Everybody, Welcome to the Party.

Abdoulaye Diallo arrived in New York from West Africa young enough to have become anything. He could have played basketball, run track, or picked up American football. Soccer was the only thing he ever considered.

He was playing at a park in Queens when a kid came up and told him about a new team. You should come play with us. He went. A few years later he was in Spain, then Portugal, then Greece, then Turkey. None of it, he says, would have been possible without the game.

He goes by Diallo. In the early days, closer friends called him something else. He is a lefty. That is all you need to know.

What it cost to get to practice

Growing up in Queens, finding a team serious enough to develop you was not straightforward. Diallo and his brother Barry would travel thirty minutes to the nearest club that was worth the trip. After middle school, they started going to Manhattan Soccer Club on Randalls Island.

"To get to Manhattan Soccer Club from Queens, you take the train up to 125th Street, and then you take a bus. The people who live there know that it is one of the worst buses you can take. Imagine a 13 or 14-year-old kid going through that to get to training, practice finishes at 7:30 in the evening, and you're going back home the same exact way," Diallo says. 

That commute was not exceptional. It was just what you did if you wanted to play at a level that matched your ambition. 

The soccer field in LeFrak City, Queens, where he grew up playing, was eventually removed during renovations to the area. Gentrification took it out. The one thing the community was attached to was gone.

"In Turkey, right outside the facility where I was staying, there was a soccer field. I have never seen anything like that in New York, and I have been here 17, 18 years."

He pauses before continuing. Basketball courts, sure. American football, yes. But a soccer field just there, available, belonging to the neighbourhood: that was something else entirely.

Soccer becoming cool, and what that actually means

Diallo has been in New York long enough to watch the city's relationship with soccer change. When he was a kid making that bus journey to Randalls Island, the game was not fashionable. Now people wear soccer shirts in the summer. Cleats have become a fashion item. The world, as he puts it, is catching on.

"Shit, everybody, welcome to the party. We have been doing this. We have been living like this."

That shift matters to him not because of the recognition but because of what it signals for the kids coming up now. The spaces that were hard to find, the teams that were hard to afford, the commutes that lasted longer than the sessions: those are still real. But more people are paying attention, and more people paying attention means more people building.

What KidSuper actually is

Diallo has been part of KidSuper FC long enough to remember when Colm Dillane was just a guy who could play. He did not know about the fashion brand at first. Then the ball came to Colm, and the first touch told him everything he needed to know.

"You can tell someone is a good soccer player from the first touch. With the ball, he is super quick. If you had just seen him, you would never guess."

He still wears some of Colm's clothes to work. His clients notice. That is when he gets to say: yeah, that is my boy.

What he describes about the KidSuper rooftop is not a pitch. It is a building. You walk in, and beautiful clothing and fashion are everywhere. Then there is a music studio and a podcast studio. You go upstairs, and there is a lounge with a massive screen for watching soccer. And right outside that is the field, in New York City, on a rooftop, belonging to someone who just decided it should exist.

"Imagine you are a kid and someone gave you all the money in the world to set something up for yourself. That is the building that he has. It does not get more legendary."

The games that happen there are serious. Former professionals, D1 players, people who still have everything in them. Diallo describes it simply: they are dogs. The ball moves. People are going for nutmegs and rainbow flicks. And nobody is trying to hurt each other, but nobody is taking it easy either.

If you are a baller, you are welcome

The team at KidSuper FC includes players from across the world. Diallo describes a game at Columbia University during Ramadan. They arrived at 7pm, broke the fast together, started praying on the pitch. A couple of the guys were Muslim. One was Albanian. Then a player from the opposing team ran over and joined them.

"That is what soccer did. You can go be Muslim and that is what KidSuper has been going for the longest. Different cultures, different people from all over the world, coming together."

He has a wife and two daughters now. Every Tuesday he does personal training. Every Sunday he is on the rooftop with KidSuper. Those things do not compete with each other. They fit.

Ask him what it is about soccer that nothing else can replicate and he does not have a clean answer. He just knows it is there.

"There is something about the game that you cannot find somewhere else. You cannot find it in anything else. I came to the States so young that I could have picked up anything. But no. It was still soccer."

He thinks about what the rooftop could become. The players who go there, the footage that gets captured, and the level that shows up every Sunday. He sees it the way he saw Colm's first touch: quietly, before anyone else did, knowing immediately what it meant.

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