Matt Besler was barely 10 years old when he scored his first World Cup goal. He soon followed up with a second and a third. By the time he graduated from high school, he had countless strikes to his name – and yet you will find no mention of them in the Fifa record books. Sadly, soccer’s governing body does not recognise World Cups played in suburban Kansas City backyards.
The format of those childhood tournaments was, admittedly, a little different to the one in which Besler will compete this summer in Brazil. He and his friends were playing a version of soccer familiar to kids the world over: one set of goalposts, one keeper (optional), and one huge mêlée as everybody tries to score at the same time. The last player to do so is eliminated; the rest go through to the next round.
In theory, each participant should attempt to score as quickly as possible – each goal taking them one step closer to being crowned as world champion. But Besler held a different view.
“I never wanted to score first because then you have to go out and sit until everyone else scores,” he explains. “It's, like, five minutes before you get to come back on for the next round.”
Besler winces at the thought. At 27, he might be the captain of Sporting Kansas City and a starting centre-back for Jürgen Klinsmann’s USA team but on some level he remains a big kid, itching for a game. He is only a few minutes removed from a morning practice session when we sit down to talk at SKC’s slick training facility in Swope Park, but perched on the edge of a too-small stackable chair in a fresh t-shirt and shorts, Besler looks ready to run back out and do it all over again.
“I remember playing soccer every day of the summer over at Seth’s house,” he continues – casually referencing the fact that he grew up playing with Seth Sinovic, now a team-mate in Kansas City.
“He had a backyard and he had his older brothers, plus a couple of neighbourhood kids. We had the Kickback goal in his backyard, and we would play that [World Cup] game over and over.”
It is not the childhood one would necessarily expect for a boy growing up in America’s heartland, where baseball, basketball and football have traditionally held sway. According to Besler, his parents signed him up to play soccer at four simply because a new coaching clinic had sprung up in their neighbourhood, and it became the popular thing to do. As he tells it: “They knew none of the rules.”
Besler, though, was a quick study. A naturally sporty kid, he also played baseball, basketball and street hockey. Soccer, however, quickly became his No1 obsession.
“In first, second, third and fourth grade, in your yearbooks, each kid got to write down what you wanted to do when you grew up,” he recalls. “I wrote 'pro soccer player' every single year.”
Exactly how he thought that could happen in America, even Besler is not sure. He was nine by the time Major League Soccer launched its inaugural season, in 1996, and there were no guarantees it would last, with attendances dropping sharply after an initial surge of interest. Professional indoor soccer leagues offered one alternative, but those were often transient.
As such, some adults had a hard time taking Besler’s dreams seriously.
“My high-school basketball coach didn't quite understand how soccer worked,” says the defender. “I remember telling him one Thanksgiving that I had a chance to go with the Under-17 national soccer team and play in a tournament in somewhere like Florida or California.
He didn't understand that that was a big deal, that it was a big honour to be playing for a youth national team. He didn't understand it and he didn't want me to miss basketball practice. I would love to get the chance to go back and talk to him about it. I would definitely shake his hand and say 'See! I told you! I told you that this was important!’
Besler would quit the basketball team before his junior year in high school, deciding to focus his energies on a college soccer scholarship. A versatile and prolific midfielder, he landed a place at Notre Dame but was used mostly as a substitute during his freshman year.
Once again his impatience to get out on the field came to the fore. Informed by coaches that his best chance of starting as a sophomore was in defence, Besler agreed to try his hand at centre-back. He won an open competition for a starting place in preseason, and never looked back.
Which is not to suggest that everything came naturally.
“Definitely not,” he says. “It's a big adjustment. Just the way you see the game, the decisions that you have to make. I made plenty of mistakes, you still make mistakes, you still learn. But at that point, I was learning something new every single training session.
“I thought it was going to be boring, but it's actually the opposite. There's always something you can be thinking about, planning ahead. I discovered that playing centre-back is a game within a game. If you approach it like that, it's a lot of fun.”
Selected by Kansas City – then known as the Wizards – with the eighth pick in the 2009 MLS Superdraft, Besler went on to become a consistent yet unassuming presence for his hometown side. It was not until 2012 that he achieved national recognition, as MLS Defender of the Year. He had still never played for the senior US team.
That changed in January 2013, when he was selected for a friendly against Canada in Houston. The next thing Besler knew, he was starting a key World Cup qualifier against Mexico at the Estadio Azteca. In his first competitive international start, he marshalled Manchester United’s Javier “Chicharito” Hernandez superbly, helping his country to a valuable 0-0 draw.
His arrival felt like a metaphor for the improving standards of domestic soccer in the US. Ever since 1998, when a team built largely around MLS players crashed out of the World Cup with no points – losing even to Iran – the trend had been for national-team managers to rely more and more on stars who played abroad. Just four domestic-based players were included in the squad that went to South Africa in 2010.
