Playing Out a Dream, a Long, Long Way From Home

Europe|Playing Out a Dream, a Long, Long Way From Home

Izzy Morales first caught sight of the Stadium of Light from the back of an Uber. He had left his home in Canton, Ohio, a couple of days earlier. He was still coming to terms with the novelty, with the distance, of the new life he had chosen. When he touched down in Dublin, en route to the North East of England, it had suddenly struck him that he was traveling “halfway across the world.”

That jet-lagged, time-zone haze did not lift once he arrived at his eventual destination, Sunderland. The Stadium of Light, though, snapped him out of it. He had never been there before, of course. But still it felt familiar. It felt like a place he knew.

In a way, he did. He knew that it was at the Stadium of Light where Manchester United had seen the 2012 Premier League title snatched from its grasp by Sergio Agüero, Manchester City and probably the most famous goal in English soccer’s modern history. As an 11-year-old, Morales had watched it all unfold, the shock and the silence etched onto his brain from 3,600 miles away.

“That was the first memory that popped into my head,” he said. “Watching the Premier League on a Saturday morning. I would never have expected that I would ever actually be there, to be so close to it.”

The memory had been powerful enough to carry Morales across an ocean. Playing soccer abroad, he said, had “always been my dream.” Last year, as he approached the end of his time at the University of Maine, he had come to accept that it was not one that would be realized. He was planning, instead, to try forging a career in sports management.

And then, late last year, Morales received an unexpected message through his social media accounts. South Shields, a professional team in the sixth tier of English soccer, had opened an academy for international players. It was looking for recruits. Would he be interested?