Trump Once Played Soccer

By the time Donald Trump was in his senior year at New York Military Academy, he had quit playing football and decided to join the varsity soccer team. Most of his teammates were from South or Central America, the children of diplomats and military officers: four Colombians, two Peruvians, and players from Mexico, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Venezuela.The coach wasn’t particularly good, former teammates told me, and the season was not particularly successful. The yearbook recorded three wins and eight losses, as recently reported by The Guardian. Latin music filled the team bus en route to away games, and the players’ pregame chant culminated in a plea for togetherness: “¡Nosotros! ¡Nosotros! Rah, rah, rah!”“It was like you were in another country,” Alfred Harrison, one of Trump’s teammates, told me. “You didn’t really get the ball unless you spoke Spanish.” Harrison recalls Trump being a decent player, working on the back line as a defender and kicking the occasional long ball over the midfield to start an attack. “He was fairly active on the field,” he said. “That guy had an abundance of testosterone, that’s for sure.”Trump didn’t seem to play much soccer beyond that year, and it’s unclear whether he watches or cares much about the game today. His son Barron played in Arlington and for the D.C. United Academy team during Trump’s first term as president, but there’s no evidence that Trump embraced being a “soccer dad,” let alone that he ever showed up to watch a game. He reportedly considered buying Rangers FC in Scotland, where his mother is from and where he owns golf courses, and the Colombian team Atlético Nacional, which was once linked with the drug trafficker Pablo Escobar, but passed on both. When he was asked last year to identify his favorite player, he named Pelé but recognized that the choice was a bit old-fashioned. (Golf caddies also used to refer to Trump as Pelé for the number of times he kicked the ball on the golf course.) Most of all, Trump seems