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The world champion son of a crazy football league with triple line

BarcelonaThe relationship between the United States and soccer is fascinating. Before the match against England, their fans booed the opponents by chanting “it’s called soccer“. Yes, they prefer to use soccer before football, since for them football is played with their hands, with a helmet and by kicking each other. The United States has given its heart to soccer. Or at soccer, what would they say? Their league is already among the ten best in the world, both in terms of audiences and spectators in the stadiums. More and more young people are playing football and for years they have been the best in football played by women. And now they want to reach the quarter-finals of the World Cup again, a milestone they already achieved in 2002.

Not the whole country, however, has quite got the game. The ultra-conservative Fox News, which normally ignores the sport as not being American enough, is now covering it, but asking very strange questions, like “what is that spray they use on a player’s leg?” or “why do referees make it so hard to score goals?” The most American question, however, was the usual one: “why do the games end in a tie?” In such a competitive country, a draw is not an option: you have to be the best, you have to defeat the opponent. Perhaps for this reason FIFA values ​​introducing in the next World Cup, which will be held in the United States, penalty shootouts to decide who gets an extra point in the event of a tie. A very American idea that they had already put into practice in the 90s at the birth of the MSL, but with different penalties, where the player ran out of the middle of the field to face the goalkeeper alone. It didn’t last long.

Either way, football wins. When they defeated the Iranians, the White House released a video of them briefing the second-in-command, President Joe Biden, who quickly grabbed a microphone to brief viewers of an event. In the 80s, Reagan probably wouldn’t even have known that a World Cup was being played. The winning goal was scored by Christian Pulisic, the Chelsea player. A man born into a sports-crazy family, in which his father, Mark, was part of another crazy American soccer experience now largely forgotten, theindoor soccer. In the 80s the country no longer had a professional league after the famous one disappeared North American Soccer League (NASL) which brought Pelé, Beckenbauer or Neeskens to the United States. The MSL would not be created until 1993, so in that impasse there were lost, short and curious tournaments, like the soccer league indoor.

Play with ceiling

The league was formed in 1984. Initially the idea was to create a football league, with the same rules as the outdoor sport, to turn it into a kind of Masia of local players. Because the NASL was full of international stars, the rules of this indoor tournament was that all players be American. But in the same year of the birth of the project, the NASL went bankrupt and disappeared. And the indoor football league became until 1991 the main competition of soccer of the United States. And the experiments arrived, such as introducing a kind of three-point line, like in basketball, which allowed goals to be valued with different scores. Long shots were worth three, those from inside the area two and penalties, one. Substitutions were also played, to imitate American sports, with penalty shootouts in each match and with time. The league initially started with eleven players, but eventually moved to six on grass, with frequent changes. And no sideline service: the ball could hit the side walls, as if it were ice hockey.

The Pulisic were a family with Croatian roots. The grandfather of the current national team player was from the island of Olib. Arriving in the United States in the 1950s, he was a huge soccer fan, a passion he passed on to his son Mark, who he took to watch Pelé’s New York Cosmos games in the 1970s. They slept in the city in boarding houses after driving hours from Pennsylvania, where they lived. Mark would later tell his son, Christian, what those crazy years were like when New York went crazy with the king sport, with the Cosmos players walking through the door vip of fashionable discotheques. Mark would start playing soccer at an early age and, in fact, married Kelley, one of the best players on the team at George Mason University, where they both studied. The passion for football would lead him to play football indoor with the Harrisburg Heat, with whom he would become runner-up in 1995. They lost the final in four games by scores such as 19-9 or 14-11. Things about the goals with different scores. In the middle, however, he had tried to shine in football all his life. He did so in 1991, leaving for the land of his ancestors to play for the Croatian side NK Zagreb. He did not have much sight as he was caught up in the beginning of the Balkan War. He would return home impressed by the images he experienced, with the bombing alarms and refugees arriving as they could from the war front.

Christian Pulisic was born in 1998. And his father, Mark, retired in 1999, shortly before the demise of the league, completely residual once MLS was formed. When Christian was small, his mother got a job as a teacher in England. And the Pulisics spent a few years near Oxford, where Mark took the opportunity to train as a coach and visit all the football fields he could. He fell in love with how football was lived in England. And it was clear to him that this would be the fate of his son. All said and done, he is now shining at Chelsea. Known as Captain America because of his physical resemblance to the comic book character, Christian Pulisic has gone from being the bully when the United States failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup to being the captain of a dream selection. And that in four years it will be the host of a World Cup in which Mark Pulisic will be able to see full stadiums cheering on his son. He, who spent his entire career chilling in lost pavilions, trying to score goals from the three-point line.

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