They came for the soccer, but as they watched, a social worker named Ramona Avilez from the nonprofit Congreso approached them, asking about their health coverage and income. One couple said they were immigrants with an infant daughter and a household income of $600 a month — "too low," Avilez said. Their child, however, was a citizen, and thus eligible for food stamps. Avilez explained this, and gave the couple her number. They may not call, but she'll be back next week.

The Amistad (or "friendship") Club, which began its second season Sunday, was founded by the activist Ricardo Diaz as a vehicle for community service. When Diaz, who is best known for organizing Philly's recent immigrant protests, first set out to do outreach (as a consultant for Congreso) in South Philly, he wanted to find a way to reach the people who don't normally seek help. Soccer, Diaz knew, is like a religion in Mexico. If he built a soccer club, he figured, they would come.

TEAMWORK: The games are good, but the Amistad league is also about outreach. : mark sebastian

The first order of business was to make Amistad appealing. A competing league (whose organizer didn't want to link with services) played its games at 26th and Moore streets; Sacks, on Fourth and Washington, was closer to most of South Philly's Mexican residents, but it was controlled by people believed to be hostile to an immigrant soccer league. Diaz jumped through enough bureaucratic hoops to win the right to play there, and the proximity made it easier for potential team captains to field players, who often let teams compete for them by buying jerseys and paying their registration fees.

Eladio Mendez, one of the captains of "Inter," says that while "it's really hard — you got to spend money on jerseys and stuff," Amistad makes recruiting easier because "the field's a lot better, the area is better."

Once Diaz got his season going, he started inviting service providers to attend games. Last year, HIAS & Council Migration Service of Philadelphia came to provide information on immigration law, and on one Sunday, the Drexel Newcomers Health Project came and distributed more than 100 flu shots.

"We try to find people who are falling through the cracks medically," says Desi Carozza, the third-year medical student who organized the event. "We needed a place with a lot of people present ... for peer support." Amistad provided "something that people are familiar with."

This year, Diaz hopes to bring back Drexel, as well as numerous other organizations. More than service distribution, though, he intends to use the league to gain insight into immigrant issues, and to build relationships among Mexicans in South Philly.

"I get to understand what people want," he says. "I could not do the work that I do if I wasn't intimately related" to South Philly.

When Diaz finds captains who are willing to call players at 7 a.m. to get them to games, he says, he is cultivating contacts with community leaders. When he visits shop owners to ask them to sponsor teams (thus far he has two), he becomes a familiar face. The problem, as Diaz sees it, is that Mexican immigrants in South Philly constitute a substantial population, but have no real infrastructure. So they don't really constitute a community.

"Everybody looks for the Mexican community, thinking that it exist[s]," he says. But, in spite of the fact that many people come from the same region of Mexico, the population is actually very fragmented. With the soccer league, Diaz is seeking to establish an institution that will allow him to reach about 350 players, plus their families and friends.

This past Sunday, though, concepts like community and institutions weren't at the forefront of anybody's mind. With Univision present to document the festivities, the teams played their inaugural games, then gathered in front of the camera to chant and promote themselves. You'd never know that the club was, in the words of the man who created it, an "excuse."