As the lights swirled in the darkness of an aging San Diego arena three weekend ago, stepped through the “O” of a giant inflatable “Sockers” sign. On the other side of the fog machines, the spotlight found him: it was Landon Donovan, now 37 years of age, and still American men soccer’s only true household name.
Even before he stepped out of retirement here for the third time (following a brief reunion in 2016 with the LA Galaxy and a half-season at Mexico’s Club Leon in 2018), the fact that Donovan would join the Sockers – for a reported $250,000 for the remaining half of the Major Arena Soccer League season – seemed odd. The San Diego Sockers? The indoor soccer team? For a player with 157 international caps, this quirky subgenre of the sport, with its $2 Bud Light nights, its frenetic play and its games in places like Turlock, California and Hidalgo, Texas, seems like unfamiliar territory. But in the context of Donovan’s eclectic career it is of a piece with all his other moves that American soccer fans have debated for the past 20 years.
Donovan has always been a steely-eyed competitor on the pitch and a fully formed, self-aware human being off it – one who chose to play the bulk of his career domestically, once took a sabbatical to tour Cambodia during World Cup qualifying, and was unafraid to publicly frame that and other decisions in the context of mental health. He’s the nation’s best-ever male player who has a taste for starring in subversive commercials; the reluctant-hero archetype who happens to be blessed with quickness, dynamism, vision, and the je ne sais quoi that prolific goalscorers possess. Yet despite two successful loan spells at Everton and an enviable highlight reel of World Cup goals, Donovan may also be remembered, perhaps unfairly, as the talented American who left Europe and spent the prime of his career at the LA Galaxy – a club where other stars tend to end theirs.
This latest comeback, then, seemed a good opportunity to attempt to square the dueling narratives of a star who, his detractors will forever allege, never fully tested himself, with that of a man simply intent on his life as well as he can – soccer or no soccer. In other words, to try to understand how someone so talented can seemingly walk away from the game at will, yet return to it just as easily.
Donovan is famously a cracking interview. So it went on a sunny February day in San Diego, over a post-practice lunch near the ocean. I’d only just turned on the recorder when he said, “I don’t have this crazy burning desire to play soccer like most people do.” Since his first retirement, in 2014, he’s rarely kicked a soccer ball in his own time. Instead his wife Hannah, a former college tennis player who grew up in San Diego got him hooked on her chosen sport. “She kicked my ass the first time we played, and every time subsequently, so I wanted to get better and better,” he says. “And now I love it. I can’t get enough.” He says tennis is how he now seeks the adrenaline rush that pro athletes become conditioned to. That and being a father to three kids ages three and under fill up his days just fine, he says.
But to understand how a generational talent like him regards soccer the way he does, even as he continues to play the game, you have to go back to his childhood. His relationship with the game was unique. “I knew nothing about world soccer,” he says. “I just liked playing the game. So there was no, ‘Oh, if I could play for Manchester United’ – that never came into my head.”
There was no career path whatsoever; all he wanted out of soccer was to earn a college scholarship. But the game had other plans for him. His star turns in youth tournaments earned him a contract with Bayer Leverkusen. He was unhappy there, largely because he wasn’t getting games, and a year or so later he joined Major League Soccer.
“I was just doing what my gut was saying, which was like, ‘Landon, you need to play soccer.’ I didn’t care about playing at Bayer Leverkusen – they were in the Champions League and all this – I didn’t give a fuck, I just wanted to play soccer. So I’m glad I got out of there as quickly as I could, because I wanted to play. I needed to be happy.”
Even though he went on to win six MLS championships, his move to the States ruffled the plumes of a certain kind of Eurocentric American fan – ones who projected all their hopes and ambitions for US soccer onto Donovan. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, of course, and Donovan has always been aware of the criticism he’s taken. The expectations of an athlete from fans and coaches are tough to deal with, and it took Donovan years, and therapy, to come to terms with it. “Since I was 16, everything was planned for me,” he says. “You were told what to do, when to do it and how to do it, and that carried into my personal life, where I’d expect people I was dating to tell me where we’re going and when. That’s all I knew. So at some point I had this light – like, wait a minute, I can have my own ideas and make my own decisions. That was really powerful. … [Now] I really try hard not to just accept everything as society says it’s supposed to be.”
Since that epiphany, he’s been intent on living his own life. It’s a fairly low-key one – he’s not the Lamborghini-collecting type of star. And, he says that having money since he was a teenager and not being beholden to it is liberating: it’s allowed him to do what he wants, which sometimes means leaving some on the table. When he retired from the Galaxy in 2014 with three years remaining on his contract, he says he walked away from $6m to $7m. Nevertheless, “If I stayed another year, I could see myself becoming very depressed, because I just wasn’t excited doing it,” he says. “For me, mundane is not healthy.”
His first retirement, however, wasn’t what he’d planned. “My whole career, I used to say, ‘I can’t wait till I’m done: I can live in one place, I can travel, and I can golf every day.’ After I was done with the Galaxy, for six months I did nothing but golf every day – and I was bored out of my mind. I said, ‘This isn’t me.’ I need something to go after. I need somewhere to focus that attention.”
First it was broadcasting. He also became the public face of a redevelopment project to bring an MLS team to San Diego. He says he enjoyed getting involved in the community and talking to people as humans rather than through the usual mediums of selfies and autographs. But the ballot measure was defeated.
Then soccer came calling again, as it always does. It was a text message from a friend about playing for the Sockers. Donovan’s decision-making process, as he describes it, is ludicrously simple. It involves trusting his gut and talking to his wife, and it’s based on two criteria: Will it bring him happiness? And is it good for him and his family? Donovan, who appears to have been practicing living in the moment long before it was cool, signed less than a week later.
The Sockers checked those boxes. And he gets to feel the gameday energy once again – the thing he misses most when he’s not playing. “There’s nothing in life that mimics an experience like that,” he says. “There’s nothing you could go through where you have thousands of people cheering for you, or against you, with something at stake. Most humans are not used to that, so it’s addicting. I love it. We’re social creatures, so to feel that energy is very tangible.”
That energy was visible, even radiant in his second game for the Sockers. As he once again emerged from the inflatable sign, through the fog and into the spotlight, his eyes were wide and his smile was huge. He scored two goals in a 13–2 drubbing of the Turlock Express – his first just 12 seconds into the game.
After the match, down in the bowels of the old stadium, his eyes were still ablaze, and energy was still visibly coursing through his body. He says to me: “Did you enjoy that?” There was no need to ask him the same.