From LA to Florida: On the Ground Ahead of the FIFA Sports Weekend

The plane out of LAX was half journalists, half stringers. Everyone on it had the same destination and roughly the same brief: file something honest about American soccer before Sunday.

Florida is an unlikely capital for the sport, and that is exactly the point. In the last five years the state has quietly become the operational hub for a game the country has argued about since the 1970s. This weekend's FIFA fixtures are the visible tip of that shift.

Over the next four days I will file three dispatches from the training grounds and the fan zones. This is the first. Read it as a map — of the personalities, the money, and the American soccer story that is finally too big for the American sports press to keep ignoring.