Could you help me find this tenuously metafilter related article?

February 29, 2020 2:43 PM

During the last soccer / football world cup there was a small series of niche articles in various publications about the intersection of the adoration of footballers and discrimination of immigrants in the soccer nations of Europe. I want to find one article about a specific English team member who's sister took the bus with him several nights a week to get him to training in London club's youth section.

As far as I recall it was never posted on Metafilter. But's it's heavily associated in my head with this post that I made at that time.

Can you help me find it!

Specific details I remember:
It was on a sports website that had quite some thoughtful, sociological, philosophical, essays about the conditions the sports heroes came from. This footballer was from Jamaica or the west Indies, had moved over to London to live with his mum who had immigrated some years before to build a life for her family. He missed a [particular food or drink from home] and resented the life in London. His older sister spent a lot of time on buses bringing him to football training after school while his mum was working hard to support her family. He became a skilled and famous footballer and the British tabloids made much hay about him buying a big house with a lavish bathroom for his mum.

I know it's a long shot but would make my month to find this.

posted by roolya_boolya to MetaFilter-Related at 2:43 PM (4 comments total)

"But it was quite hard for my family, because my mum would never let me go to training alone. And she always had to work, so my sister would have to take me all the way out to Heathrow.

"Three busses. The 18 to the 182 to the 140. The red double-deckers with the blue wool ’80s vibe on the seats. Spent ages on those. We’d leave at 3:15 and get home at 11 p.m. Every. Single. Day. She’d sit upstairs in the little cafe and chill until I was done with training. Imagine being 17 years old and doing that for your little brother. And I never once heard her say, “Nah, I don’t wanna take him.”"

--It Was All a Dream, by Raheem Sterling (The Players' Tribune)

(May not be the article you seek, but is perhaps a lead.)
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:55 PM on February 29, 2020

Here's the link to the Metafilter post, from 2 weeks before your post.

There's also this post, from back when Liverpool were semi-downtrodden.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:26 PM on February 29, 2020

You linked to a post that I made, so maybe there's a different world cup post you're thinking of?
posted by ChuraChura at 6:05 PM on February 29, 2020

This one might also be along the right track, from Popula about watching the World Cup from different places, or this one from African Arguments with dispatches from different countries during the Africa Cup.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:30 PM on February 29, 2020