Peace Out Sweden: It's been real...

My time in Sweden seems very much to be coming to an end.  I have a trial scheduled for later this week in Finland and nothing after that.  I’m a bit wary of that because my ankle is still not so good.  If that trial doesn’t work out then I honestly don’t know what I’ll do.  I guess I’ll just email every team in Europe until someone responds, but even then I have no idea where I’d stay in the interim time.  London I guess.  But as of now I have 32-33 days to find a team, impress them and sign a contract.  That’s really not a lot of time.  It gives me the possibility to have three, maybe four trials if I’m lucky.  I’m already stressed about that; I can’t imagine what I’ll be like if things are the same in two weeks.  Even if I don’t find a team, I’ll still probably try to stay in Europe and get a job, likely in England because of the language, as a newspaper reporter or something (I have a degree in journalism).

Ok, tangent--------------------------------

For Americans who follow soccer, it is common knowledge that England is the highest paying country for soccer.  It is also common knowledge that it is almost impossible for Americans to get a work permit, because those who apply for a work permit to join a soccer team must pass rigorous guidelines which I won’t outline here.  All you need to know is that I have a better chance of having a baby (like me actually having the baby) than getting a work permit to play in England.  But there’s always been something that I’ve wondered:

Can I get regular work permission in England (like a green card equivalent), then use that to qualify to play in England? 

I don’t see any reason to deny me to play for a League 1 or League 2 team if they want me and I already have active work permission in England.  On top of that, it seems a bit unlikely that at that level anyone would even notice.  At the same time, a League 1 team in England could pay salaries of like 6000-10,000 pounds a month.  That would be a sizeable raise for me without being an unreasonable raise in quality of play (from the highest I've played I should say.  It would be a big jump from division 1 in Sweden).  I mean the top attacker in League 1 last year was 36-years-old.  That doesn’t discourage me from thinking I can play there.  So my point is that if I don’t find a team by September 1, then maybe I’ll go to London, stay with Celia (I haven’t run this plan by her, in case you were wondering lol) and work at a newspaper.  There’s like 100 of them in London anyway and I’m good at writing news stories.  Much better than I am at writing stream-of-consciousness blogs J.

End of tangent-----------------------------

I trained today with ESK since I didn’t have anything else to do.  I’m pretty much just killing time until I leave Wednesday.  I paid Robert for his bike, which was stolen while I was in London.  That sucked, paying for a bike because it got stolen a week before I was leaving.  I could have kept that money in my pocket by keeping the bike at my house when I went to London rather than leaving it locked up at the train station.  Oh well, you live and you learn.  There’s criminals everywhere, even Enkoping.

Tomorrow I will train again and then I’m off to Finland.  I’m looking forward to telling you where I’m going, but nothing is 100% clear at the moment.  Developments are happening all the time and for that reason there’s no point in trying to look too far into the future.  Maybe I’ll do the trial this weekend or maybe I’ll sign tomorrow for another club entirely.  Or maybe everything will fall through and put me back at square one.  The last scenario is by far the worst for me, but would probably make for the most interesting blog.

No pictures because I’m literally sitting in Enkoping wishing I had more money.  I’ll put a meme instead.  A USA-themed one because of the Olympics.  It's from the hilarious Comedy Central show "Workaholics".  Enjoy!