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Around the same time, he had been taking nude photos of the French rugby team for their Dieux du Stade, or “Gods of the Stadium,” calendar. Similarly, Vriens still feels American puritanism and heteronormativity has a lot to answer for. People were probably not ready for him to apply that vision to the US team, who in 2002 was still trying to find a strong public foothold in its home country. Growing up in the Netherlands, he’d always viewed soccer players as akin to rich and glamorous rock stars with beautiful women always by their side. Vriens told BuzzFeed News he suspected that part of the controversial reaction at the time - and since - to the photos can be put down to differences in culture between the US and Europe. Writer Pablo Maurer described the water fountain photo as “perhaps the most memorable photograph ever taken in the history of US men’s soccer.” In 2019, the Athletic published an exhaustive investigation into how the photo shoot came to be. Future teammates would parody it, while fans would re-create the photo at the site of the actual fountain. The water fountain photo, in particular, haunted Donovan for years. “If you can’t laugh about it, you have severe problems.”
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“Everybody’s laughing about it,” McBride added. “I thought we were going to get suits,” forward Brian McBride was quoted as saying. The AP story said the US Soccer Federation had sheepishly admitted the players were expecting “more traditional shots.” “I think we’re going to get a whole new fan base for our next games in New York and San Francisco,” goalkeeper Keller was quoted as saying in an apparent reference to those cities’ gay communities. As they trained in Seoul, an Associated Press report noted the players were ribbing one another over the pictures. The publication of the photos caused something of a flutter among fans and the team at the time. “The players all posed willingly,” the New York Times wrote in a subsequent story once the pictures were released. Other pictures showed goalkeeper Kasey Keller and midfielder DaMarcus Beasley lying on the grass as if it were a bed, sporting come-hither stares. In another, superstar Landon Donovan, then in the early days of his career, wears a shiny Jacquard shirt worth $480 as he sips from a water fountain - eyes fixed on the camera as a trickle of liquid pours into his mouth and oozes off his lip. In one photo, defender Pablo Mastroeni lies on a bench wearing a $1,138 Roberto Cavalli shirt, his back arched to accentuate his buttocks. The website Top Drawer Soccer later described it as “the least sexy, sexy photo shoot of all-time.” Former ESPN spinoff site Grantland said the pictures were “tonally bewildering” and that they “came blazing - literally blazing, like a Mack truck filled with dragons and pushed off the top of Mount Rushmore - into existence.” Vriens said his brief from the Times was to make the team look sexy, and that’s exactly what he did. “And that reaction, not the pictures, is laughable.”
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“I understand why, certainly within the United States, people were shocked, I guess, but for me that in itself is a big surprise,” Vriens told BuzzFeed News in an interview to mark the anniversary and to reflect on the pictures, the reaction to them, and their place in soccer history. But no one could have anticipated what the end result would turn out to be - or that we’d still be talking about them 20 years later. The plan was to shoot some photos for the paper’s style section to promote the team. The pictures were taken by photographer Matthias Vriens at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina, as the US players prepared for the World Cup in South Korea. This week marks two decades since the New York Times published a set of photos that have since been called both “ infamous” and “ iconic.” The newspaper was not (and is still not) widely seen as a purveyor of thirst traps, but in the early days of the internet, the pictures went as close as can be to viral among soccer fans.