I was in first grade when my parents coughed up the money for me to play on a local youth team. At the start of the season, we didn’t have a name, which makes me think the league must have been new. It was the early 1990s, after all, and we were in small-town northern Arizona, hardly a soccer hotspot. The coach polled us for names before holding a vote, and I made what I thought was an awesome suggestion: the Purple Dolphins. Purple was the color of my favorite Ninja Turtle (Donatello, of course) and dolphins were the smartest mammals on earth after humans, which I knew because I wanted to be a marine biologist. I remember being confused by the dismissive chuckle of the other boys, already tapped into a sense of sporting masculinity I did not yet understand—my playful mascot was clearly not threatening enough for soccer. Their votes were decisive: We would dress in red and call ourselves “The Destroyers.”
My central memory of this entire experience is that we never won a single match, which was all the parents and staff seemed to care about, a pall that grew with each passing week. I don’t recall much about the games themselves, except that I was stuck in defense. Defense was where they put kids with no apparent skill; all the boys with any size or speed played up front. I wasn’t taught much about the game or my position, and I could sense that they didn’t know what to do with me. I didn’t know what to do either, so I yelled a lot, which seemed to be a problem. I was an attention-seeking child and I knew how to be loud, crack jokes, shout at my teammates, and mock our opponents—all of which, I would argue, could have been developed into valuable footballing traits. At the end of the season, I’m not sure if I was asked not to return or if my parents simply didn’t feel it was worth paying for me to continue.
Growing up in my small town, I knew of no other way to play soccer. I recall no teams at my elementary or middle school, and by the time I reached high school, it was too late. I was into punk, and punks didn’t play sports. I’d missed my window, and my chance to play was over before it began. It would be nearly twenty years before I kicked a ball again.
The 1998 and 2002 World Cups came and went, with only vague reverberations reaching my corner of Arizona. Something about France, something about Brazil. The names “Zidane” and “Ronaldo” flicked at the edges of my awareness. But as the years went on, despite knowing almost nothing about the game, even despite hardly ever watching it, the sport still somehow held my interest. I vaguely understood that it was worldly, with a foreign, escapist allure made all the more powerful by the insularity of my surroundings. By the next World Cup, I’d found another friend who felt the same. He didn’t play, but he came from immigrant parents and had a sense for the world beyond our hometown. More importantly, he had satellite television, which gave me a way to watch and someone to watch with. From his living room, we saw Jürgen Klinsmann coach the Germans to a third-place finish in glimmering Teutonic stadiums, and we gasped as Zidane slammed Materazzi to the ground with his glistening head in the final. For the first time, I felt part of soccer’s global heartbeat.
There’s been plenty of pontificating among US soccer fans and pundits about what defines our nation’s style of play. At the heart of these conversations is a deep-seated insecurity—at least for our men, who still toil in the shadow of the women, four-time World Cup champions. Entire tomes have been written about the footballing identity of countries like Brazil and Argentina and Germany and Spain, each of which has organically birthed distinct ways of playing that defined eras of the game. By comparison, our perennially outclassed men’s team seems to oscillate between styles—once admired for their scrappy doggedness, they’ve spent the last decade directionless and adrift, despite having a deeper talent pool than ever.
Our shortcomings, some argue, are rooted in a lack of cultural identity or history with the game. What we’re missing is something intangible, a spiritual essence. After all, in most elite footballing cultures, national style flows from the streets. In its simplest form, soccer requires little more than a ball and a place to play. The rough-and-tumble grit of the Argentines can be observed on the potreros of Buenos Aires, where neighborhood kids battle each other on a daily basis. The joy and flair of the Brazilians can be seen in those who dance with the ball in the favelas or on Copacabana Beach. In the US, however, kids are more likely to be funnelled into rigid, middle-class structures that have them playing on well-kept fields under the auspices of parent coaches who care more about meaningless wins than developing their talent. In this “pay-to-play” model, parents often act like angry shareholders who imagine they aren’t getting their money’s worth unless their kids play an individual starring role on a winning team, resulting in results-driven, joyless play. Our youth, steeped in America’s capitalist ethos from the outset, are given far less room for expression and development and shackled with expectation.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was one of those kids being shaped by the limitations of this model, which flourished in the aftermath of the World Cups hosted by the US during the 1990s—the men’s in 1994 and the women’s in 1999. These tournaments produced the “supernova” of youth soccer that resulted in the decades-long dominance of the American Youth Soccer Organization, also known as AYSO. If you played any soccer as a kid in the 1990s and 2000s, or brought your own kids to play soccer, it was probably with AYSO.
I sometimes wonder: How many other potential late bloomers crashed out of this system at an early age like me? How many had their love and joy for the game dimmed and diminished through the imposition of adult disappointment over meaningless losses? How many had parents like mine who didn’t understand the sport and pulled them from it too soon? How many were surrounded by adults who assumed they weren’t getting anything out of the game, and didn’t have anything to offer it, unless they were leading a team of destroyers to victory?
