There’s an old pennant hanging on the wall of my office here in Washington DC, tucked between a poster of indoor soccer legend Steve Zungul and a photo of Pelé riding a horse. “Soccer,” it reads, “the sport of the 80s.”
For a century or so, soccer was always the sport of the next decade. Clear-thinking businesspeople tried everything to sell it to Americans, but soccer was always considered too foreign and exotic, an activity best practiced and consumed by outsiders. Even in the mid-80s, when I started playing, it was still very much othered. It’s what drew me to the sport in the first place.
Later, as an angsty teenager living in Spain, watching Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona sides rewired my brain in the same way Nirvana’s Nevermind did. When I came home to Tennessee a year later, in 1993, there was no top flight to speak of in the United States. I spent my time watching the Nashville Metros of the old A-League with about 75 other weirdos. It was a carnival of misfits, and I was in heaven.
Yet I still wanted the sport to break through, and there was hope on the horizon, in the form of the 1994 World Cup. That tournament finally thrust soccer fully into the American public consciousness, and the game has continued to grow since then. Americans wake up in the wee hours to watch games from abroad and are finally warming up to their own version of the sport, as well.
When I started writing about soccer in the early 2010s, I loved doing stories that were floating around in the ether, more closely related to the culture, history and sociology of the sport than the matches themselves. I couldn’t help but think that, If I’d been writing about baseball or American football, most of those stories would have already been written.
Yet I’ve found over the years that there are seemingly unlimited stories to be told about American soccer, past and present alike. The game here and abroad touches so many parts of American society – politics, business, culture and so on. These are things that demand serious coverage … and less-serious coverage as well.
After all, we’re only a half-century removed from that moment that Pelé took the field on horseback.
Pablo joins the Guardian as part of our ongoing expansion covering soccer in the United States ahead of the 2026 World Cup. He arrives alongside two other new hires: soccer correspondent Jeff Rueter and assistant sports editor Ella Brockway. He is based in Washington DC.
