8 August 15 - 21, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Back in Frisco, the team is lining up for a Wednesday match against Minnesota United. With the warm weather and three games in the span of eight days, new coach Peter Luccin is working his lineup card, try- ing to keep his players as fresh as possible. This night, it will be Kamungo in the start- ing lineup, with Gonzalez held in reserve. It turns into a wild game which FC Dallas wins, 5–3. Kamungo has several good runs down the left side and is credited with an assist on a beautiful cross into the box that finds the foot of Croatian forward Petar Musa. Since replacing head coach Nico Estevez a couple of weeks ago, coach Luccin has asked the team to play more “vertically” — to attack the field aggressively forward to the goal box. On several occasions, the team is able to get behind Minnesota’s high-pressing back line. This style of play would seem to fit Ka- mungo’s skill set perfectly. Coach Luccin grew up in the French soc- cer system, where he built a reputation by playing tenacious defense and not being afraid to take a yellow card. With his trim physique and shaved head, he looks like he could still do both of those things. We ask Kamungo, the moderately competent French speaker, if Luccin ever swears under his breath in his native tongue. “Not yet,” he says with a laugh, “not yet”. In his English post-game interviews, Luccin’s constant message is that the team is good, improving, getting better. But it’s not good enough yet. It’s a message that reso- nates with Kamungo. He has been telling himself the same message since he signed a contract as a teenager. Luccin was born and raised in the port city of Marseille, the third-largest city in France and one of its oldest. The historic port has for centuries attracted and blended multiple cultures — French, of course, but with a healthy mix of Greek, North African and any other people who sailed the Medi- terranean. Luccin is a soccer lifer who played for some of the biggest clubs in France early in his career, including both his hometown of Marseille and archrival Paris Saint-Ger- main. Then it was on to eight years in Spain. As injuries mounted and opportunities with the big European clubs dried up, he took one more shot to keep playing the game he loved. He signed with FC Dallas. His time as a player for the Dallas club was not extraor- dinary. Injuries were taking a toll, and his body was aging. After spending almost two decades as a te- nacious midfield defender, grabbing and fight- ing for every inch of turf, picking up a wallet full of yellow cards and more than a few reds, after getting knocked down and getting back up and rehabbing from injuries, Luccin was out of a job and 2,000 miles from home. He had some hard choices to make, and the choice he did make was somewhat unexpected. The hardnosed kid from Marseille would stay in Dallas and teach the finer points of the world’s game to American children. At this point, he had a wife and kids of his own and 20 years of experience playing the game at a very high level. He just needed a new passion, and he found it in coaching. In 2015, he changed roles within FC Dal- las, moving from player to coaching the U12, U13 and U14 age groups. That experience eventually led to an assistant role with then- head coach Luchi Gonzalez, and Luccin kept the job when Nico Estévez was hired. As the 2024 season got off to a disappointing start, Estévez was let go and the rest of the season was turned over to Luccin. Before the change, the team’s play had become in- creasingly cautious and predictable. Scoring was down, chances were down, and the big off-season signing of Petar Musa seemed like it might be wasted money. On the MLS television broadcasts, the word “boring” was starting to be used. Something had to change, starting with the team’s attitude, or as forward Tsiki Ntsabe- leng put it after the team’s five-goal outburst against St. Louis, “I just think there’s a switch of mentality and attitude, the way we approach games. We start flying, and then we try to maintain the intensity throughout the game to make it difficult for the oppo- nent. I just think that shift of mentality has made a huge difference for us.” As for long-term results, the jury is still out. After two much-needed wins at home, the team suffered a gut-wrenching loss in Seattle, building a two-goal lead only to watch it snatched away in the final minutes. But no one walked away from that match thinking it was boring. As the team breaks for League’s Cup play, Luccin’s results have been encouraging. The team’s troubles win- ning on the road continue, but in MLS play at home they are 5–1–0. Freeing the team up to take more chances and, potentially, mistakes is a great scenario for Kamungo. One of the most remarkable aspects of Kamungo’s meteoric rise is that until he joined the Abilene middle school team, he had never played one minute of or- ganized soccer. We show Kamungo a picture of an adult game from the camp in Tanzania and ask him if that was really what it what like. “No,” he says, “not for me.” For the kids, there was no coach, no ref- eree, no uniforms, no boots (cleats, soccer shoes), no grass fields with goal posts and, incredibly, often not even a real soccer ball. The kids would play in the alley or any bare spot they could find and fashion makeshift balls from rags and