And though they cringed at paying another league to use a public field, organizer Tuan Pham was told it was the only way they would be able to play soccer.
"We wanted what they had, and that was the fields," Pham said. So for several years, the upstart paid the United Latin Soccer League to use city-owned fields on weekends, with referees and equipment provided as part of the deal, he said. Little Saigon's rosters steadily grew.
For years there has been a black market in subletting fields at public parks in soccer-crazy communities like Santa Ana. To feed the crush of teams, league presidents sometimes emerge as strongmen, brokering fields and selling game time to the highest bidder. Oversight is sometimes lax. City officials in Santa Ana, for instance, admit that they looked the other way for years.
Cities throughout Southern California -- Los Angeles, Long Beach and Garden Grove among them -- have had problems with field brokering, in which soccer leagues with permits for public fields trade, bargain or even sell their allotted time and space.
For city officials, it's a delicate task to bring order to the behind-the-scenes battle for fields, a rivalry sometimes as spirited and bitter as the games themselves.
The scramble for playing fields is particularly acute in Santa Ana, where more than 12,000 registered soccer players vie for space on just 29 city fields. The city of 350,000 has one of the highest ratios of players to fields in the region.
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'I was not profiting'
Allegations of field brokering in Santa Ana came into focus last year when the Little Saigon league asked city parks commissioner Ken Nguyen if it could reserve city fields without paying another league first.
The answer, of course, was yes.
"I was so surprised and disgraced," Nguyen said. "I was very upset because it's not right. You cannot profit on a public property."
