They’d told me that you could walk into a bar in Odessa, West Texas, and find people unaware who Lionel Messi was. It doesn’t prove quite so but the sentiment is broadly accurate.
Of the 70 wall-to-wall screens showing sports at the Walk-On Sports Bar, only one is screening a World Cup game, while at The House, a downtown bar, some people can’t identify a single member of the USA team and other names don’t register. David Beckham? Harry Kane? Blank looks.
It’s a long, flat, hot road out to Odessa, 350 straight miles west from Dallas on Interstate 20 past billboards for Love’s and Muddy Mike’s and Mary’s Cafe and, when you hit the oilfields of the Permian Basin, 250 miles short of El Paso, billboards appear for guns and cowboy hats and drilling insurance.
It’s a long road from the World Cup, too, because this is dyed-in-the-wool American football turf, where college football team players fill 300-page season preview magazines piled in stores where we, with our ‘soccer’ mindset, would expect World Cup literature to be.
Odessa is Trump heartland – jaded, careworn and on edge about the renewables talk which is an existential threat to the nodding oil field pump jacks which bring the crude up. It’s a place where a good day or bad day depends on the price of oil and where Trump restoring ‘drill, baby, drill’ is seen as a salvation. No one knows for how long.
But it has a particular kind of fame as the home of Permian High School, whose football team were immortalised in Buzz Bissinger classic bestselling book Friday Night Lights which followed them for a season. It later became the basis of a hit film and TV series.
Odessa, West Texas, is American football territory and home of the Permian High School Panthers, immortalised in the classic book ‘Friday Night Lights’
The Permian Panthers regularly play in the Texas state finals and sell out their 19,000-capacity stadium
The pump jacks drag up the crude oil in Odessa’s oil fields
It’s clear what soccer and the World Cup are up against when the name of Permian High School head American football coach Jeff Ellison elicits considerably more of a reaction than Mauricio Pochettino in The House and there are times, when Ellison is eating out with his family, that he’ll ask for a secluded corner where he might not be recognised.
The school’s varsity team of 15-to-18-year-olds, the Permian Panthers, regularly play for the Texas state championship and sell out their 19,000-capacity stadium. The Friday Night Lights burn as bright as ever.
I meet Ellison beneath the iconic Panthers sign outside the school which lists the six occasions, going back to 1965, when they were Texas state champions, and the seven in which they went undefeated, including the legendary 1989 season when they were named the best football varsity team in the country.
When Trump visited Odessa a few years back, his staff contacted Ellison to say he wanted an audience. An image of that day sits in a cabinet in the office, along with the Permian football helmet that Trump signed.
Football is community, tradition and rite of passage out here. Yet something significant happened here last year which told the place that the school’s soccer players were not an irrelevance.
When Ellison needed a strong kicker, he asked the school’s soccer coach, Luis Carmona, whether he had someone with ‘a strong leg’. Carmona recommended Iker Munos, his 18-year-old No 10 and best, most creative player. Munos tried out for Ellison and has proved a revelation, capable of a 49-yard field goal.
‘He’s one of our strongest kickers,’ says Ellison. ‘And he is also vital to our soccer team. We’ve loved that interaction between our sports and we don’t see football as in competition with soccer. Iker being among us generates more interest in soccer among our guys. They’re talking soccer. The World Cup is helping with that.’
The difficulties for Carmona running Permian soccer include the huge distances his teams must travel for games, with such a fledgling Texas infrastructure – typically, vast five-hour road trips to the big cities of Dallas, Austin and El Paso. A drive around Odessa on this visit elicits no sight of soccer pitches within a 10-mile radius.
But Munos is not the only soccer talent. Cason Nabarrette has been signed from Permian to the academy of the team in near-namesake Odisea, a Spanish club playing in Valencia’s regional leagues, and the big European clubs have their eyes and ears to the ground out here. While I visit, Juventus have been running a three-day soccer camp, with a scouting incentive. ‘Though we are behind, we are making small steps,’ Carmona says.
