'The World Cup is shifting the dial': My roadtrip to the home of Friday Night Lights showed how soccer is infiltrating diehard American football towns in Trump's heartland - thanks to Pochettino's USA heroes, Juventus and an ex-Arsenal wonderkid

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Lothar Matthaus blames 'wives and girlfriends' interfering at German camp for country's embarrassing World Cup exit - as football legend claims team only participated for 'a free family holiday'
Serena Williams' Wimbledon doubles match with sister Venus in major doubt as she suffers knee injury during comeback
England vs DR Congo - World Cup LIVE: Moment of truth for Thomas Tuchel's Three Lions as football fans descend on Atlanta for Round of 32 clash
Tottenham transfer briefing: Two Premier League wingers on shortlist, how they can afford to keep spending, why De Zerbi demanded Fernandes and Tonali and the stars heading for the exit
England have been fortunate so far at this World Cup... tonight they must play like Thomas Tuchel told us they would and make their big move, writes IAN LADYMAN
Three gunshots, a stolen moped and blood pouring onto the streets where World Cup fans were partying: RIATH AL-SAMARRAI witnesses a terrifying reminder of America's thinly veiled brutal side that lurks behind this tournament
Rory McIlroy and Erica Stoll take Wimbledon: Golf star dons Masters jacket as he's joined by his wife in SW19 after moving from the United States to £9m mega-mansion in Surrey
England fans hit Atlanta: Travelling Three Lions supporters taunt eliminated Germany with inflatable spitfires, mock the Tartan Army and do the CONGA ahead of World Cup clash with DR Congo
Mathematician World Cup expert who predicted the last THREE winners is brutally mocked by Neymar after getting his 2026 prediction badly wrong - but insists he will NOT change his model
Crystal Palace transfer briefing: The three signings they want to boost Europa League tilt, latest on new contracts for Dean Henderson, Chris Richards and Daichi Kamada and why there's no pressure to sell Jean-Philippe Mateta
Revealed: The box of tricks that made Thomas Tuchel king of the knockouts - how his methods spooked Pep Guardiola, the secret to handling pressure and why breathing exercises, maths and embarrassing T-shirts will win penalty shootouts for England
Is Ben Stokes really done with international cricket? Sky Bet offering 7/4 odds for the former England Test captain to play in the 2027 Ashes
'The World Cup is shifting the dial': My roadtrip to the home of Friday Night Lights showed how soccer is infiltrating diehard American football towns in Trump's heartland - thanks to Pochettino's USA heroes, Juventus and an ex-Arsenal wonderkid
Mexico fans sing disgraceful homophobic chant at the World Cup AGAIN during win over Ecuador as officials struggle to clamp down on repeat offenders
From Bazball to backwards: Ben Stokes rescued England - but early heroics can't hide the fact his naive, tin-eared team has gone backwards, didn't win the series that matter most and is now left in a rare old mess
INSIDE THE ENGLAND CAMP: Is right back cursed? The two options Thomas Tuchel is mulling over to fill in for Round of 32 match with DR Congo
Kylian Mbappe has entered that state of sweet sporting purity where his body makes decisions before the mind is even engaged... World Cups are made for unstoppable performances like his, writes IAN LADYMAN
Forest Green Rovers - owned by eco tycoon Dale Vince - SCRAP their women's team to 'concentrate their resources' on the men's side
Versatile Cadan Murley does not possess try machine Noah Caluori's X-Factor - but this is why Steve Borthwick's safety first selection makes perfect sense for England up against the fearsome Springboks, writes NIK SIMON
Think you're a true fan, know your football legends or your England goalscorers? Play Daily Mail Sport's exclusive World Cup games all tournament long
Arsenal star becomes second player to be sent off at World Cup for covering his mouth - as Ecuador are knocked out at the last-32 stage by Mexico
DR Congo's statue superfan will NOT attend World Cup clash against England and is stranded in Mexico after being denied US visa - with Gen Z version set to replace him
Two Mexican fans are crushed to death during huge celebration after host nation's last-32 World Cup win
Erling Haaland seizes his moment to send Norway through, the team-mate on the radar of Premier League clubs and why this could be restorative for Amad Diallo despite World Cup heartbreak, writes IAN HERBERT

