USA legend Hope Solo opens up on finding solace in the Homeless World Cup
Almost half a year has passed since the last edition of the Homeless World Cup, half a year since United States women's national team goalkeeping legend Hope Solo made one of her first public appearances following what she has previously dubbed, in no uncertain terms, “the worst mistake of my life”.
“I’d made a mistake, and that was really hard to swallow,” Solo says of a DWI charge in 2022 that placed not only herself at risk but her two-year-old twins. “It was one of the first times I went out and showed my face publicly. And you know what? I thought, this is where I want to be. Where else can you not be judged but loved?”
Solo is not looking for an answer. Nor is the two-time Olympic gold medallist and world champion. This has nothing to do with the narrative arcs of one of football’s greatest-ever stars.
On an early December morning over Zoom, Solo is in a meditative mood. We’re on the subject of the 2024 Homeless World Cup, Seoul’s historic host city status and the global fundraising effort, the World Virtual Run, taking place in April.
Our conversation, though, has plunged deeper. Solo’s involvement with the Homeless World Cup last year has become an extension of herself, with the 2015 World Cup champion finding unexpected solace, companionship and inspiration in a global event bidding to put an end to one of the world’s most wide-reaching and devastating human rights issues through the power of the world’s most beloved sport. It’s also an issue that Solo knows intimately.
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Solo’s father, a veteran from the Vietnam War, was one of many soldiers who arrived on home soil and struggled to reconcile their old world with the new.
“You didn't hear much about mental health issues then, and I'm certain he suffered from them,” Solo says of her father–a gregarious Italian man with jet black hair and a tattooed presence as big and boisterous as his personality.
He was also homeless at various stages throughout Solo’s early life. Their relationship was complex: unconventional, sure, but full of depth and passion, defined by long conversations sitting by a riverbank or overlooking a mountainous expanse outside Seattle where she grew up, an Italian hoagie never far away.
“But he wasn’t there from morning to night,” Solo says. “He wasn’t living in our house. He was living in a tent in the woods in the dire temperatures of Washington in the wind, in the snow, an old man. It would’ve been a lonely, scary life. I didn’t know how to get hold of him.”
Hope Solo with the Golden Glove award at the 2015 Women's World Cup (Photo by Dennis Grombkowski/Getty Images)With help from the organisation Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Solo’s father eventually moved off the streets. “He felt the pride in having his own place, his own kitchen,” she says.
Solo’s twins turned three years old in March of this year. Their grandfather wasn’t there, having passed away in 2007 due to a heart attack. Solo’s lasting memory of her father is his laugh, one that she says her twins would doubtlessly have loved. But for those who didn’t get the chance to know her father, the lasting image is starkly different.
“I saw his pride, but I also saw his insecurities, I saw people judge him. I would get angry at those people, but in the same breath, I was still a 19-year-old girl in college whose father would come to my games and he didn't fit in with the other parents. I was still grappling with those facts, what he looked like, how he carried himself. Because at the end of the day, he was there every soccer game cheering me on.”
Hope Solo speaks to the Mexico national team at least year's Homeless World Cup (ANITA_MILAS)The stigmas when it comes to homelessness are entrenched and myriad, depicting those in its grips as either culpable for their situation or monstrous, dirty or dangerous. The result casts a very prevalent human experience (in 2021, the World Economic Forum reported that an estimated 150 million people were homeless worldwide, accounting for 1.8 per cent of the population and more than double the population of the UK; more than 1 billion people lack adequate housing worldwide) as villainous and different.
Changing those stigmas is part of Solo’s wider mission of ending homelessness with the Homeless World Cup. She emphasises the need for communicating individual stories of war, family issues, unfortunate circumstances or bad decisions. Communicating those stories as widely as possible (as the new Netflix film, The Beautiful Game, attempts to do) is key.
A self-described student of life, Solo knows struggle and the inevitably of it in one’s story. A favourite maxim of hers is ‘life is a beautiful struggle’. It’s one of those pithy phrases generally splayed across car bumpers and sleek laptops via aesthetic-looking stickers. But it speaks to a more profound part of the human experience.
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Hope Solo speaking during last year's Homeless World Cup in Sacramento (Anita Milas)Does Solo feel that the average person or athlete today feels allowed to struggle? Or has the hyper-scrutinised regime of social media made that natural development more difficult given the new permanence of a mistake? “I think everybody struggles. It doesn't matter if social media is there or not. Yeah, it's going to be documented more, but everybody struggles, there's no taking that away. It will be there.”
Solo considers the summer’s World Cup, in which her former team suffered their worst-ever finish and Megan Rapinoe, after missing a game-winning penalty against Sweden in the Round of 16, laughed ruefully into the sky, a reaction that was dissected ad nauseam for weeks afterwards.
“You do not laugh,” Solo says, adding that the inevitably of struggling doesn't void someone from accountability. “You’re playing at a World Cup for your country, you wouldn't see that at the Homeless World Cup tournament. Megan and the team should have been playing to inspire others, to show the passion of the game. It's not a joke. It's not about the money. It's so much more. I was p****d when she laughed as well.
“But again, everyone struggles. And I hope people feel they can struggle because you can get help now. There's people to turn to. We talk about mental health more. Social media is a very strange thing for me. Personally, I’ve been mother shamed around the world for my mistakes in life.
“Luckily, I don't read that s***. Not everybody's like that. But I know that’s a healthier lifestyle for me. I wish my teammates and the younger kids were educated more in that realm, the healthy way to use social media so that you can live your life, you can struggle, you can grow without the weight of everything else on top of you.”
Hope Solo was inducted into the 2023 National Soccer Hall of Fame (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/USSF/Getty Images for USSF)While the former goalkeeper avoids social media, she doesn’t attempt to hide from her previous struggles and mistakes, nor sand down the coarser edges of them into something more palatable for PR means. She’s candid, frank and , something that’s both refreshing and arguably what makes Solo the ideal fit for a global pursuit whose core ethos involves stripping back the stigmas surrounding struggle.
There’s also something to be said for the tournament’s reverse effect, how it often reinvigorates and rekindles that latent first football love.
“That's how it was for me,” Solo says. “You see the purity of these athletes, their passion for the game, they're playing for something much bigger than the game itself. They're playing for their livelihoods at times. Some of these players and athletes left their countries for the first time."
With the global game becoming ever more sculpted by veiled avarice and a powerful few, the Homeless World Cup’s ability to peel the sport back to its fundamentals offers a timely reminder of the game’s original purity, an aspect Solo believes is why so many high-profile figures are now getting involved in the tournament.
“I’m actually very surprised people haven't gotten involved with either Street Soccer or Homeless World Cup before because this is what football is all about. This really is what we always talk about," she says.
"Anybody can play from any country. That's the whole concept of football. You grab a ball and play. So what I'd seen was just athletes playing with passion, with skill, being good teammates, getting angry still. Because it's a real tournament. You want to win. Granted, everybody is there for a deeper purpose, you can feel it in the tournament.
“It’s a reciprocal relationship. When you see these young men and women be inspired by people who are coaching them and by the program itself, you realise you can always do more. You can always do better. You can fight life's challenges.
“I'm supposed to be there to inspire these incredible athletes, but I'm always the one that walks away incredibly inspired.”
The 2024 Homeless World Cup will take place in Seoul in October, marking the first time the tournament will be held in Asia since being introduced in 2003.
Those looking to sign up for April’s 'World United 5k' 2 can do so here.
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