Bola Cheia

There are some incredible literary magazines coming out of America at the moment, and The Believer is consistently one of the best. This essay by Chris Feliciano Arnold is an example of what it does so well, offering an intimate glimpse of everyday family life that’s also a clever and critical reflection on national identity within the American machine. The beautiful game (or jogo bonito) is going to become much more American this summer, and this is what that version of football looks like.

Opened in 2020, the COPA Soccer Training Center in Walnut Creek, California, is a 117,000-square-foot, three-story-high labyrinth of sensor-­enabled practice spaces where boys and girls ages one through nineteen can refine the individual skills necessary to attract scouts from major European clubs.

Perched above the glass entryway, a gargantuan soccer ball spins slowly like a planet. Seven days a week, morning, noon, and night, families from around the Bay Area orbit the drop-off/pickup circle. Young athletes in yellow-and-black COPA jerseys scan their membership badges at the front desk before reporting to the areas designated for their age group and skill level.

Athletes ages six to nineteen are organized into training groups by age and ability, following tailored routines designed to push their physical comfort zones and leverage the neuroplasticity of their developing brains. COPA stands for Comprehensive Objective Performance Assessment, and true to its name, there are few spaces in this building where an athlete’s performance is not being comprehensively assessed. On the thirty-yard synthetic SpeedTrack, a barrage of lasers analyzes their speed and gait. In the COPA skills.lab­ – the only one of its kind in North America – ­athletes step into a 360-degree array of screens, ball launchers, and motion sensors that can replicate almost any in-game scenario. In the COPA Cube, players enter a turf box surrounded by a grid of targets that light up at random so athletes can hone their passing skills with video game–like intensity.

Data from each station is fed into proprietary technologies that calculate an athlete’s COPA Score, an objective summation of skills and potential – balance, ball control, decision-making, and more – augmented by kinesiologic measurements like maximum oxygen consumption and bone density. Teams from the Bundesliga, Major League Soccer, and NCAA Division I schools are keen to access these scores and evaluate players at seasonal scouting events. Even having a COPA Score to begin with signals to clubs that a player – or at least their parents – are dead serious about soccer. A good COPA Score can land somebody a tryout, a scholarship, or a contract, making all the pickups and drop-offs worthwhile.

When I enrolled my son William, he was almost four – still six years away from having his data fed into the machine. I tell myself that I will unenroll him from COPA long before then. For one thing, I cannot afford this place much longer. Also: I brought him here for all the wrong reasons.

Let me explain. I was born in Brazil, and then I was adopted and moved to the United States in 1981, at the twilight of the military dictatorship. When I was six or seven, my parents gave me a soccer ball, but, growing up on a farm in Oregon, I had few kids to play with, and the ball lay deflated in our gravel driveway. So despite my pedigree, I am a bola murcha (a flat ball) – I have no game. I don’t want that to be true for my kids, who are Brazilian Mexican. Soccer – futebol, o jogo bonito – was my birthright. It was taken from me. I want to give it back to my kids.

The best I can do is make sure they touch a soccer ball at an early age. I want them to be able to send the ball anywhere, to make it do magic – a magic I have never felt. I want them to feel at home in their minds, in their bodies, in their blood. I don’t know how to do that other than by making them feel at home on a soccer field.

Twice a week since early spring, William and I have walked past the weight room and the SpeedTrack and the skills.lab and the COPA Cube to Jungle Turf 1, where the one-to-three-year-old athletes gather to learn the fundamentals of the beautiful game. Jungle Turf 1 is a turf field surrounded by jungle wallpaper featuring a gorilla, a snake, a sloth, and other animal friends. On top of the supply closet, which is painted like a village hut, a monkey watches the action, tail arched like an S. The objectives for the Jungle Turf 1 athletes are very simple: Dribble the ball to the monkey. Water break. Dribble the ball to the parrot. Water break. Dribble to the sloth. Water break.

The kids here do not have a COPA Score. They play for fun. They play for stickers. If they listen to Coach Amanda, at the end of practice they get a sticker to add to their badge. Most of the children in this age group are still learning not to pick up the ball with their hands. “No hands,” says Coach Amanda. “No hands,” say the parents lined up at the perimeter of the field.

