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Landon Donovan

The soccer player Landon Donovan “has the whole package,” a writer for JockBio.com wrote in 2004. “He is quick on his feet and fast in the open field. He has a strong and accurate right leg, and is lethal with his left one, too. He combines these qualities with a scorer's instinct, which means there is no real ceiling on his potential.” Donovan was not yet 20 when he established himself as one of the most prominent soccer players in the U.S. Playing with the American national team in international competition at all levels, he won admirers among fans and professionals in both Europe and the U.S. At the age of 17, he became the youngest American to sign a professional contract with a team (the German Bayer Leverkusen) in a top-level European soccer league. At 19, on loan from Leverkusen, he played a major role in transforming one of the worst teams in Major League Soccer (MLS), the Earthquakes, into league champions. “Landon is a very special, special player. He’s high-caliber, high-quality, and high-octane,” Ray Hudson, the coach of the Miami Fusion in 2001, observed at the end of the Earthquakes' championship season, as Dave Brousseau reported for the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Sun Sentinel (October 10, 2001). “He’s the sort of player this country has always yearned for.” In both 2002 and 2003 Donovan was named the Honda U.S. Player of the Year, one of his sports' highest honors, and in 2003 and 2004 he was named U.S. Male Soccer Player of the Year by the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF). In 2004, for the Web site of the U.S. National Soccer Players Association, Earnie Stewart, the USSF's U.S. Soccer Player of the Year in 2001, said about Donovan, who was then 19, “He's a great player already. He has speed; he's great on the ball; he can dribble opponents. Because he's a young kid, he likes to take on people all of the time.” According to a biography of Donovan on the same site, he “is lightning quick on the ball and possesses a lethal touch in front of goal. His vision and skill make him one of the most highly touted players ever to come out of the U.S. youth programs.” Donovan has taken on the role of ambassador for soccer in the U.S.; he tirelessly promotes the sport, spending as much time as possible signing autographs and posing for photos with fans. Since 2005 Donovan has been a member of the Los Angeles Galaxy. He was the team’s highest scorer during the 2005 season, helping it win the MLS Cup Final.

Landon Timothy Donovan was born on March 4, 1982 in Ontario, California, and grew up in Redlands, California, a small city that lies 75 miles west of Los Angeles. His mother, Donna Kenney Cash, is a special-education teacher; his father, Tim Donovan, is an employee of a pharmaceutical company who played hockey semi-professionally in Canada when he was young and harbored hopes of joining the National Hockey League. Donovan’s parents divorced when he was two; thereafter, he lived with his mother, his older brother, Joshua, and his twin sister, Tristan, with whom he is very close. His father later remarried, moved to Nebraska, and lost contact with his children until Landon entered adolescence and began making a name for himself with the U.S under-16 and under-17 soccer teams. (From his father's second marriage, Landon has two older step-siblings.) Donovan had been playing soccer almost from the moment he could walk. Learning the basics from his brother, who also loved the sport, at age five Donovan begged his mother to allow him to join a league. She agreed, and he found himself competing with six- and seven-year-olds. The other children's added years failed to give them an advantage: during Donovan's first game he scored seven goals. The boy immediately became obsessed with soccer. “He wore soccer clothes to . . . school every day,” his sister told Joe Hamelin for the Riverside, California, Press Enterprise (June 2, 2002). “He walked around with a soccer ball. All day long. Our . . . babysitter, Connie, who was like our second mom from age 2 to 10, gave him a stuffed soccer ball the size of a regular soccer ball. He slept with that.” As a youngster Donovan took violin lessons.

By the time he reached high school, Donovan was receiving expert training from Clint Greenwood, a former player in the Welsh Soccer League and the coach of the Rancho Cucamonga, California, club--called Cal Heat--for which Donovan played. Greenwood, Donovan told Ridge Mahoney for Soccer Magazine, as posted on greenwoodsoccer.com, “was always focused on a lot of ball contact. His theory was absolutely perfect: As a kid you need to touch the ball as much as you can. You should always be with the ball.” He also said of Greenwood, as quoted on ussoccerplayers.com, “Clint taught me almost every technical skill I have.” During his freshman year at Redlands High School, Donovan became a soccer star and was named the Most Valuable Player (MVP) of the area league. The soccer program at Redlands High was weak, however, so the following year he transferred to East Valley High, also in Redlands, to take advantage of its superior coaching. But he spent less time playing for the school than for the U.S. national teams. In the 10 games in which he participated at East Valley High, he scored 16 goals. On the international stage he was also a standout, scoring his first goal in his debut with the U.S. Under-17 team, in a game in which Mexico earned a 21 victory. The following year Donovan played increasingly for U.S. national teams. He was instrumental in bringing its Under-16 squad to victory in the Christchurch Cup in New Zealand, a tournament in which he scored 11 goals and was named best player of the tournament by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA). At the season’s end he was also named an All-American by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America.

