This American Took the Most Unique Path to the World Cup
American goalkeeper Matt Turner might just have the best story in this year’s World Cup
Hey everybody! Before we get into this week’s story, I wanted to remind everybody about the upcoming House of Fútbol, hosted by all of us here at ROS.
From Nov. 29 through Dec. 4, the House of Fútbol will be an interactive hub in New York City where you can watch the World Cup, listen to panel discussions featuring some of the biggest names in soccer, and immerse yourself in the sport like never before. We’ll even be hosting a live taping of In the Moment featuring USWNT legend Carli Lloyd.
You won’t want to miss it. For more information, and to RSVP to save a spot, click here.
And one more piece of housekeeping: there won’t be a Friday newsletter next week due to the holiday. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with family, football, and…err…fútbol as well.
-Joe
Earlier this week, I read a great essay about watching the New York City marathon. The author, a writer named Haley Nahman, described her “annual marathon cry”—a.k.a. that moment when, standing on the sidewalk while hundreds of people jogged past her, the weight of their achievement became too overwhelming. She writes about how watching the average runners—the ones for whom the race is borderline torture—was actually more touching than seeing the best in the world break records. “Sometimes when something defeats us, we feel a need to go back and prove something to ourselves, I guess,” she quotes one runner, who failed to finish a race, as saying. “I don’t feel that way about this. I gave everything I have, and it wasn’t enough, and I’m ok with that.”
This idea that success can be measured differently by athletes in the same competition—that the finish line can, literally, be moved—is one of my favorite things about amateur sports; I experience some version of that “annual marathon cry” myself. For some, the marathon is about winning, for others it’s about finishing, and for others still, it’s just about showing up. One contest. A thousand different stories about why it matters. A thousand different champions.
Pro sports almost never have those multitudes: You win or lose, and you get paid based on those results. Put another way, if amateur sports are a kaleidoscope, then pro sports represent a line drawing—black and white.
Except for the World Cup. Once every four years, we gather the greatest athletes in the world, all playing in the most important tournament in their lives, and the units we use to measure their success are radically different depending where we look. For Lionel Messi, it’s about cementing a legacy. For Spain’s Pedri, it’s about creating a myth. For Christian Eriksen, it’s about celebrating life and the greatest comeback story in sports history.
And for Matt Turner, the American goalkeeper—well, he’s already crossed his finish line.
Once the tournament kicks off on Sunday, you will be inundated with stories, context to help you understand what success would mean to each player and team in the tournament. You’ll hear about the Americans especially, because even though this is our national team, almost every player remains anonymous to most of the country. To make us care, we have to understand where these guys came from. It’s a squad made up of immigrants, phenoms, and grizzled veterans, but Turner’s story is my favorite of all. He’ll be starting in goal for the U.S. on Monday when we take on Wales—but only because he never gave up. Then, he never gave up again. And he didn’t give up after that, either.
The Matt Turner story goes like this: During his freshman year of high school, he needed to play a fall sport to stay in shape. Any fall sport would do. Turner hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, so football was out of the question. He hadn’t ever played soccer before, but it sounded fun enough. He wandered onto the field one evening and joined tryouts. When the starting goalie went down with an injury, his coach asked for volunteers to replace him. “I’ll do it,” Turner said.
Here's where you’d expect the story to end, or at least fast-forward. It’s where I’d write something like, “And the rest was history!” But really, that was just the start. Turner says he felt natural in the goal, and he made the team. The freshman team. He wouldn’t make Varsity until his junior year, and even then, he wasn’t particularly talented. Moreover, he never was particularly interested or invested in his soccer career. He had never even seen a soccer game on TV until he watched the 2010 World Cup and Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria, and something clicked. “Nothing has made me cheer as loud,” Turner said. “Nothing has captivated me quite as much as [that] tournament did. I didn't right then and there say, ‘I'm going to play in that one day.’ I just thought, ‘I want to try to get as good as I possibly can.’”