The parents at COPA are a mural of Bay Area immigrant ambition. People bring their kids to COPA to connect them with home while also exposing them to a sort of Silicon Valley engineering marvel that can happen only here. At the end of each session, Coach Amanda – over-patient and underpaid – drags out a mini net and pretends to be an alien while a swarm of three-year-olds peppers her with errant shots. We parents applaud each goal that gets through, a radiant love emanating from the sidelines. Planet Soccer is a good planet, despite war and famine beyond the Jungle Turf. A fair, well-lit planet where everyone gets a sticker. A planet with no real grass.

COPA is the most American way possible to train your kid to play soccer. As in most other domains, the United States is trying to engineer its way to soccer relevance through data-driven, objective, skills-based education, money, and immigrant talent. COPA is a space where, like in so much of America, play and joy and the ­natural world – swimming in a lake or kicking a ball across actual grass – have been replaced by automation, surveillance, status, and award seeking. I should get a sticker for bringing him here.

When William earns five stickers, he moves up to Level 2, and I take him to Dairy Queen for a hot fudge sundae. At that point, he is still learning how to balance his toe on a stationary ball without falling over. When he earns ten stickers, he moves up to Level 3, and I take him to Dairy Queen for a hot fudge sundae. At that point, he is learning to dribble from animal to animal and back, pause, and put his toe on the ball. Next, he learns how to dribble fast or dribble slow from the parrot to the net – and shoot to score. When he earns twenty stickers, he moves up to Level 4, and I take him to Dairy Queen for a hot fudge sundae. By then he is four years old, full of hot fudge, and we move him to the four-to-five-year age group, over there on Jungle Turf 2, where another Brazilian kid, age four and a half, looks prepared for the World Cup. For the sake of privacy, I’ll call this kid Max. Max does not wear a COPA jersey. He wears a canary yellow Brazilian national jersey with bright blue shorts. He is light on his toes, already developing his own style and flair, punting the ball into the net from anywhere in the room while his mom works on her laptop.

During sideline chit-chat, I ask Max’s mom how he got so good. She says he’s here five days a week, and when he’s not here, he’s on YouTube, watching soccer, copying what he sees. Indeed, he looks like a soccer prodigy in a YouTube clip. When Max is finally connected to the COPA Score machines, he is going to melt the sensors. Someday an army of German coaches will fight over him.

It makes me feel good to see Max here, because it means that, even though I’ve taken this American route to the jogo bonito, it’s good enough for real Brazilians if I sprinkle in a little YouTube.

In Brazil, at least the part of Brazil where I would’ve grown up, the best players are forged in the streets, on uneven terrain, on cramped five-by-five futsal courts, where they learn to improvise. They develop the kind of muscle memory that you can learn only by playing with bare feet. They learn the kind of creativity that you can learn only in mixed-age-group pickup games with no adult supervision. You don’t earn stickers; you earn respect. You earn a nickname. If you cry, it’s your teammates, not your dad, who comfort you. Who knows who your dad is, anyway? Those players are forged the way I would’ve been forged if I had never left Brazil.

Twenty years ago, the first time I returned to Belo Horizonte, the city of my birth, I picked up a blue soccer jersey – Cruzeiro – at the bus station. The next day, I met my birth mother for the first time, and her son, and her other son, and her daughter, my younger half brothers and half sister. After we’d gotten through the initial tsunami of emotions, my half brother Ramon, two years younger than me, rushed us back to the bus station to pick out an Atlético Mineiro jersey. The Felicianos were not Cruzeirenses. The Felicianos were puro gallo. The ­working-class team in BH.

When my brother found a jersey that fit me, he put on his Atlético jersey, and we took a picture together, and our mother beamed. On another planet, our mother would’ve watched us play futebol together in the alleyway with the creek running past. On another planet, we would’ve watched championship matches together. But on this planet, she saw me once as a baby, and then again, twenty-five years later, as a grown man who could barely speak his mother tongue. While my brothers played barefoot soccer in the alleyway, I was knocking baseballs around a sheep pasture.

