Score!!!

Next up: Neddy Marquez, the forward whom Farolito invited on board this season after he was the first division's top scorer with Alianza Lima last year. Because of his construction job, Marquez hadn't been able to make it to all the Saturday games, and Lopez hardly played him in the ones he could get to, causing him to transfer to another papy squad, Cienciano, that week. Lopez cuts him no slack: "I told him you made 30 goals in the last tournament, but with us, well, you didn't play, but you didn't do it."

At 58, Lopez has salt-and-pepper hair and a trim mustache, and stands a fit 5-foot-10 thanks to daily three-hour workouts and playing in an over-50 league on Sundays. Though he'll talk endlessly about strategy or Mexican soccer gossip, he handles personal questions like a star defender, dribbling past specifics to generalities that commit to nothing. He's polite without being overly friendly, and always seems to need to get back to work.

Work is what has made Lopez. His tale of coming to the U.S. reads like the classic immigrant script: Growing up the son of corn farmers, and with just three years of school, Lopez migrated north in 1975 from Mexico City. At the nursery he worked at in Half Moon Bay, he met two other Mexican immigrants who wanted to open a taqueria in San Francisco. After scouting out the Mission's existing eateries, the three started Taqueria San Jose on the corner of Mission and 24th streets. But after a couple of years, Lopez sold his share and opened his first restaurant kitty-cornered from the San Jose in the early 1980s, ignoring his former partners' plea that he not open a business within 10 blocks.

"He loved to work, but him, híjole! He wanted to become rich quick," says David Valle, still the owner of Taqueria San Jose. The third partner left to open El Taco Loco on the third corner of the intersection. "They stole all my recipes," Valle jokes.

In 1986, Lopez entered a team in the San Francisco Soccer League, which, in the days before Major League Soccer, was the top competition in the area, dominated by clubs that recruited expat pros and other immigrants. Each Sunday in Boxer Stadium in Balboa Park, clubs with names like Greek Americans, Sons of Italy, Concordia Sport Club, and San Francisco Glens were cheered on by their respective ethnic communities, who paid regular dues to support their teams. Former Greek Americans owner Jim Rally says he would often sponsor European professionals to immigrate to play and work at Greek-owned businesses; the club started paying players in the early '80s to keep up with the competition.

Lopez' team entered the league like a rocket, seizing the division championships each year to reach the majors in 1991, and, two years later, captured the U.S. Open Cup.

One year later, Lopez took a big step: He bought a minor-league Mexican soccer franchise for $10,000, he says, and created a team named for the cockfighting tradition of the state capital, the Gallos of Aguascalientes. Under his ownership, the team rose to the first division three years later, one step below the majors. Lopez made regular flights to Aguascalientes, where the team's fan base had grown from a handful of fans at the first games to nearly filling the several-thousand-seat municipal stadium. He even sent a few Farolito players there to try their hands in the pros.

In 2000, the Gallos won the winter tournament, which poised the team to enter the Mexican majors. It would have been a prime moment to sell the team, but Lopez wanted "the whole enchilada," says Ricardo Ramirez, a friend of Lopez' who plays on his over-50 team. But in the final game of the tournament to determine which team would ascend, the Gallos lost. With his franchise hemorrhaging money, Lopez says he sold it in 2001 for $800,000. He says he walked away without profit after paying what he owed for players' salaries and travel expenses for away games.

"He felt like a failure," says Lopez' 29-year-old daughter, Guadalupe, who keeps the books at the Mission Street taqueria. For her father, buying a Mexican team "was like a little kid walking into Toys 'R' Us. He always had [dreamed] about it, but obviously it's a very expensive dream."

While Lopez says he was "just one person more" in the Mexican soccer world, he had long since become king in the San Francisco leagues. True, Sundays at Boxer Stadium for the younger team are no longer what they were. Only a couple hundred fans will show. The creation of MLS in 1996 whisked away the star players, several top clubs have folded, and the multiplying leagues around the bay have diluted the talent pool. Nevertheless, it's still the top amateur talent in the Bay Area, and the young Farolito squad has taken the championships for six of the last seven years.