The Football Festival
Written by: Emanuel Ramsey (aka Manny aka RampageBobby) Edited by: Ellie Gauldin
I’m not going to lie. Reading Jake’s story brought a tear to my eye. It inspired me to tell my story. We all have a story of how we came to the game and what this upcoming World Cup means to us. Here is my story.
I don’t think my family honestly understands how obsessed I am with soccer.
Only the closest people around me know about my soccer obsession. Growing up in an African-American family that played football or basketball, it may seem very weird how I’ve picked up loving the game of soccer. How was I introduced to the world game you might ask? Well I’ll take you back to how it all started.
It was the summer of 2006 and I was home for summer break. The NBA Finals had just ended and the Miami Heat triumphed over the Dallas Mavericks that year. There was nothing else to really watch other than baseball, which I played in high school but hated watching. I was watching SportsCenter and I saw pre-cutaway promos for different World Cup matches that were subsequently happening at the time. I knew nothing about the sport so I decided to give it a try. I saw how they were talking about Ronaldinho and how he was the reigning World Player of the Year. I decided to hop on Youtube (a new platform at the time that had recently been introduced to me by my Dad) and typed in Ronaldinho. Watching those videos, my mouth dropped.
I come from the era of And1 mixtape and that’s exactly what I saw him do on the pitch. Toying with defenders. Making them fall. It was simply amazing. So I started to watch each World Cup match. I didn’t understand the concept of a national team because this was the only sport that made a huge deal about it, but as I came across different players, I would look them up on the internet and see that they played for clubs. I didn’t understand what that meant at the time so I searched deeper and saw that these clubs were in different leagues around the world and my curiosity grew further. Leading me to save all the money I could to buy FIFA 06 for my Xbox. Once I bought it, it was really the only game I played for the next year. It was official. I was hooked on soccer. I was so excited to discover the game of soccer that I wished in my younger years, I had more friends to share my excitement of the game. But growing up in a 98% African-American school, the more popular sports were basketball and football. Soccer was really unheard of in our neighborhoods and if you were seen being hardcore about it, you were most likely made fun of. So that really made me hide the fact that I was a huge soccer fan even though I wanted to share it with everyone I knew.
Ever since I came to love the sport, I felt that I would need to find a team to gravitate towards. At the time, MLS, as the domestic league, was very accessible to watch but I felt like the quality of it was lacking so I looked elsewhere. Manchester United was one of the best clubs on the planet, during that time, with two good young attacking players who were on showcase at the World Cup. I researched their history which was rich and strong in footballing culture, so I decided from 2006 on, that Man United would be my team. I was super happy when we won the Champions League in 2008. We’re not going to go into the two losses to a certain team. But, I loved every minute of being a fan of the Red Devils.
Back to the 2006 World Cup. That year, I happened to catch all of the matches that the US played in. I heard them talk about a guy named Landon Donovan and how he was supposed to be this stud of a player. He ended up having a poor tournament but, to be fair, the whole team had a poor tournament. I caught the first match they played in Gelsenkirchen (Schalke’s home stadium) against the Czechs. I watched Tomas Rosicky thrash that US team and saw how technically skilled Rosicky was (which led me to continue following his career from Dortmund to Arsenal, soon finding that he was one of my favorite players). For me, this felt like rock bottom for the US, who were now in rebuilding mode, with a lot of the veterans retiring from international duty. But it felt like a rebuilding project so I watched earnestly with every friendly and every FIFA tournament they participated in. The wins over Ecuador and Mexico. The 2007 Gold Cup Final win. The spectacular run in the Confederations Cup in 2009. It felt like we were on a high. It couldn’t get any better. But then our fortunes would turn against our hated rivals. Since that ’09 Gold Cup Final, we’d only win 4 more times in the next 14 matches with Mexico winning seven of those matchups.
Coming off of a jubilant 2009 Confederation’s Cup, we made the round of 16 in the 2010 World Cup, after winning the group, and lost a gut wrenching match to Ghana. I remember watching the match in my parent’s basement holding myself after such a nerve-wracking match. Then, an agonizing loss to Mexico in the 2011 Gold Cup Final sent Bob Bradley packing and we entered the Jurgen Klinsmann era. I remember during this time that era kinda mirrored my own life. I had graduated from college and was figuring out what I wanted to do. Me and my parents didn’t see eye to eye so I ended up moving to Chicago. A few months into moving to Chicago, I got into a bad car accident. I had no injuries but the car was completely totaled. At a certain point, I stopped being really into soccer because I had to essentially, “Grow Up”. It turned out, though, that this was a really dark period in US Soccer. We lost in the 2015 Gold Cup semifinal to Jamaica and the CONCACAF Cup to Mexico.
It was something about that loss to Jamaica that didn’t sit right with me. Turns out, it was the beginning of the decline of US Soccer. That 2018 World Cup Qualifying campaign was the saddest excuse for a program, and for a team to come out and give that lack of effort and perform so under what they were capable of was mind-blowing. The night we didn’t qualify, I was in the midst of the worst time of my life. I had no internet, no cable, no phone, nothing. I basically had to steal internet from a next door neighbor to try to watch this game and when we lost it really put the cherry on top of just a horrible year of my life. But life would get better for me and it would get better for US Soccer as a whole as well. A new crop of players would emerge and their potentials would far exceed the players that came before them.
Today you might consider me a Euro Snob and while I won’t agree with it, I won’t necessarily outright deny it. Despite that, I’m very proud of how much soccer has grown domestically since I started watching 16 years ago. MLS has expanded to 30 markets and the academy system has now replaced college soccer as the main source of developing talent in this country. Now more than ever, kids are playing soccer. I look at my Facebook feed and see many of my friends’ kids are playing soccer. And this it’s not only white kids, but many of POC friends’ kids are playing soccer as well. My best friend’s African-American son is playing soccer and it brings me so much joy to see. I wish that I was exposed to soccer at an early age because I would’ve totally given my all to the sport. I’m currently looking into taking the coaching and referee curriculum provided by the United States Soccer Federation. My ultimate goal is to give back to the next generation by helping to make soccer, one of the most popular sports in the world, the number one game in the US.
Follow Manny on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RampageBobby
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That was a really interesting and well-told story. We all come to this sport with different backgrounds, don't we? I like hearing about others' experiences.