Mark Sochon

Rodri in 2024: “When I turned 14, I went to this summer camp in the middle of the forest in Connecticut. Even the name, ‘Conn-et-ee-cut,’ sounded crazy for a kid from Madrid. But when I arrived, it was like I was stepping into a Hollywood movie. You know the movies where the kids go to the camp on a big lake and there’s wooden canoes and you’re climbing trees and sleeping in tents and starting fires with sticks? It was really like that. You’re eating the marshmallows and the biscuits, you know? Over the fire? With the chocolate? S’mores. Incredible. No phones. No Wi-Fi. I’m all by myself in a new country, trying to make friends. ‘Hello, I am Rodrigo. I am from Madrid.’ (My teammates are already laughing, I can hear them.) I was always saying, in my broken English, ‘OK, guys, when are we going to play football?’ ‘Yeah, Rodrigo. We’re playing later. We’re gonna throw the pig skin around.’ I’m thinking: ‘The pig skin??’ ‘Come on, bro. Like the NFL.’ Honestly, I kind of liked it. It was fun. But I kept saying, ‘I want to play soccer, guys.’ ‘Sawker? We’re not playing sawker, mayn.’ To make it worse, I actually arrived there during the start of the 2010 World Cup. I couldn’t even check the internet, so I was in pain. But there was a little computer in the office of the main cabin, and every single day, I would ask the camp counselors to tell me who won the games. Spain lost the first match to Switzerland, if you remember. I thought they were messing with me. ‘Switzerland? Really? You sure you googled it right?’ Anyway, time is going by, and Spain start playing better. Knockouts — they keep winning. Then the semifinal against Germany — I’m dying. I’m on a canoeing trip, I think. I keep asking the main counselor, ‘Please, please can you just find out the score?’ Finally, we get back to the cabins and somebody tells me: ‘Spain are in the final.’ I never felt so far from home, but also close to home, if you understand what I mean. For the final, I begged the main counselor to let me watch on his computer. He said OK, sure. Then he brings out this computer, and it’s like a 10-inch screen. You remember those mini laptop PCs? It was one of those. Tiny. I’m thinking: It’s beautiful. I don’t care. Just let me watch. I don’t know how we did it, because we were in the middle of the woods, but I must have found a stream that was not exactly legal, and I watched the final, surrounded by Americans who didn’t care about what was happening. When Iniesta scored, I literally started screaming and I ran outside and sprinted around the lake. ‘Vaaaamoooooosssss!!!!!!!!!! Aaaahahhhhhhhhh ¡¡¡¡¡jajajajajajajaja!!!! ¡Viva España!’ The Americans thought I was crazy. They were shaking their heads. They were looking at me like, ‘Wait, is the Spanish guy crying? Over the sawker?’ They couldn’t understand what it meant to me. They thought I was crazy. And maybe I am crazy.” playerstribu.ne/Rodri @ManCity | @SEFutbol