bags, discarded gloves and condoms and anything else they could scrounge. The only things he had in com- mon with other kids across the globe was the joy of playing the world’s game, and an idolization of the established stars he saw on infrequent TV broadcasts. In Abilene, for the first time, Kamungo was playing in real games, on a real team, and his natural gifts were unmistakable. Like most kids in every type of sport, Ka- mungo would have daydreams of turning pro. Between adjusting to life in the U.S., learning English and staying current with his schoolwork, he had a lot on his plate. Texas is littered with high school hotshots with dreams of hitting it big. It just doesn’t often happen, and it probably wouldn’t have happened for Kamungo if it wasn’t for Ber- nard’s older brother Imani. If Bernard had doubts or was getting comfortable enough just starring on the West Texas high school team, Imani knew that there was still un- tapped potential in his little brother. And he had a plan. Imani was going to get Bernard a tryout with a pro club. But with the plan came a hurdle: the cost of a tryout with a professional club. In addi- tion to the food and the gas and the travel expenses, the price for getting in front of MLS scouts could be as high as $500. That was way too much for a family just four years removed from a refugee camp. So Imani kept looking, probing the system until he found an opening. In this case, it was an open tryout with the FC Dallas farm system, the North Texas Soccer Club — relatively in- expensive at $90, and close enough to home to get there in a single night’s drive. In Texas, a decent high-school football program will have a dozen coaches and their offensive system and terminology will be replicated down to the pee-wee level that feeds the beast. This systematic training and identification of athletic potential is what most of the rest of the world uses to recog- nize and develop European football, aka soc- cer, talent, and the talent pool is pretty much every kid in the country. Teenagers who commit to playing soccer in the U.S. inevitably need to hook into part of the “elite” club system to get the kind of training and instruction they need, and that must be paid for. Omar Gonzalez had the size, talent and commitment to get into that system, and the downstream dividends of champion-level success in college, the MLS and Liga MX. As a kid growing up in Oak Cliff, most of his immediate friends were people of color. But most of his teammates in the elite programs were white kids from more affluent families. It was, in fact, the parents of one of his new teammates who helped to subsidize his continued move up through the system. Kamungo had neither the designer kit, the elite background nor the friends from other teams to help ease those jitters. All he had were some unique skills developed on the dusty fields of a refugee camp, enough gas money to make it back to Abilene and an older brother who had an unshakable belief in his younger sibling. Would it be enough? It took about 15 minutes for Kamungo to realize that he could play with these other hopefuls. It took the coaches about another 15 minutes to recognize that not only could Kamungo play with them, he was better than just about all of them. For some of the young men at the event, a look from the pro league might be a measuring stick that sends them off to junior college. For others, maybe it was a vanity project all along, driven by helicopter parents who thought they could wish and pay their way into success for their children. But for Bernard and Imani and the rest of the Kamungo family, this was a life- changing, generational event. Back in Abilene, he would share the wonderful, yet somehow bittersweet, news that he was leaving his high school soccer team to be- come a professional. Like Kamungo, Omar Gonzalez also never played his senior year for Skyline High School in Dallas. After 15 years training in Florida, going off to college and playing pro- fessionally across the world, Gonzalez says, “This is the first time I’ve lived in Dallas as an adult.” In a country that is generally starved for homegrown talent, the U.S. national team wasn’t about to let him get away. Soccer is the world’s most popular sport, and the World Cup is the world’s most- watched sporting competition. In be- tween World Cups, tournaments such as Copa America, the Euro Cup and African Cup of Nations assemble national teams for international matches. These are some of the sport’s most prestigious titles. Leg- ends can be created or reputations de- stroyed in a moment of brilliance or an instance of bad luck. With so much on the line, national soccer bodies around the world are in an intense competition to sign the best players to their nation’s team. The rules surrounding national team eligi- bility can become byzantine at times with dual citizenship, ancestry and parents and grandparents all in the mix. Players are desperate to play the World Cup, and national teams are just as desper- ate to assemble the best talent. And while the eligibility rules can be complex, the rule that binds a player to a certain nation is not. Once you play in an international match for that country, you get “capped.” “Cap” is one of those quaint English traditions Mike Brooks Head coach Peter Luccin is determined to bring more passion to the team. Culture from p6 >> p10
