Real Salt Lake? Correction: make that ReAL Salt Lake. You’re asked to pronounce “real” the Spanish way, Ray-ahl – as in Real Madrid, the world’s greatest soccer club.

Salt Lake’s new MLS franchise – it will field a team next season – wants to cash in on that Spanish glamour. The team’s chairman, David W. Checketts, announcing the typographically-challenged name, was in fine purple-prose form. The name, he told us, “signifies soccer at its highest level – soccer with excitement, tradition, and flair […] the name symbolizes dignity, history and, quite literally, royalty. It is our mission to establish those attributes for our team.”

Checketts, a man not previously heard of in the soccer world, has got that splendidly right, especially the bit about excitement and flair. His aims are lofty and admirable. But back here on earth, what chance does ReAL have of playing like Real? Sad to say, no chance at all. None whatsoever.

Largely because of another key word used by Checketts: tradition. Real Madrid’s tradition belongs within that of Latin soccer with its emphasis on ball control, artistry, short passing, and its love of the theatrical.

Soccer tradition in the USA is quite different, being firmly linked to the northern European countries – particularly England, Scotland, and Germany – where hard work and discipline are the name of the game, and hard running, stamina, and physical application count for more than fancy footwork. The flair and artistry of the Latins – particularly the South Americans – is regarded with, at best suspicion, at worst hostility, by the heavily Euro-oriented coaches in the USA.

None of the 10 MLS coaches is Hispanic; five of them were born in northern Europe. Since 1916 the U.S. men’s national team has had 37 coaches, none of them Hispanic. Today, the United States Soccer Federation runs men’s national teams at six different age levels – and none has a Hispanic coach.

That last statistic brings up another reason why Checketts’s dream of playing like Real, of playing with Latin flair and excitement, is a non-starter: One of those USSF coaches, John Ellinger, has been named to coach ReAL.

For the past five years Ellinger has been in charge of the USA’s under-17 national team. In that position, he has had the opportunity to assess every young player in the country and to bring his choices into the USSF’s residency program in Bradenton, Fla. His choices have included only a handful of Hispanic boys.

I want to make one thing very clear. We are not talking about racism here. This is strictly a matter of soccer styles, a prejudice that so heavily, unthinkingly, favors the northern European style that it works against the Hispanic. We’re talking about a mind-set – but even that seems much too feeble a term to describe the reinforced concrete bunker of traditional opinion that blots out Latin soccer.

Ellinger’s reluctance to field Hispanics was even more noticeable in the big games of the climactic under-17 World Cups. In three editions of that tournament (1999, 2001, 2003), Ellinger’s teams played a total of 13 games. With 11 players on the field, that is a total of 13,200 individual playing minutes. Ellinger used only four Hispanics; they were on the field for a grand total of 278 minutes. I have seen many games played by Ellinger’s teams over the past five years and never have they inspired any images of Real Madrid in my mind.

Like the vast majority of the thousands of coaches trained and licensed by the USSF, Ellinger is Euro-oriented with a preference for what he once described to me as “high-energy players”. This stylistic division in the sport is, of course, a global matter. But the USA is the lone country in which both schools are living alongside each other.

It is this coexistence that makes American soccer’s pro-Europe bias not only senseless, but downright damaging. The large, and growing, reservoir of Hispanic talent is not getting a fair deal in this country because all of the top coaching positions are occupied by Europhile coaches.

We have just had an extraordinary example of how deep the bias goes. Chivas-USA is a new Los Angeles based MLS expansion franchise – like ReAL Salt Lake, it will begin play next year – that is owned by Mexican business entrepreneur Jorge Vergara, who also owns the parent Chivas club in Guadalajara. He has made it very clear that he wants the new club to be a primarily Hispanic club, with Hispanic players, and with Spanish as the main language.

Vergara has also vowed to do what American soccer has so far singularly failed to do: To beat the bushes looking for American-born Hispanic talent.

Also sought was a Hispanic coach familiar with the American soccer world and the peculiarities of MLS’s single entity structure. Sought but not found: There were no Hispanic coaches with the necessary experience. Two weeks ago Chivas-USA introduced their choice: Thomas Rongen, a Dutchman resident in the U.S. since 1979, a European who does not speak Spanish.

Rongen has had stints with three MLS teams, and since 2001 he has coached the American under-20 national team. His track record for selecting Hispanic players to that team is, if anything, slightly worse than Ellinger’s with the under-17s. Rongen’s team for the 2004 under-20 World Cup included no Hispanics at all (Arturo Alvarez had been forced out with injury, to be replaced by Freddy Adu), and its style of play was standard energetic north-Euro.

One wonders what on earth Rongen will offer to the fans of Chivas-USA? Most of them will be Mexican-Americans, fans of the mother-club in Guadalajara. They will want Latin-style soccer.

Yet this past weekend, Rongen inexplicably turned up as a television analyst blatantly shilling for D.C. United in their game against the New England Revolution. It was a highly physical game, and as the violent tackles and the yellow-caution cards piled up, Rongen declared with evident relish, “this is the way it’s supposed to be played.”

Maybe. But Rongen’s Euro attitude will have to be greatly tempered with Chivas-USA, where he will have a Mexican assistant coach and a number of experienced Mexican players.

Up in Utah, in the land of ReAL, Ellinger will have no such restricting influences, and will be free to indulge his liking for high-energy soccer. He may produce a good team, even a winning team, but – sorry about this, Mr. Checketts – it won’t look anything like Real Madrid.