Fans of a certain age will recall the widespread excitement at the hiring of Klinsmann as the first foreign coach of our men’s national team. A prolific former striker in his own right, Klinsmann won the World Cup with Germany in 1990 and was a Premier League legend at Spurs. He came to the helm promising to implement the fluid passing style in vogue during the 2010s, pledging to restructure the American soccer pyramid, and calling for the dismantling of the pay-to-play youth model in favor of one that fostered free, unstructured play and encouraged a greater diversity of talent. US soccer in the previous decades could be defined, in part, by its barriers to entry—pathways to the national team largely flowed through AYSO and colleges and universities. Klinsmann envisioned a pipeline for young players that passed instead through European-style development academies untethered to our costly, scholarship-dependent higher education system.
To me, the handwringing about US soccer has to do with a broader struggle to reconcile our country’s twin impulses toward isolation and globalization.
Even in the midst of our much-heralded restructuring, however, no one seemed to be looking to our own streets. Instead, our cultural gaze was cast across the Atlantic, where Klinsmann sought to attract and recruit talented dual citizens. It was a strangely defeatist, myopic tack—rather than honing our identity from within or finding those who might have been overlooked by our own system, we sought players shaped in Europe instead. Our national team’s relationship with Major League Soccer, the premier domestic league in the US, was also contradictory. Even as Klinsmann insisted on the importance of US players going abroad to ply their trade in the world’s greatest leagues, our most famous exports like Clint Dempsey, Landon Donovan, Jozy Altidore, and Michael Bradley, were being lured back to MLS by the promise of bigger paychecks and more playing time. By 2018, with Klinsmann gone and the USMNT failing to qualify for the World Cup, it was obvious that the overhaul had failed. Even the likes of Swedish great Zlatlan Ibrahimovic, after arriving in the US with his family to play for LAFC, complained about the pernicious costliness of American youth soccer: “First they think about money, then about quality and results.”
It’s difficult to define something as amorphous as a national playing style or culture, but to me, the handwringing about US soccer has to do with a broader struggle to reconcile our country’s twin impulses toward isolation and globalization. We are a nation of immigrants with a dominant culture that has long insisted on assimilation. Our economy demands the borderless flow of capital even as it regards the movement of people as something to be met with ever-hardening, militarized frontiers and interior raids and abductions. We live under an administration that prizes insularity and retreat while continuing limitless campaigns of global violence. Our politics, like our soccer, would love for us to ignore what we see on the streets in favor of what is packaged and prepared for us—the press conferences, the media spectacles, the endless monetized scroll of memes and video clips, the shiny and sanitized spaces that pay lip service to our lived reality while resembling it only in brief moments of rupture.
By 2010, I still didn’t know how to play soccer, but I was successfully learning to watch it. What I remember most from South Africa were the moments of transgression, like Suárez swatting a surefire Ghanaian goal away from the net with his hand, or Nigel de Jong’s kung-fu chest kick in the deciding match between the Netherlands and Spain, the most violent final ever played.
Two years later, living abroad in Europe, I flew to Ukraine with Dutch friends to witness their team crash out of the 2012 Euros, and I began to understand how defeat could be eclipsed by the joy of partaking in the larger cultural event that subsumed it. My memory of the 2014 World Cup is marked by the tournament’s excruciating exits, with Mexico going down to an unjust penalty from a diving Arjen Robben (no era penal!), and Brazil’s generational humiliation at the hands of Germany, the 7-1 Mineiraço. But for me, the saddest of all was the USMNT’s round of 16 exit to Belgium after a missed tap-in by Chris Wondolowski and a herculean goalkeeping effort from Tim Howard.
That US defeat brought me to tears. My friends and I finished our beers and closed our tabs, stunned and dejected. I returned home to lie in bed, not knowing what to do with all my interrupted enthusiasm. I now realize that the severity of my dismay also confirmed the legitimacy of my fandom, which I had, until then, always imagined to be inferior. The defeat also marked a return: After the tournament’s close, my friends and I began to meet in a Tucson park to kick a ball around. Most of us hadn’t played soccer since we were kids, but we continued gathering week after week, slowly relearning the basics.
The lessons flowed from the streets. The simple act of assembling in a public park with a ball drew others to us, magnetizing people we might otherwise have never met. A neighbor who observed us milling about on the field offered to lead us in drills. He seemed to have a different jersey for each day, sporting kits from Barcelona, AC Milan, Dortmund, Porto, and the Croatian national team. He suggested different activities each week. We paired off to practice receiving the ball with the top of our foot, our thighs, our chest, our head. He taught me to blade my body toward an attacker while playing defense, to stay on my toes instead of planting my feet or diving for the ball. He had us form lines to practice sending passes long, then short, then long again. He set out cones and had us cut and dribble between them, and brought tiny pop-up goals for our pickup games to encourage us to take precise, on-the-ground shots instead of firing wildly into the air. We nicknamed him “coach.”
