Not many soccer players have the talent, let alone the opportunity, to find success at the professional level. For recent Chicago Fire draftee Daniel Johnson, playing professionally has been his dream for as long as he can remember. Thus, it should be no surprise that he was willing to do whatever it took to make that dream a reality, even if it meant moving away from his family for a spot at a world-renowned English Premier League’s youth team. Add the fact that he was only twelve years old at the time, and his story becomes just that much more remarkable.
“I never looked at it as a trial. I never thought it was a trial,” Johnson said in a recent interview with ESPN. “The first day I got there, it ended up a [U-13] game was canceled on the weekend, so they had a makeup game just by happenstance, and I was thrown right into it...and immediately after the game, they pulled my parents and I into a room and said, 'We'd like to bring you over fulltime. If you want to make a real go of this, if you want to do this professionally, we think we should have you over here, develop you.'”
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Ryne SierackiSenior at the University of Michigan studying Kinesiology and Movement Science CategoriesArchives |