The World Cup they didn’t know they wanted to be part of
Credit: Donnie Nicholson
Lisa Wrightsman never made a Women’s World Cup—her professional football career aspirations were extinguished through a combination of the then professional women’s football league folding and drug addiction filling its void. Hope Solo actually made a Women’s World Cup—three, in fact, one of which she won.
But this isn’t a case of football career comparisons. It’s a tale of how two women whose seemingly disparate career paths brought them to the same place with the same sense of purpose: a World Cup they didn’t know they wanted to be part of.
Seated at opposite ends of the 2023 Homeless World Cup symposium panel—arguably the physical embodiment of the spectrum of their experiences—Solo and Wrightsman and their fellow panelists discussed their firsthand experiences with homelessness. (Theirs was the second of three symposium sections. The first focused on trauma in relation to homelessness; the third concentrated on a new Homeless World Cup initiative to encourage cities to end homelessness.)
For former US Women’s National Team goalkeeper Solo, that experience came in the form of her Vietnam vet father, who was homeless at various stages throughout her early life. (While she hasn’t been homeless, Solo has had other challenges in recent years.)
For Wrightsman, it came through losing everything to drug addiction. She spent 90 days in rehab following her time in prison. It was there that she was heavily recruited to a football program—partly for her own health and partly because they had no football background and were hoping she could steer them true.
Credit: Anita Milas
Wrightsman went on to represent the US in the 2010 Homeless World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. The team was far removed from the elite athletes she was used to playing with—many were out of shape from the long-term effects of drug and alcohol addiction; at least one was over 60 years old. But knowing they weren’t going to win freed Wrightsman up to see football, and herself, with fresh perspective and potential.
“The Homeless World Cup was the first time I had ever seen the power of the game,” she told the 300-hundred-strong symposium audience. Specifically, its capacity to elevate people from their existing circumstances and equip them with structure, skills, and support networks to set them on a better path.
Wrightsman subsequently returned to the US from the tournament with a renewed purpose and goal: to make the life-changing power of street football to tackle homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and mental health issues her career. She’s been working in the space ever since.
For both Solo and Wrightsman, the Homeless World Cup pares football back from its high-performance environment with its attendant commercialisation and pressures to the core of a game that brings people together. “Soccer brings you back to where you want to be,” Solo told the symposium.
Later, after having watched the US Women’s team take on reigning champions Mexico, she recalled how she came to discover the grounding effects of the Homeless World Cup via its Philadelphia-based arm of Street Soccer USA. She spoke of “the pureness of the game that I saw for the first time in a long time”: “When you’ve played for so long, at the highest level, the game becomes professionalised … It’s not that I ever lost my sense of love for the game—I never did. But the simple joys in the game, perhaps I did. And when I saw what the game brought on that field in Philadelphia and Street Soccer USA, I was like: ‘This is what it’s about.’”
“Sport did a lot of things for me I didn’t realise it was doing,” Wrightsman told the symposium. It was only after that sports structure was stripped away from her—when she came to party more than she played—that she realised how important it is “move the body to move the brain”. The latter helps players to keep moving forward—Wrightsman likens it to giving enough of a boost to continue on and to cope with the next challenge and next day.
Credit: Anita Milas
The Homeless World Cup was in its formative stages when Solo’s father passed away in 2007. Solo agrees that the tournament would have been something her father, who encouraged her to find the joy in the simple things in life, would have loved. “He would have been the best coach,” she says. “He was great with kids and a good motivator. He was a youth coach. He coached a community college for basketball before he was homeless.”
Based on her own experience, the self-described student of the greatest school that is life can see, too, that the tournament is fantastic for families who’ve lived the homelessness experience vicariously. “What I have seen is family members in the crowd excited and had found signs … That’s cool to see for the family members because obviously they’ve gone through worry and fear with their children, brother, sister being homeless. That’s got to be very difficult on a parent on a sibling, whoever it may be.”
The Homeless World Cup arguably only came into Wrightsman’s and Solo’s sphere of consciousness through necessity—it is, indeed, a Homeless World Cup they didn’t know they wanted or needed to be part of. But it’s also proved incredibly life-affirming.
“I said earlier today, that life is a beautiful struggle,” Solo explains. “We all go through death, we all go through life’s challenges, personal struggles, everything. So you have to find the beauty in it, you have to come out the other side … Like, it’s okay to struggle, but you got to find beauty in it. And so I think these family members and parents watching abroad, or even here, [are] just probably in tears of joy and pride for what their family member has gone through and overcome. I love it.”
Credit: Anita Milas, Donnie Nicholson
Words: Fiona Crawford