American football is community, tradition and rite of passage out here where a boy’s masculinity may be questioned if he does not take up the sport
It’s a far cry from Los Angeles where World Cup fever is in full swing
A World Cup watch party – spot the Mexico shirts hinting at the Hispanic American influence on soccer’s growth
For generations of American boys, soccer was a sport you played until 6th and 7th grade – Britain’s Year 7 and 8 – but then you moved to football and your masculinity was questioned if you didn’t.
Football will always dominate here, and Carmona says he still finds himself working on basic skills with 12-year-olds, when the British equivalents will be at that stage by the age of six. But when he started as Permian’s coach, 22 years ago, he’d be struggling to make teams up. These days he has 90 to 100 players.
The changing profile of the school is significant. Permian High has a far bigger Hispanic-American profile than when the football team were last state champions. The most talked-about players among Carmona’s squad are Messi and Emiliano Martinez. Hispanic-Americans are a driving force in US soccer.
The push to develop the sport is even more evident in Midland, a more affluent neighbouring city that the oil executives have tended to make home. West Texas FC – a soccer club formed in 2023 by two local property developers – has grown rapidly and is now attracting crowds of 2,000 in fourth-tier semi-professional USL2.
‘Things have really blown up for us, and we’re trying to pick up the best ideas from Europe and elsewhere,’ says Melissa Milan, one of the club’s directors.
The team has an Australian coach and players of 10 nationalities. As we speak, they’re preparing for some profile being offered by the Midland RockHounds minor league baseball team, which is hosting a ‘World Soccer Weekend’ around its game and has asked West Texas along. ‘Sports aren’t competing with each other – that’s not the American way,’ says Milan.
On the outskirts of Odessa, more evidence of cut-through. FIFA licensed collectable ‘ballers’ and World Cup Panini stickers are on sale at the Exxon gas station. Some have been sold and Shannon, one of the staff, says she has been watching USA games – though ‘Harry Kane’ still doesn’t register.
During the onward drive north across vast, flat oil lands into New Mexico, there’s evidence that a group of Scots were present at a time when football was taking hold back at home. A straight 30-mile road – ‘so lonely that we call it haunted’, they tell me in the gas station at its end point in Hagerman, in the Pecos Valley – is called East Aberdeen Street. A nod to the Scottish immigrants who first settled there but didn’t lay down a football culture.
The name of Permian High School head American Football coach Jeff Ellison elicits more of a reaction than the name ‘Mauricio Pochettino’ in Odessa – but there is some cut through
Alex Freeman celebrates scoring for the United States in their opening World Cup match
Gedion Zelalem, the first player born after Arsene Wenger took over at Arsenal to make his Gunners debut, is now at New Mexico United in a sign that times are changing
In some of the most remote one-horse towns in rural New Mexico, the football stronghold looks indomitable. At Dexter, the banners and the bunting proclaim: ‘Blue Pride – Dexter Demons.’ In Roswell, the self-appointed UFO capital of the USA because of an unidentified craft which landed 75 miles away in 1947, it’s the Hornets.
In Albuquerque, six miles from Odessa and 500 from the Mexican border, the nascent soccer culture thrives. A crowd of 2,000 people are gathering before a big screen in the main square to watch Mexico beat Czechia and the local New Mexico United, who play in America’s second-tier USL Championship, are handing out merchandise to catch the wave.
The club was formed in 2018, and they now have former Arsenal and Rangers midfielder Gedion Zelalem – the first player born after Arsene Wenger took charge in north London to make his debut for the Gunners – and ex-Manchester United centre back Tyler Blackett in their squad. ‘We’ve had no major sports team here and we wanted to harness the huge fanbase for football,’ says one of the club staff at the event.
But it’s in Odessa, where the challenge for soccer is so huge, that the World Cup’s subtle but distinct impression on its seemingly most unreachable people seems most significant. A nine-year-old on the school perimeter is wearing an Argentina top and coach Ellison will be sitting down to see Pochettino’s USA play Bosnia-Herzegovina in the last 32 on Thursday. ‘I don’t know where all the games have been played but I think the coach and the way he works and communicates are interesting,’ he says.
‘Sports of all kinds are helping our kids to develop as people. That’s at the heart of school and college sport. Of course we want soccer to grow. We’re pleased to see the World Cup is shifting the dial.’