At the age of 16, Donovan was attracting the attention of European teams, especially Bayer Leverkusen, one of the top teams in the Bundesliga, a German league. Officials from Bayer Leverkusen were particularly impressed by his scoring of two goals during the U.S. Under-17 team’s 43 victory over Argentina at the beginning of 1999. (Donovan told ussoccerplayers.com that John Ellinger, the head coach of the Under-17 team, “turned me into a professional.”) By the end of March 1999, Donovan had been offered a $400,000, four-year contract with Bayer Leverkusen. (He had also become the youngest person to play with the U.S. national Under 23 team.) His mother, who wanted him to attend college, urged him to turn the contract down, but his father encouraged him: “Landon had a chance to do exactly what I had hoped to do,” his father told Marc Spiegler for Sports Illustrated (April 17, 2000), “but I didn’t have the ability or the talent.” Donovan, who for several years had dreamed of playing in a European league, eagerly accepted the Germans' offer. But after he joined Bayer Leverkusen, he discovered that the style of play favored in the German league was more physical than what he was used to, and he was relegated to Leverkusen’s reserve team in Germany’s fourth division, where the level of play was not the best. He also felt lonely, and by the end of 2000, he was reportedly seeking to be loaned to the MLS. (MLS, America’s professional soccer league, consists of 12 teams; its season runs from April 1 to the beginning of October and is followed by a postseason competition that culminates with the MLS Cup Final on November 12.) Indeed, negotiations toward that end were taking place behind the scenes, and in March 2001 Leverkusen and the MLS agreed to lend him to an MLS team for two years. (At the end of the 2002 season, the deal was extended for another two years.) Earlier, in 1999, Donovan had participated in the Pan American Games as a member of the U.S. Under-23 team, which won a bronze medal; he started in four games and played in all six. Also in 1999 he was named a parade High School All-American. In 2000 he played in four games at the Summer Olympics, and the USSF named him U.S. Soccer Youth Male Athlete of the Year.

In April 2001 Donovan began playing for the San Jose, California, Earthquakes, which had ended the previous season as one of the worst teams in the league. Donovan flourished on his new team, becoming one of its biggest stars and one of the MLS’s best players. On June 2 and July 16 he was named to the Team of the Week, a fantasy squad formed weekly by the magazine Soccer America to celebrate players’ performances during the previous week. Donovan also won a place on the Western Division's All-Star team, capturing 26,151 votes from fans, more than any other midfielder. He was named MVP after he scored a record-breaking four goals during the All-Star match, which pitted Eastern Division players against their Western Division counterparts. By the end of the regular season, he had scored seven goals and registered 10 assists for the Earthquakes. The accomplishment made him the team’s second-leading scorer and helped the Earthquakes reach the play-offs. In the ensuing six matches, Donovan scored five goals, one of which occurred during the cup final, a 21 Earthquake victory over the Los Angeles Galaxy. Meanwhile, Donovan was also performing well on the international level. In June he had joined the Under-20 national team and played in the Under-20 World Cup; while the U.S. won only one match, Donovan worked noticeably hard to strengthen the weaknesses in the U.S.’s game plan. In October 2001 he joined the senior national team in its must-win World Cup qualifier against Jamaica. Providing “just the spark the Americans needed after three sluggish losses,” as Glenn P. Graham put it in the Baltimore (Maryland) Sun (October 8, 2001), Donovan drew the penalty that gave the U.S. its second goal, leading to a 21 victory and qualification for the World Cup for the fourth straight year.