Most expected Klinsmann to go down a similar path when he was appointed, a year later. The German encouraged MLS players to test themselves in Europe and spoke about setting up regional offices around the world, in order to scout out those previously undiscovered US-eligible players who might have grown up in foreign nations
Over time, though, Klinsmann has shifted his stance, recognising the improving standards of the domestic league. Besler is one of nine MLS players to make the final cut for Brazil. He is one of seven never to have played outside the US.
The defender had his chance to move abroad last summer, when Queens Park Rangers and Birmingham City – impressed by his initial performances for the US national team – headed up a list of European suitors. Besler admits that he looked “pretty hard” into such offers before deciding to stay in Kansas City. In doing so, he passed up the opportunity to make himself substantially wealthier.
“Yeah,” he says with a hint of wistfulness. “Yeah. That was a tough decision. Because over there, you're talking about a major difference in salaries. But when I made my list of what was important to me at the time, the money and the salary part of it wasn't at the top of the list. No1 in the list was what situation is going to help me to be most successful.
“What I told myself was that I wanted to put myself in the best position to succeed. Succeed on the field, off the field, as a team, individually. And every single time, every comparison I made with QPR, Birmingham, there was a team in Belgium … I just found that Kansas City, at that point in my career, was the best choice. It was the best situation for me to succeed.”
For Besler, success meant seizing the opportunity he had to win a league title with his hometown club. Sporting Kansas City had posted the best record in the MLS Eastern Conference in 2012, only to crash out of the playoffs in the first round. By the time those European offers arrived in the summer of 2013, SKC were in the middle of their next season, and on course to make another run. His decision to hang around was vindicated when they lifted the MLS Cup in December.
“That is one of the reasons why I stayed,” says Besler. “I felt like this group that had been put together had been working towards it. If you leave, and they go and win the thing, it's like you missed out on a championship.
“Those are the memories that you can never, ever forget. I wanted to have that. I wanted to be a part of it.”
By that point he also had faith that his World Cup prospects would not be damaged by staying in Kansas City.
“I think if Jürgen would have said, 'If you want to be on the national team, you have to play in Europe,' then my mentality would have been different. I would probably have been wanting to go over and try and play in Europe, so I could get on the national team.
“But the fact is he never came out and said that. So for me, it wasn't ever really an issue. I said that first of all I want to develop as a player over here in MLS. And then when that happens, who knows what will happen after that.”
He will take a similar one-step-at-a-time mindset into this summer’s World Cup. Drawn against Germany, Portugal and Ghana in the group stage, the US can ill-afford a slow start. Besler says that the team’s primary focus is simply to win their first game.
“There's different stages of our goals,” he says, gesturing the highest of them with a hand raised over his head. “Up here it's ‘go as far as you can, win the World Cup’, but where do you start? You start with winning our first game against Ghana. If we can get three points out of that, it would put us in a great position. It gives us a decent chance at it.”
Besler is happy to define the Ghana game as the biggest of his career so far, although a positive result could ensure even more significant ones in the days that follow. The prospect of lining up against the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Mario Götze and Mesut Ozil in the group stages alone is at once a thrilling and a terrifying one.
“I’m more excited than anxious,” says Besler. “I think everyone's going to be anxious. I think everyone has the right to be nervous, too. If you're in the World Cup and you don't have butterflies right before kick-off, then you're not human.
But for me it's more excitement. It's a major challenge, but why not? It's your first World Cup. Why wouldn't you want to get to play against some of the best teams?
Best of all, he gets to do it alongside one of his closest friends in soccer. Graham Zusi, drafted by Kansas City along with Besler in 2009, has experienced a similar career trajectory – moving from solid MLS performer to potential World Cup starter inside the last 24 months.
The pair lived together in their rookie season, staying at Besler’s parents’ house in leafy Overland Park. It was supposed to be a temporary measure, allowing them not to sign any expensive apartment lease while they waited to find out whether they had made the team. But as the days became weeks and the weeks became months they came to appreciate the arrangement.
“There was a lot of nice things about it,” says Besler. “The saving money part was big, because we were on a rookie minimum salary at the time. I don't know exactly what it was, but I think it was like 30 grand a year. And my mom is a dietician, so the food was the best part. Coming home after a practice at night you’d get full dinners. Everything, steaks, potatoes, greens. It was awesome.”
Plus, of course, there was the opportunity to bond with a team-mate. Besler and Zusi each have their own places these days, but are never sad to room together on tour with the national team.
“It's nice having him there, along the ride,” says Besler. “We were warming up for that qualifier at the Azteca, in Mexico, in front of 100,000 people and we're just jogging together 20 minutes before the game, and almost laughing. Like, 'how the heck are we warming up for this game right now? What are we doing here?' It's cool.”
Almost as cool as lining up together for an actual World Cup game. US fans only hope that Besler enjoys himself as much in Brazil as he used to do in Seth Sinovic’s backyard.
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