A few years ago, Exequiel Soltero wanted to rent two soccer fields in a well-to-do Seattle suburb. Finding places for his Latino immigrant soccer league to play matches had become quite a challenge: the area’s soccer fields were always snatched up by wealthy, mostly white clubs who had the money and expertise to navigate the city’s leasing process. It was a complaint he often heard from other clubs in Seattle’s lower income communities.

They felt shut out.

So Soltero was thrilled when he found two fields that were clean, well-maintained and available at the times he needed. But when he called the local recreation scheduler, he was told the fields had been rented. Suspicious, he drove to the park on the day he had requested – and found the fields empty. They were available. Just not, it seemed, to Mexican immigrants.

“I went to his office and confronted him,” Soltero says. “I said: I went by the fields and I stayed there for over an hour and nobody was there.”

The official eventually leased Soltero the field, but only after demanding he pay the rental fee upfront. Soltero says he was also asked to provide a list of the players along with their home addresses to prove they were “local”.

Sitting at a table in the Mexican restaurant he owns in the mostly African-American and immigrant Seattle neighbourhood of Dunlap, Soltero still seethes.

“If you were a white team they wouldn’t ask you for addresses,” he says. “I don’t think the white teams have to pay upfront.”

By now, he knows the stereotypes of immigrant soccer leagues: that they won’t pay; that players bring their families and stay all day with coolers of food; that they leave the fields a mess. It doesn’t matter that Soltero has lived in the US for four decades, his restaurant becoming a Seattle institution with a fleet of catering trucks. Or that he demands his teams clean the fields before leaving.

Too often, he says, he is judged by his accent.

Seattle is known as one of America’s most liberal cities, famous for its green initiatives, robust unions and taxes on the rich. In recent years, it has grown into one of the country’s biggest centres of soccer. On match nights, thousands of fans of the city’s Major League Soccer team, Sounders FC, march through the old streets of Pioneer Square to CenturyLink Field, where attendance over the last few years has averaged more than 40,000 a game.

But a three-decade tech boom has also gentrified Seattle in ways longtime residents could probably never have imagined. Last year, Seattle was the nation’s fastest-growing big city, adding more than 50 people a day. Rents have risen 57% in six years. A city with a nominally socialist soul now has a skyline filled with construction cranes erecting luxury condominiums.

In this new economy, poorer and non-white players have been pushed away from one of the world’s most democratic sports. Public schools refuse to share their immaculate fields with the public, citing concerns about litigation. Parks are overcrowded, and immigrant players who come to play pick-up games are chased off pitches by well-funded leagues who pay to practise there.

The problem is hardly Seattle’s alone. Field access is becoming a serious problem in American soccer. A game played freely around the globe is regulated in the US, controlled by a sprawling network of expensive youth leagues that can often cost parents more than $10,000 (£7,420) a year. The leagues are well-funded, heavily white and sometimes so sophisticated they employ people to find fields. They are also the primary feeders to colleges and national teams.

“You want to be part of an organisation that has money to get the fields,” says Courtney Brown, the athletic scheduling manager for Seattle Parks and Recreation, speaking generally about American soccer today. “Soccer is pretty organised. If you aren’t part of [a big club] you aren’t getting in.”

Seattle wants to change this. A few years ago, officials and soccer supporters began discussing the inequality in their city. While they weren’t blocking black and immigrant teams from their fields like the suburban community Soltero described, officials feared they weren’t doing enough to help underserved kids get on to the city’s fields.

With a push from Doug Andreassen, a former president of Washington Youth Soccer and head a panel examining diversity issues for the US Soccer Federation, the city started to look for ways to even up access to fields.

In July, Brown did something revolutionary. He started telling the big soccer clubs that he would be leasing them fewer hours on the city’s fields. He would offer those hours to leagues in underserved neighbourhoods.

He explained that he was doing this to be fair, that this would become the city’s parks policy starting this year. And that he hoped, this being Seattle, that everyone would understand.

It was a bold move. Brown knows of only one other US city that is trying something similar. Most other parks officials he has spoken to have no interest in enforcing greater equality, fearful of upsetting the wealthy leagues that provide guaranteed income.

“People here are about one another,” he says. “They care about social justice.”

Brown knows he is asking a lot. Not only is he demanding that clubs give up field time to lower-income teams, he actually might have to find those teams himself. In many leagues, organisers speak little English and might not understand the rental process. Simply opening the registration window and expecting these teams to sign up isn’t enough. He’ll have to seek them out.

“People will get upset,” he says. “But I really think if we talk to them, tell them what we are doing, they will say: We know there are organisations that are minority and we understand that they need to get fields too.

“I think they will understand if I communicate it right.”

So far the bigger clubs have been understanding. He reminds them of Seattle’s Racial Equity Toolkit, a city-mandated flowchart designed to help eliminate institutional and structural racism. And he tells them that next year, at least once a week, some fields won’t be rented at all but instead left open for free use, to allow the kind of casual pick-up games being discouraged by bureaucracy.

“I have to say, I’m happy with how it is going,” he says.

“Courtney is a little naive,” says Andreassen, as we drive through some of Seattle’s poorest neighbourhoods, many with stunning views of Lake Washington, the Cascade Mountains and the towering Mount Rainier.

So many times, he says, he has listened to white parents and coaches accusing black and Latino teams of using over-age or undocumented players, or of violating obscure procedural policies. Usually the allegations come because the non-white teams have beaten the white teams, he adds.

Recently he helped a Latino team south of Seattle that had been suspended by a mostly white league for just such a procedural error. The Latino team had won a tournament. Andreassen wonders just how progressive Seattle’s soccer community will prove to be when confronted with losing field time.

Then he pauses, and says maybe Brown’s optimism is good. “Because his being a little naive about this will help him push through,” he says.

And maybe a city that is supposed to be about social justice can find it again in soccer.

Part two of our in-depth look at soccer and race in American cities runs tomorrow

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