Unlock more of the best World Cup coverage with a DailyMail+ subscription - brilliant exclusives, in-depth insight and the writers you love every day

By IAN HERBERT, DEPUTY CHIEF SPORTS WRITER

Published: 12:00 BST, 30 June 2026 | Updated: 13:21 BST, 30 June 2026

They’d told me that you could walk into a bar in Odessa, West Texas, and find people unaware who Lionel Messi was. It doesn't prove quite so but the sentiment is broadly accurate.

Of the 70 wall-to-wall screens showing sports at the Walk-On Sports Bar, only one is screening a World Cup game, while at The House, a downtown bar, some people can’t identify a single member of the USA team and other names don’t register. David Beckham? Harry Kane? Blank looks.

It’s a long, flat, hot road out to Odessa, 350 straight miles west from Dallas on Interstate 20 past billboards for Love’s and Muddy Mike’s and Mary’s Cafe and, when you hit the oilfields of the Permian Basin, 250 miles short of El Paso, billboards appear for guns and cowboy hats and drilling insurance.

It’s a long road from the World Cup, too, because this is dyed-in-the-wool American football turf, where college football team players fill 300-page season preview magazines piled in stores where we, with our 'soccer' mindset, would expect World Cup literature to be.

Odessa is Trump heartland – jaded, careworn and on edge about the renewables talk which is an existential threat to the nodding oil field pump jacks which bring the crude up. It’s a place where a good day or bad day depends on the price of oil and where Trump restoring ‘drill, baby, drill’ is seen as a salvation. No one knows for how long.

But it has a particular kind of fame as the home of Permian High School, whose football team were immortalised in Buzz Bissinger classic bestselling book Friday Night Lights which followed them for a season. It later became the basis of a hit film and TV series.

Odessa, West Texas, is American football territory and home of the Permian High School Panthers, immortalised in the classic book 'Friday Night Lights'

The Permian Panthers regularly play in the Texas state finals and sell out their 19,000-capacity stadium

The pump jacks drag up the crude oil in Odessa's oil fields

It’s clear what soccer and the World Cup are up against when the name of Permian High School head American football coach Jeff Ellison elicits considerably more of a reaction than Mauricio Pochettino in The House and there are times, when Ellison is eating out with his family, that he’ll ask for a secluded corner where he might not be recognised.

The school’s varsity team of 15-to-18-year-olds, the Permian Panthers, regularly play for the Texas state championship and sell out their 19,000-capacity stadium. The Friday Night Lights burn as bright as ever.

I meet Ellison beneath the iconic Panthers sign outside the school which lists the six occasions, going back to 1965, when they were Texas state champions, and the seven in which they went undefeated, including the legendary 1989 season when they were named the best football varsity team in the country.

When Trump visited Odessa a few years back, his staff contacted Ellison to say he wanted an audience. An image of that day sits in a cabinet in the office, along with the Permian football helmet that Trump signed.

Football is community, tradition and rite of passage out here. Yet something significant happened here last year which told the place that the school’s soccer players were not an irrelevance.

When Ellison needed a strong kicker, he asked the school’s soccer coach, Luis Carmona, whether he had someone with ‘a strong leg’. Carmona recommended Iker Munos, his 18-year-old No 10 and best, most creative player. Munos tried out for Ellison and has proved a revelation, capable of a 49-yard field goal.

‘He’s one of our strongest kickers,’ says Ellison. ‘And he is also vital to our soccer team. We’ve loved that interaction between our sports and we don’t see football as in competition with soccer. Iker being among us generates more interest in soccer among our guys. They’re talking soccer. The World Cup is helping with that.’

