Football is the most Catholic of sports. Everyone is welcome, everyone will suffer, redemption is a mystery. Goals are little miracles of willpower and dexterity. Fate is left in God’s hands—not in the coach, the referee, or some sporting executive. To push against football destiny is to ask too much of God.
So what happens when a player from a poor country scores a goal against one of football’s traditional superpowers? They become demigods, living saints.
The first of these Haitian demigods played twice for us but made his mark for a different country. Born in Port-au-Prince to a wealthy Haitian-German family, Joe Gaetjens was an accounting student at Columbia University, a Clark Kent of sorts playing pickup soccer in Central Park when destiny tapped him on the shoulder and invited him to don his cape for the fledgling USMNT. The team was on its way to Brazil for the first World Cup after the carnage of World War II, the planet in desperate need of a kumbaya moment. Back then, the World Cup was more unpredictable (tiny Uruguay won the first tournament in 1930), rugged (Italy, a defensive stalwart, won twice), and gentlemanly. FIFA welcomed nearly every country that could field eleven young men to qualify. In 1950, England—at the twilight of its seemingly interminable imperial peak—waltzed past Wales and Ireland to make it into the tournament after snubbing the prewar editions.
England was heavily favored against the U.S., so much so that the BBC didn’t bother to send a reporter to cover the first-round match in hilly Belo Horizonte, ordering their man to wait for the team in Rio, presumably after it mopped the floor with the Americans. Gaetjens, too frisky to let the U.S. crash out like that, rose to great heights to head in the game’s only goal. The picture of Gaetjens, handsome and confident, held aloft by his teammates, circulated in newspapers around the world. This goal and win—still the greatest victory in U.S. men’s football history—was so glorious, surprising, and resounding that it’s since been immortalized in multiple nonfiction books, a movie, and, ahem, a hot new novel, Death of the Soccer God.
After playing professionally in France for several years, Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1954 and was greeted as a hero. But before long, he was disappeared by a newly elected authoritarian, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, after the regime caught wind of a coup plot by his exiled siblings. One morning the government’s undercover death squad, the Tonton Macoutes, picked up Gaetjens as he was walking out of the dry cleaners. He was never seen again.
So began Haiti’s relationship with the tournament, a history of heroic performances against the most tragic backdrops. For over a decade, national soccer suffered alongside Haitian society. Only after Papa Doc’s death did a Haitian-born striker emerge to bring glory to the Haitian national team—in the 1974 World Cup, the first one I was alive for and remember.
My early childhood involved shuttling constantly between Haiti and New York City, to the point that I still don’t know which language I spoke first—English, French, or Haitian Creole. What I do know is that “Sanon” may have been the first word I ever uttered in my life. I was three years old in 1974, and damn if I don’t remember the goal as if I were at the stadium: Emmanuel “Manno” Sanon, broad-chested and in a tight red shirt, legs glistening with sweat, a huge grin on his face, chugging the ball around Dino Zoff, the redoubtable Italian keeper, to score. It was Haiti’s first goal in its first-ever appearance in the World Cup, and against the legendary Zoff! Until then, he hadn’t given up a goal in a match in 1,142 minutes, eons in footballing time. After reaching the final in 1970, Italy came into the 1974 World Cup as one of the favorites, and the Azzurri were supposed to wipe the grass with Haiti in that group match in Munich. They did, winning 3–1, but Emmanuel Sanon scored!
Afterward, I remember people on the street high-fiving each other and dancing whenever they saw the goal replayed on television. Reverence for Sanon drowned out awful news. After Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier succeeded his father in 1971, Haiti was politically stable, but adrift, still grieving from Papa Doc’s fascism. Families with money or connections or the good fortune to secure a visa had begun sending their best and brightest to study in the U.S. and France. Few ever returned permanently. Sanon’s small miracle reminded the world of the great talents Haitians possess. We shouldn’t be underestimated. Even as the country descended into civil unrest after the fall of the dictatorship in 1986, Sanon’s goal, like Gaetjens’s goal, remained a cornerstone of national history, evoking General Dessalines’s victory over Napoleon in the 1804 war for Haitian independence from colonialism, the first Black country to ever win freedom by force.
Since 1974, Haiti’s presence on the global stage has mostly been shaped by great French and English literature and by great tragedies. After Baby Doc was toppled, internal bickering and outside interference prevented good governments from lasting. In 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Port-au-Prince was so devastating—killing 300,000, destroying 70 percent of the capital and most government institutions—that it seemed to erase the official version of the country. Despite its horrors, it offered an opportunity, a blank slate for Haitians and international partners to build a better country. Instead, since 2018, Haiti has fallen into the hands of marauding gangs uninterested in building anything other than a void from legal authorities so drug smugglers can use the country as a hub for shipments to the United States.
And yet, fifty-two years after the 1974 World Cup, Haiti is back in the World Cup. The island nation of ten million was resourceful enough to field eleven players good enough to confront the world’s best soccer teams. When Duckens Nazon leads the national team into this year’s “group of death” featuring mighty Brazil and canny Morrocco, it will be the highlight of his career. As a striker for the Persian Gulf Pro League club Esteghlal, he makes his living playing in Iran, a country pummeled this year in a war with Israel and the United States. Now he’ll be representing Haiti, a country so dangerous the soccer team was forced to play its home games in petite and breezy Curaçao during its World Cup qualifying campaign.
Nazon, who was born and raised outside of Paris, chose to represent his parents’ country in international football, a standard trajectory for Haitian football stars. When he puts on the blue Haitian jersey, he plays like a man possessed of otherworldly determination. Last year, during a crucial World Cup qualifier against Costa Rica—a Central American powerhouse as of late—he scored three goals in the second half to secure Haiti’s improbable World Cup qualification.
This summer, my three-year-old self will accompany me, now fifty-four, to watch Haiti once again play in the World Cup. The spirits of Emmanuel Sanon, Joe Gaetjens, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Toussaint Louverture will be rooting for the boys, too, as they prowl green, immaculate pitches in Boston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta to pry goals from formidable foes.
Haiti is a mess and the U.S. is not much better. The world is awash in pain and terror. As in World Cups of yore, a Haitian striker could surprise the world with an unexpected goal. In a way, Nazon has had to defy death many, many times simply to play in this World Cup. All the Haitian players have. It’s an ancestral tradition, very Catholic: defying great odds, perpetually pursuing redemption for themselves and their nation. In that sense, they’ve already won.