In 2002 Donovan scored seven goals and made 20 assists during regular-season play. The team again made it into the play-offs but lost to the Columbus Crew in the opening round, despite Donovan’s one goal and one assist. Donovan's greatest successes in 2002 were achieved on the international stage, where he was the only player to start in every game the U.S. played. At the beginning of the season, he was a key member of the squad that won the Gold Cup Championship: he scored that tournament’s first goal, in the U.S.’s 21 victory over South Korea. For his efforts during that game, he was named Man of the Match, an honor he won again during the U.S.’s shootout victory over Canada in the tournament’s semifinals. He was also valuable in the U.S.’s surprising World Cup run to the quarterfinals in Korea/Japan (both countries hosted the competition). He scored two goals during the World Cup tournament. Fútbol de Primera, a Mexican football organization working to promote international soccer in the U.S., honored him for his performance in international play by naming him the Honda Player of the Year. He was the youngest player ever to receive that honor.

In 2003 Donovan scored 12 goals and made six assists for the Earthquakes during the regular season and four goals and two assists during the play-offs. Five of his regular-season goals came in two consecutive games in late September, when he registered a hat trick against the Kansas City Wizards and two goals against FC Dallas. He thus became the 15th player in the history of the MLS to score five goals in two games. Two of his postseason goals came in the MLS Cup Final, in which the Earthquakes took the championship for the second time in three years, beating the Chicago Fire 42. Donovan was subsequently named the MLS Cup MVP. His achievements earned him a number of other honors throughout the season, including being named player of the month in both April and September, player of the week in the third week of September, the Los Gatos Brewing Co. Earthquakes’ player of the month for September, and the Earthquakes’ MVP for the year. He was also named U.S. Soccer Male Athlete of the year. In international competition Donovan led the U.S. team in scoring: his seven goals included four made during the 50 win over Cuba in the Gold Cup on July 19. He also registered five assists during the season. Those accomplishments earned him his second Honda U.S. Player of the Year award, making him the first player to be so honored in consecutive years.

During the Earthquakes' regular 2004 season, Donovan scored only six goals and registered 10 assists. The team reached the MLS Cup semifinal, where it fell to the Kansas City Wizards, 32. In international play Donovan performed better, scoring fives goals in 14 games and earning the title Man of the Match four times. He was again named Honda U.S. Player of the Year. In November 2004, as many observers had expected, Donovan announced that he would return to Germany and play with Leverkusen, and he did so in January 2005. “They have assured me that it is not prison I'm going back to,” he said, according to Jonathan Nierman, writing for MLSnet.com (November 23, 2004). “I don't expect to go in and just play. You can't just go and be given anything, you have to earn it and I expect to do that, but it's nice to know that they are backing you and supporting you.”

Donovan’s stay in Germany proved to be short-lived. In January 2005 he made two appearances as a substitute in the closing minutes of two games. He later substituted in four more games and started in two. Dissatisfied with the amount of time he spent on the field, he expressed his desire to play with the Los Angeles Galaxy. That team soon worked out a deal with Leverkusen and bought out Donovan’s contract. Donovan returned to the U.S. and began playing with the Los Angeles Galaxy at the beginning of April. “My decision to return to the MLS is one that I have made with thoughtful consideration,” Donovan said, as quoted by Agence France Presse (March 31, 2005). “If we as Americans can't contribute to our league, it's a bit of a disservice in growing soccer here in the US.” During the regular season with the Galaxy, Donovan registered 10 assists and was the highest-scoring player on the team, with 12 goals in 22 games. In the opinion of George Dohrmann, writing for Sports Illustrated (November 2, 2005, on-line), Donovan pushed the Galaxy “farther into the playoffs than they deserved.” Indeed, he led the Galaxy into the finals, which it won in overtime, beating the New England Revolution 10. In the qualifying round of the World Cup, he scored six goals in 12 games, helping to assure the U.S. a place in the 2006 tournament.

The United States will play the Czech Republic, Italy, and Ghana in the opening round of the World Cup in June 2006. “Americans' success will depend heavily on Donovan, who scored twice in 2002 [during the last World Cup tournament] and was the most influential U.S. player during the recent qualifying campaign,” a Washington Post (December 10, 2005) writer predicted. If he performs as well as expected, Donovan may prove to the world, which often ridicules Americans' efforts to compete in soccer at the international level, that an American-grown talent can flourish among the best.

The five-foot eight-inch Donovan weighs about 150 pounds. He has appeared in ads for Gatorade, Pepsi-Cola, and Verb, a program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that encourages youngsters to engage in physical activities. According to ussoccerplayers.com, Donovan's leisure activities include playing video games and golf.