The difficulties for Carmona running Permian soccer include the huge distances his teams must travel for games, with such a fledgling Texas infrastructure – typically, vast five-hour road trips to the big cities of Dallas, Austin and El Paso. A drive around Odessa on this visit elicits no sight of soccer pitches within a 10-mile radius.

But Munos is not the only soccer talent. Cason Nabarrette has been signed from Permian to the academy of the team in near-namesake Odisea, a Spanish club playing in Valencia's regional leagues, and the big European clubs have their eyes and ears to the ground out here. While I visit, Juventus have been running a three-day soccer camp, with a scouting incentive. ‘Though we are behind, we are making small steps,’ Carmona says.

American football is community, tradition and rite of passage out here where a boy's masculinity may be questioned if he does not take up the sport

It's a far cry from Los Angeles where World Cup fever is in full swing

A World Cup watch party - spot the Mexico shirts hinting at the Hispanic American influence on soccer's growth

For generations of American boys, soccer was a sport you played until 6th and 7th grade – Britain’s Year 7 and 8 – but then you moved to football and your masculinity was questioned if you didn’t.

Football will always dominate here, and Carmona says he still finds himself working on basic skills with 12-year-olds, when the British equivalents will be at that stage by the age of six. But when he started as Permian’s coach, 22 years ago, he’d be struggling to make teams up. These days he has 90 to 100 players.

The changing profile of the school is significant. Permian High has a far bigger Hispanic-American profile than when the football team were last state champions. The most talked-about players among Carmona’s squad are Messi and Emiliano Martinez. Hispanic-Americans are a driving force in US soccer.

The push to develop the sport is even more evident in Midland, a more affluent neighbouring city that the oil executives have tended to make home. West Texas FC – a soccer club formed in 2023 by two local property developers – has grown rapidly and is now attracting crowds of 2,000 in fourth-tier semi-professional USL2.

‘Things have really blown up for us, and we’re trying to pick up the best ideas from Europe and elsewhere,’ says Melissa Milan, one of the club’s directors.

The team has an Australian coach and players of 10 nationalities. As we speak, they’re preparing for some profile being offered by the Midland RockHounds minor league baseball team, which is hosting a ‘World Soccer Weekend’ around its game and has asked West Texas along. ‘Sports aren’t competing with each other – that’s not the American way,’ says Milan.

On the outskirts of Odessa, more evidence of cut-through. FIFA licensed collectable ‘ballers’ and World Cup Panini stickers are on sale at the Exxon gas station. Some have been sold and Shannon, one of the staff, says she has been watching USA games – though ‘Harry Kane’ still doesn’t register.

During the onward drive north across vast, flat oil lands into New Mexico, there’s evidence that a group of Scots were present at a time when football was taking hold back at home. A straight 30-mile road – ‘so lonely that we call it haunted’, they tell me in the gas station at its end point in Hagerman, in the Pecos Valley – is called East Aberdeen Street. A nod to the Scottish immigrants who first settled there but didn’t lay down a football culture.

The name of Permian High School head American Football coach Jeff Ellison elicits more of a reaction than the name ‘Mauricio Pochettino’ in Odessa - but there is some cut through

Alex Freeman celebrates scoring for the United States in their opening World Cup match

Gedion Zelalem, the first player born after Arsene Wenger took over at Arsenal to make his Gunners debut, is now at New Mexico United in a sign that times are changing

In some of the most remote one-horse towns in rural New Mexico, the football stronghold looks indomitable. At Dexter, the banners and the bunting proclaim: ‘Blue Pride – Dexter Demons.’ In Roswell, the self-appointed UFO capital of the USA because of an unidentified craft which landed 75 miles away in 1947, it’s the Hornets.

In Albuquerque, six miles from Odessa and 500 from the Mexican border, the nascent soccer culture thrives. A crowd of 2,000 people are gathering before a big screen in the main square to watch Mexico beat Czechia and the local New Mexico United, who play in America’s second-tier USL Championship, are handing out merchandise to catch the wave.

