​Orlando wanted World Cup games badly. We pushed our bid, lobbied hard, and dreamed of Lake Eola bathed in global colors, downtown buzzing with supporters from six continents, and Camping World Stadium reclaiming a place on soccer’s biggest stage just as it did in 1994. Yet FIFA passed us by this time. Perhaps we’ve been looking at it the wrong way all along. Even without hosting matches, Orlando gave the World Cup something far more meaningful: a rising American star in Alex Freeman. He isn’t just playing in the World Cup—he’s starting and scoring, emerging as one of the tournament’s breakout players. The passport says he grew up in South Florida and carries an NFL family name, but the world is discovering a soccer player forged in Central Florida. That should matter to this city and fill Orlando with pride.
Long before he was turning out for Villarreal in Spain’s top division, long before United States coach Mauricio Pochettino called Freeman a player with “the potential to be one of the best in his position in the world,” and long before the United States entrusted its World Cup hopes to a 21-year-old right back, a pivotal choice was made during the pandemic. A mother faced a difficult decision as her teenage son faced a move 200 miles away. Orlando City’s youth academy believed in a kid that Inter Miami’s academy had overlooked, and coach Javier Carrillo saw something in him that others hadn’t. Carrillo first coached Freeman at Weston FC, a respected South Florida academy, before leaving to run the U-17 program at Orlando City’s academy. When Carrillo arrived in Central Florida, Freeman had just been turned down by Inter Miami, and Carrillo urged Freeman to relocate north with him.
The move, however, was far from simple. Freeman was only 15, his family wasn’t moving, and he would have to live with a host family he’d never met. Remarkably, the host family agreed to open their home to Freeman even though their own son would be competing against him for minutes. “Imagine being in the middle of COVID, and you have a 15-year-old kid whose former coach is knocking on your door saying, ‘Listen, I have a great opportunity for your son, but he’s going to have to move to Orlando, and he’ll be playing a different position than he plays now and he’s going to be living with a family he doesn’t know,’” Carrillo recalls Freeman’s mother’s initial skepticism. “It was challenging to say the least, and there was a lot of back and forth, but in the end everybody agreed, and it all paid off.” It wasn’t merely a soccer decision; it was a leap of faith that would become the defining moment in Alex Freeman’s developing career. Freeman has since become a symbol of Orlando’s enduring impact on the sport.