New England Revolution New-Guy Report: Arsene Oka

By: Jeff | March 7th, 2007

Maybe it’s time I got over being excited about left-footed players. According to Arsene Oka’s profile on the New England Revolution’s official site, he’s “primarily a left-sided player”…much like the other two guys I’ve profiled in this project. Dang. Looks like Steve Nicol knew what he was shopping for and bought a slew of it.

As for the rest about Oka, I knew this profile would be a hard one. To begin, he doesn’t have a college career, or time with the U.S. U-20s – e.g. the kinds of places one can easily find minutes played, goals scored, assists provided, etc. While it’s true he played for a couple of the Cote d’Ivoire youth national teams (yeah, I know; I could write “Ivory Coast,” but everyone else seems to go with Cote D’Ivoire…when in Rome and all that), it’s hard enough to find good dish on the senior teams.

So, as is my wont, I wandered over to Wikipedia. Given who this Oka’s profile on the U.S., never mind the world, scene his Wiki entry isn’t much. Feeling momentarily frisky, I checked out the entries for a couple of clubs that Oka played for in Cote d’Ivoire – Stade d’Abidjan and Stella Club d’Adjame – and the thin information there suggests both clubs’ heydays came in days past.

Google yielded one last nugget: the name of the sports management agency that appears to handle Oka’s career, CDS Soccer Inc. A blurb on Oka re-signing with the Revs appears a ways down on their site’s latest news page, but that’s old hat and the photo gallery I found doesn’t give us much more than a look at this young man when he was even younger. I made an attempt to contact CDS and will post that later if that goes anywhere.

But, what we seem to have here is a man poised to write his history. The future is now, son. Let ‘er rip.