The club was formed in 2018, and they now have former Arsenal and Rangers midfielder Gedion Zelalem - the first player born after Arsene Wenger took charge in north London to make his debut for the Gunners - and ex-Manchester United centre back Tyler Blackett in their squad. ‘We’ve had no major sports team here and we wanted to harness the huge fanbase for football,’ says one of the club staff at the event.

But it’s in Odessa, where the challenge for soccer is so huge, that the World Cup’s subtle but distinct impression on its seemingly most unreachable people seems most significant. A nine-year-old on the school perimeter is wearing an Argentina top and coach Ellison will be sitting down to see Pochettino’s USA play Bosnia-Herzegovina in the last 32 on Thursday. ‘I don’t know where all the games have been played but I think the coach and the way he works and communicates are interesting,’ he says.

‘Sports of all kinds are helping our kids to develop as people. That’s at the heart of school and college sport. Of course we want soccer to grow. We’re pleased to see the World Cup is shifting the dial.’

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Versatile Cadan Murley does not possess try machine Noah Caluori's X-Factor - but this is why Steve...
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Serena Williams' adoring children watch their mum bow out of Wimbledon Singles as her Centre Court comeback ends in Round 1 defeat: Family, friends and fans cheer 44-year-old's amazing return - after getting back into shape with the help of fat jabs
Serena Williams' Wimbledon comeback comes to gutting end as tennis legend, 44, crashes out in opening round defeat in front of emotional husband and kids
Mexico fans sing disgraceful homophobic chant at the World Cup AGAIN during win over Ecuador as officials struggle to clamp down on repeat offenders
Furious local media accuse Virgil van Dijk of 'ruining Dutch football' with Liverpool star told his 'time is up' following the Netherlands' dramatic World Cup exit to Morocco
Tottenham win £85m race for Man United's top summer target Mateus Fernandes as Red Devils refuse to get into bidding war with their Premier League rivals
LeBron James is LEAVING Los Angeles Lakers in bombshell NBA move
Arsenal star becomes second player to be sent off at World Cup for covering his mouth - as Ecuador are knocked out at the last-32 stage by Mexico
Serena Williams gets blasted for 'arrogant' off-court act after falling short in Wimbledon comeback: 'That's not on'
Erling Haaland's dad fights back tears in the stands after watching his son fire Norway into the last-16 of the World Cup
France vs Sweden - World Cup last 32 RECAP: Tournament favourites run riot as Kylian Mbappe, Bradley Barcola and Michael Olise link up to score three goals in clinical display
Ronald Koeman RESIGNS as Netherlands head coach hours after World Cup exit following shootout defeat by Morocco
The DR will see you now! Why Congo are NOT the walkover England want before World Cup gets tough: Prepare for not many goals, some under-rated Premier League stars - and a FLORIST as their boss!
Novak Djokovic leads calls for Home Office to allow Boris Becker to return to Wimbledon - with tennis legend currently unable to return to UK following prison sentence
Kylian Mbappe is hot on Lionel Messi's heels as France sensation scores twice in 3-0 win over Sweden to move one behind Argentina great in World Cup goal charts
Ivory Coast vs Norway - World Cup last 32 RECAP: Erling Haaland sends his side through with 86th-minute winner to set up knockout clash with Brazil
World Cup Breakfast: Beware, England! Imperious Mexico set up daunting potential last-16 showdown against Three Lions, Kylian Mbappe breaks ANOTHER record, match highlights - and what to look out for today
Mexico vs Ecuador - World Cup last 32 RECAP: Co-hosts end 40-year wait for a knockout win and march into the round of 16... after Raul Jimenez sealed victory with stunning strike in Mexico City
US tennis star Ben Shelton suffers shock first-round Wimbledon exit after grueling five-set battle against World No 140
REVEALED: Phil Mickelson's wife's response as golf great hit with sexual misconduct claims
Ashley Cole leaves Cesena job just THREE months after landing gig in Italy: Ex-Chelsea star quits over 'change in strategy' following talks with sporting director
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Source: Dailymail.com

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