And this is the awful metaphysics of our dilemma. We never would’ve been together in Brazil. If I had stayed in Brazil, if my father had not abandoned my mother, Ramon and Renato and Rosana would not have been born. If I had stayed in Brazil, my son William would not have been born. In some way, I never would have been born, or at least I would have another name, another life, my original life, for worse or for better, who’s to say, but one thing you can say is that if I had been born and kept, instead of born and given up, then I would not be me, or at least not the me I know now, and that many people I love – including my own children – would not have been born. And there is nothing I can say or do, or would want to do, to undo all that, but maybe there is something I can do to bring us all full circle so we are on the same planet – Planet Soccer.

That’s a lot of pressure to put on myself, and it’s a lot of pressure to put on little William, who still needs his mother to go to sleep, and I tell myself that it’s OK if I am here for all the wrong reasons, as long as he is here for the right reasons: hot fudge sundaes. But after a really good practice, I can tell he wants more. COPA is doing the job of filling him with something that I cannot. Confidence with the ball. Moves. I want him to own the ball. I want him to own Brazilian and Mexican and the space in between. I want him to own William.

I do not want soccer to own William. So far he wants to come to COPA. He wakes up some days and asks, “Is this a COPA day?” The older kids, the ones with COPA Scores, do not look like they are happy to be on Planet Soccer. I do not hear the sound of much laughter here. Their parents, if they are here at all, are on their smartphones. All the playfulness has been sucked out of the turf. This is a place for skills training, not play. This is a place to be improved, rated, sold off to the highest bidder.

By June, when Coach Amanda kicks the ball his direction, William can stop it with his foot and balance like a statue. Look up. Take action. When he tries to score a goal on Coach Amanda, he knows, somehow, how to juke her. He moves across the turf with the ball on a string. During some practices, he is tired, sleepy, rolling on the ground. During other practices he is focused, a look of determination and joy on his face like I’ve never seen. He is playing with a full ball – a bola cheia – and he knows it.

One night after dinner, William tells me he wants to go out to the backyard to play soccer.

“I’m great at soccer,” he tells me.

“You are,” I say. “You’ve been practicing.”

And no matter what happens with soccer, I can already tell he is going to be great at being William. He doesn’t even know the difference between Jungle Turf 1 and Estádio Maracanã. He doesn’t know the difference between California and Oregon, between the United States and Brazil, between Coach Amanda and some future coach that might yell at him. But already he knows that a goal is something special, that not every ball flies true. A goal is a magical concoction of aim and force and luck. Like a life. If you score a goal, you should celebrate. I don’t know how he knows that, but he knows. It’s not something that comes from his papa, who has never scored a goal. It comes from a place inside him that has no name, no shame, no home or away. And as long as I can steer him clear of the lasers and the sensors, from being assigned a score, then I can keep his soccer Brazilian soccer – creative, joyful, poetry – and then maybe he’ll stick with it. In a few years, he is going to feel it in his bones, in a place before memory, in his bare feet, and he is going to step onto a field with confidence, with flair, splitting defenders, elastico, vai vai vai vai vai, William, and he will cry when he loses, and he will cry when he wins, and he will nutmeg some kid named Chad from Walnut Creek, gol de placa, and he is going to dance, and his heart will be full, and our hearts will be full, finally, bola cheia, bola cheia.

But that’s just my imagination. You could fill an ocean with my dreams for him. That he does not know those dreams is a grace. Another grandma, whom he has never met, another language that he has never spoken, a whole universe of ice cream treats he has never tasted, a whole new city with streets like veins. Someday we will visit, and I will roll out the ball, and he will play with his cousins in Bairro Santa Teresa, and if he plays long enough, an afternoon, a weekend, a summer, he will earn his nickname.

The Believer is a quarterly literature, arts, and culture magazine specializing in criticism, literary nonfiction, and immersive reportage on contemporary issues. Like all good magazines, it has died a few times, but it always comes back to life, thanks to its faithful and devoted readership. A digital subscription costs just $16.

Chris Feliciano Arnold is the author of The Third Bank of the River: Power and Survival in the Twenty-First-Century Amazon. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

Jude Weir is a collage artist and illustrator from the South Downs in England.

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