He rededicated himself to the sport, and two years later, when he received his acceptance to tiny Fairfield College, he decided to email the soccer coach about the possibility of joining the college team. Again, he got a chance. And again, Turner rode the bench.
But then one day—the starter couldn’t play. Turner warmed up, jogged into his spot between the posts, and here again, it feels like we should hit rewind. Andtherestishistory. But that’s just not the way that Turner’s story works. Playing against Iona, an opposing player wailed a shot from far away, and the ball hit the top post, sailed high into the air, and Turner watched it as it dropped to his hands. It was a routine play, but it hit him in the chest and rolled in. Turner’s was the number-one play on SportsCenter’s Not Top 10.
“At that point, I was all done,” Turner told The Athletic last year. “I was like, ‘You know what, this isn’t for me. Fairfield’s not for me, soccer is not really for me. I have a good GPA, I can transfer anywhere, maybe walk on to a different team, get a really good degree and just have some fun, whatever.’ And that was my mindset. I was done.”
Instead, Turner was coaxed into giving it just one more try. A season later, he finally earned the starting spot. He played well, but it was just small-time college soccer after all, and his numbers weren’t anything special; after graduation, the MLS didn’t even invite him to their pre-draft combine. “I knew I wasn’t going to get drafted,” Turner told Boston Man magazine. “But I definitely still watched the entire draft, all four rounds of it, thinking maybe, maybe I’d sneak in somewhere.”
Nobody took Turner—but one team called after the draft. The New England Revolution needed a fourth-string keeper, and they invited Turner to try out. After two practices, they signed him to a contract. “From the beginning, you could see that he was a sponge,” said Revolution keeper coach Remi Roy. “He retained everything. But it was more that he could make saves that only a small percentage of goalkeepers can make. The ones that you can’t teach them, the ones where you’re out of position, but you still make the save, the game winning save, the ones that should be goals, but he still makes the save. He was doing those when he was on trial.”
And the rest is history…right? Finally? Almost. Turner improved, but he still rode the bench. In 2018, he earned a few starts, yet in 2019, he began the season as the Revolution’s third-string keeper once again. In the middle of the season, he finally cracked the starting lineup—and promptly gave up five goals. His manager called him into the office, and surely, Turner must have felt like he had an egg in his throat, wondering if he was about to get cut. He certainly could not have imagined that just three years later, he’d be the starting goalie for Team USA in a World Cup. Rather than demoting him, though, the manager assured Turner that he’d earned an extended chance. He’d let Turner gain some confidence. See how things went from there.
By the end of the season, Turner was a finalist for the MLS goalkeeper of the year award.
The next season, he was voted the Revolution’s team MVP.
The year after that, he earned starts for the USMNT in World Cup qualifying, stopped a couple penalty kicks, and got a call from his agent: Arsenal wanted him to come play in the Premier League.
Now, Turner is firmly entrenched as the U.S. Men’s National Team’s starting keeper. He’ll lead the team in Qatar, and when he does, he’ll have to knock down shots from Wales superstar Gareth Bale in the opening game. When Bale was 16, he played in his first-ever professional game for the storied club Southampton. When Turner was 16, he watched his first soccer game ever.
The same game. Different finish lines. The rest, as they say, will become history.
🎙️ ICYMI, USMNT legend Jozy Altidore joined In the Moment this week to talk about when he scored a goal to beat Spain, at the time the number-one team in the world, and how his teams helped inspire a new generation of soccer players in America—like Matt Turner.
💪 Matt Turner’s not the only USMNT player with an incredible story. Jordan Ritter Conn traced Walker Zimmerman’s journey from outcast to the heart of the defense’s for The Ringer.
🤯 One last soccer story for you: it’s not just the best players in the world who will be going to Qatar for the World Cup. Their assistants will be there too. And they’ve seen some wild stuff.
🐯 One dad woke up before dawn for his son’s golf tournament. Another #golfdad was there too.
