📍🇨🇱 Houston Pickup Scene We’ve been lucky on the #AudiFCBTour to see the premier squads in the world up close and personal in the United States, kicking about on manicured pitches of the most impressive quality and delivering thrills of the highest order. It has been enlivening to see stadiums on American shores packed to the rafters with football fans seeing the best and brightest of the global game. But, at the end of the day, American soccer culture isn’t seen in its most pure and inspiring form in Houston’s NRG Stadium or Kansas City’s Children’s Mercy Park—but, rather, down the street from those venues It happens in the streets after school and in the parks after dark. “Pickup culture” is the heart of American soccer—the unstructured, carefree, inclusive, and FREE form of the game that knows no gender, class, or level of play. This photo series from Brian Hartley showcases one such game from above that we stumbled onto in Houston, with the help of one of our readers, Edgar Salinas. This is Sunday Night Lights. One last dose of the weekend before the reality of Monday hits. And it’s been going on for ten years. ‘Til next weekend.
