A Foot in the Local Door : In Mission Viejo, U.S. soccer team already is a winner

As the rest of the world works itself into a fever over professional soccer’s World Cup, the United States seems successfully inoculated. Even the sport’s name is different here: It’s called football everywhere else. But sometimes the low-key atmosphere is not such a bad thing.

For more than a year, the U.S. soccer team has had its training center in Mission Viejo. Local residents helped candidates for the team learn the neighborhood, find good restaurants, pick motels and apartments.

The players reciprocated, happily signing autographs for youngsters, standing still for photographs, behaving like nice guys instead of spoiled brats. It proved a refreshing change from millionaires in American baseball, basketball and football occasionally insulting fans and even charging for autographs.

Although youth soccer has long been popular here, American professional players run no risk of being mobbed while walking down the street. There is a faint chance that could change in less than two weeks, when World Cup play begins in the United States for the first time.

The quadrennial event will obviously stir passions among the sizable number of Americans born in countries where soccer is the dominant sport; scalpers are already bidding up tickets for the championship match at the Rose Bowl July 17.

But so far, many Southern California fans have enjoyed seeing the practices from front-row seats in a casual atmosphere, much as baseball fans could during spring training decades ago. The team, which in past World Cup years lived out of suitcases while moving from town to town, got a sense of stability, thanks to Mission Viejo.

It’s been fun having the players train locally, and they will break camp in a week with the paradox intact: A country that makes heroes of athletes largely ignores sportsmen who would be lionized abroad.