A teenager named Joel wandered over from the nearby public housing complex and marveled good-naturedly at my lack of skill. An asylum seeker from Honduras, he made it his personal project to teach me to juggle, taking off his shoes to show me how he held his foot to make the ball bounce back at him the way he wanted. He counted how many touches I made before it fell to the ground. You have to caress the ball, he told me, be gentle with it, draw it toward your body like a lover. Joel was nineteen and I was twenty-eight, but I remained his student until the day he announced his departure to Louisiana to find work alongside his cousins.
Soon we were playing ragtag pickup twice a week on the dry field, baked by the sun and pockmarked with dips and divots. When our coach couldn’t come, we used water bottles and shoes as goalposts. Soon, we were joined by a group of Mexican day laborers who solicited work in front of a neighboring church. With them, the games became fast-paced and sprawling as they slipped and slid in their slick-bottomed sneakers, still somehow controlling the ball better than any of us. One of the men always ran with a hand gripping the top of his jeans, pulling off rainbow kicks even as he struggled to keep his pants from falling down. Even though I spoke Spanish, I didn’t yet know the language of the game, and soon I learned how to call out and respond to plays.
A year later, my friends and I followed the US again, as the women’s team played through the knockout stages of the 2015 World Cup. When Carli Lloyd dispatched Japan with a stunning sixteen-minute first-half hat-trick in the final, our high lasted for days. This time, we knew where to deposit our energy. Instead of going home, we grabbed a ball and went out into the streets.
Is there anything to extrapolate about our national style from my experience as a late bloomer? If it’s true that footballing identity flows from the streets, then there must be. On any given Monday or Wednesday night, I might play pickup alongside landscapers, grocery baggers, service workers, archaeologists, college professors, nonprofit workers, community organizers, wildlife biologists, architects, and software engineers. I might hear Spanish, Nepali, Arabic, Hindi, Somali, French, or Italian. I might pass the ball to a 10-year-old or a 60-year-old.
The game is irrepressible because the people who love it find and create the conditions to play even in places where they might otherwise be stifled. The pickup games I participate in have roamed from one park to another—when the city stops lighting a field, when schools or rec leagues usurp a neighborhood park, when turf becomes too potholed or saturated with water from broken irrigation, we migrate to another field a few miles away. In each new place, we seek out the greenest patches of grass, trying to avoid new ruts and depressions and finding new places to lean our bikes and change our shoes and tie our dogs. Most of all, adjusting our play to the new neighborhood players who inevitably join us. When you play like this, the game resists normalization. It is transient and unwieldy, made up of ever-shifting alliances forged through proximity, convenience, and care.
The game is irrepressible because the people who love it find and create the conditions to play even in places where they might otherwise be stifled.
FIFA would have us believe that “football unites the world,” that each game is an Etch a Sketch where difference and inequality are shaken off and erased despite all the profiteering, corruption, and sportswashing that underpins its organization. But there’s an important difference between the idea of soccer being the force that unites us, and one in which we are the force who unites to play it. In one scenario, the power flows from the top down, from the governing bodies themselves, while in the other, power rises from the bottom up, flowing from those who cast their lot together to meet in the streets. Of course, I’m asserting nothing new here—see Gabriel Kuhn’s Soccer vs. the State or Mickaël Correia’s A People’s History of Soccer. My point is that there’s something so quotidian, so omnipresent about the game when played at the smallest scale, that its radical nature is barely perceived. Recently, the park where I play weekly pickup became a meeting ground for community members coming together to organize against ICE in the aftermath of an immigration raid that had occurred two blocks away. Soon after, I learned from a teammate that our playing here existed within a much longer lineage—in the 1970s, border patrol sweeps targeted the Mexicans who gathered to play pickup on these very same fields. Fifty years later, migrants still play here in force even as the long, unending raids against them rage on.
Although we may seem like latecomers, American soccer is steeped in history—in 1930, our first national team made up of immigrant millworkers, clerks, and laborers famously placed third in the inaugural World Cup hosted in Uruguay. Our most recent and greatest glories have come through a women’s team that has, for decades, welcomed and helped cultivate the stardom of queer nonconformist players. In Tucson’s vibrant weekly queer-centered pickup games, the approach could not be further from what I experienced as a child: Players circle up before each match to establish ground rules of inclusive play, emphasizing gender-neutral language and the importance of making passes to allow everyone time on the ball, especially newcomers looking to develop their skill.
When you look to the streets, you’ll find something that’s been overlooked through decades of US failure, World Cup postmortems, and ongoing debates about infrastructure and development. The American soccer you’ll find is shaggy, scrappy, multifarious, and eclectic. It occurs across cultural and linguistic lines; it is multi-generational and socioeconomically mixed; it is inclusive and queer and ever-changing. The pickup games in my neighborhood streets and city parks are unassimilable and irrepressible, and there’s nowhere else I could have learned to play this way. Whatever happens at this year’s World Cup, I know where I’ll be heading after the final whistle.