Score!!!

Lopez' assistance doesn't end with the envelope. When Farolito takes teams to tournaments in Las Vegas or Los Angeles, travel expenses are covered. The team masseuse kneads the players' legs with baby oil before every game. When Donizeti Santos hurt his hand this season and the X-ray, clinic visit, and medicine added up to $250, Lopez paid it all.

But with the only prizes being a trophy at a ceremony and publicity for his taqueria, why all the generosity? Lopez says he pays expenses like food and uniforms because soccer is "something you like to do. Instead of going on vacation, or going dancing I don't know where, it's better to go see a game because that's what you like."

Others say Lopez will do anything to get players who will help him win. In the past, that has meant routinely flying in one player from Las Vegas for two seasons. Carlos Castro Borja scored against Mexico in the 1994 World Cup qualifiers for El Salvador, a moment he jokes "was better than sex."

When Lopez saw Borja play a couple of years ago, he wanted the player. Borja was sent off mere minutes into his first game with Farolito after a scuffle on the field in a moment that has gone down in league lore. "I wanted to die," Borja said over the phone from Vegas. Still, Lopez paid him: "He said, 'I have the say, you take it. This is what I offered you, and this is what I'm going to be paying you.' I was left with my mouth hanging open. For playing 20 minutes!"

Borja crashed for more than three months at the home of a teammate, easily living off his pay from one game a week. After Borja returned to Vegas, Lopez paid for him to fly in for every game that first season and for important ones in the second. (Lopez, ever discreet, says that he merely helped Borja with gas to drive to the city.)

Borja now talks about Lopez the way most of the coach's loyal players do, as soccer's patron saint of generosity: "How humble, that guy," he says. "We should build him a monument on the field in San Francisco."

For all the interest in Salvador Lopez, the joking that he's the George Steinbrenner of the papy league, and the speculation swirling around those white envelopes, the coach himself doesn't seek attention. Since leaving his post on the league's board of directors several years back, he now sends the jolly team manager most know as "Pecas," or "Freckles," for his face's abundance of them, on team errands and to the Tuesday night meetings.

Many teams make a social bonanza out of each Saturday. The members of team El Salvador come early to stake out their spot on the bleachers with their blue and white national flag, and connect a car battery to speakers that provide the cumbia and reggaetón soundtrack for the games. But Lopez arrives in his Toyota Tundra about an hour before the match, 15 minutes before he requires his players to show up. He delivers his no-nonsense orders, then observes quietly from the sidelines, clipboard tucked under his arm, as his team wins. After eating, coach and team usually dart away to prior commitments. Veni, vidi, vici: an efficient enterprise.

But with a free afternoon after the Alianza Lima match, Lopez' respected perch as a premier talent broker in the league was on full display. First up: Rene Hidalgo, a compact and lightning-fast forward from team El Salvador. He wanted to know if he could haggle his way onto Farolito midseason. Lopez says he won't get much playing time, and Hidalgo responds with self-flagellating enthusiasm: "It doesn't bother me to sit out at all. What I care about is that you win." Lopez invites him to an impromptu practice on Wednesday night: "Talk to Pecas."

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.