Longtime Tierrasanta resident Joe Connor, the self-acclaimed “GOAT of sports travel,” has visited 189 countries and 44 territories, watching a soccer match in 144 of them — including 47 of the 48 nations in the expanded World Cup that kicks off Friday and continues for the next seven weeks across North America.
None of that happens, probably, if not for his finger and his leg.
First, the finger.
Connor grew up in Connecticut, attended TCU and briefly lived in Florida before moving to San Diego at age 24 on a whim, figuring: “What the heck, I’ve got nothing to lose.” He worked in a bookstore and then at radio stations, first running the board overnight at KOGO for $5 per hour and then as a producer for former Charger Hank Bauer’s sports talk show on KMFB.
He didn’t always get along with Bauer, and one day in 1998, Connor flipped him the bird.
The next morning, he was summoned to the program director’s office and summarily dismissed.
“I got home after getting fired,” Connor says, “and I’m like, ‘OK, it’s the middle of the summer, (Sammy) Sosa and (Mark) McGwire is going on. I’m going to do a road trip.’”
He flew to Columbus, Ohio, rented a Dodge Neon and toured 15 Major League Baseball parks over the next three weeks.
That grew into an obsession to see every MLB ballpark, then even NFL, NHL and NBA venue. Then every Division I college venue in those sports.
From February 2018 to December 2019, he spent 675 consecutive days seeing sporting events across 48 states, driving 150,000 miles in two different cars painted in American flags to raise awareness for veterans’ charities and first responders, starting with a Cal Baptist basketball game in Riverside and ending with a San Diego Gulls hockey game at Pechanga Arena.
In 2006, he embarked on another ambitious odyssey, visiting 272 baseball parks over 216 days.
In 2022, to celebrate his 50th birthday, he attended a sporting event in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico and the country’s largest Native American reservation.
Tierrasanta resident Joe Connor attends a soccer match between South Africa and Lesotho. (Photo courtesy of Joe Connor)
Having “conquered” American sports, he set his sights on distant shores, planning to circumnavigate the globe. He’d start in New Zealand in November 2022 with the women’s rugby World Cup.
Except he developed a blood clot in his leg, and his cardiologist advised him to stay home and rest. Bored, he started watching a different World Cup on television, the quadrennial soccer tournament held in Qatar in November 2022 instead of its usual June slot to avoid triple-digit summer temperatures.
Soccer?
He admits it: He despised it.
He grew up an ice hockey player, the son of a Hartford Whalers season-ticket holder. His only contact with the beautiful game came during a year at a small prep school that required students to play a sport in each season, and he had nothing else to do that fall.
“So I tried soccer,” Connor says. “I hated it, all the running, and nobody scored. We weren’t very good, I wasn’t any good. And it was cold. It would be windy and freezing. I hated it.”
Through his domestic travels, he had seen an occasional Major League Soccer or USL match, but only because he was in a city to see another sport.
“It was something to do,” Connor says. “I didn’t really know the rules that well. I didn’t know offside.”
And another thing:
“I don’t like the draw thing. I don’t get it, especially a scoreless draw. Come on. That’s my biggest beef with the sport. It’s not part of our culture.”
But something about the telecasts from the 2022 World Cup in Qatar kept drawing him back, the passion, the nationalism, the fervor, the intensity, the jubilation, the humanity. It got him thinking: Maybe he was missing out on an entire segment of sports travel.
“I’ve always been very curious,” says Connor, now 54. “Both my parents were very curious.”
His next trip was to Antarctica, the only continent he had yet to visit, and he noticed that he would have to fly to South America first. So he sidetracked to see the famed River-Boca derby in Argentina, the Cali Clasico in Colombia, Vasco da Gama in Brazil, Defensor Sporting in Uruguay, Cerro Porteno in Paraguay, The Strongest in Bolivia, Alianza Lima in Peru.
Joe Connor’s quest to see soccer in as many countries as possible first took him to South America and Brazil. (Photo courtesy of Joe Connor)
The following year, he decided to try seeing soccer matches in all 48 nations of the 2026 World Cup hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada. Or try to.
The problem: He wouldn’t know most of the field until late 2025, and some until regional playoffs concluded this March.
The solution: Hit as many as he could before qualifying was complete (or in some cases, even started).
Between January 2023 and April 2026, Connor took 11 separate international trips, clicking off all but 15 sovereign countries. The only World Cup entrant where he didn’t see a match, for obvious reasons, is Iran. He actually received provisional approval to visit last summer, but scrapped the trip as tensions rose and bombs fell.
He did, however, see Iran’s national team play at Tajikistan in a regional tournament last September. Close enough.
Following the South America and Antarctica trip, he spent five months in Asia and Oceania. Saw soccer in Australia, Bhutan, China, Fiji, Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Thailand, Vietnam and French Polynesia.
He came home for two months, then headed to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, clicking off 20 more countries.
He came home for a month and went to the Caribbean. Home for another month, then Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa that included the quarterfinals of the Yamle Yamle Cup in Zanzibar (off the coast of Tanzania) that went to a nine-round penalty shootout.
Home for two months, then back to Africa for a wild trip with stops in Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal and Togo.
He posts YouTube videos of some of his adventures, often interspersing rhyming riffs mimicking Muhammad Ali, whom he credits with his life-affirming quotation: “Don’t count the days, make the days count.”
In Nouakchott, Mauritania, he pops up on camera while recording a match between Chemal FC and ASC Gendrim at Cheikha Ould Boïdiya Stadium.
“I’m the GOAT, the best of all time, Clementine, blow your mind, super freak of sports travel,” Connor says in Ali’s trademark rapid staccato. “I’m the Superman, the man of steel, where’s the real deal? … I’m in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. You can’t have a beer here, but you can still go to a football game.”
That was trip No. 6 of 11. He returned to Africa and the Middle East in the spring of 2025, Asia last summer, Central America last fall, the Caribbean in February.
The final trip came in March and April, ticking off the World Cup nations he had missed: Cabo Verde, Turkiye, Czechia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jordan, Mexico and New Zealand.
He is single and has no kids. Jobs as a career coach, freelance sports journalist and real estate investor allow him the flexibility and enough money to travel.
It’s a small cost, though, for the priceless experiences.
The United States is a sports-loving nation. Soccer, Connor realized, can transcend sports and approach religion.
Fans versus fanatics.
“The main thing I took away from soccer is that it’s tied to the culture of not every country but a lot of the countries, especially pretty much everywhere in Africa and South America and Europe and a lot of other places,” Connor says. “Just how passionate and how much the sport is tied to the identities of these countries.
“And it’s not just the World Cup, which is every four years. I would go to second- and third-division matches, and they’re going nuts. Soccer is just different.”
A match with Port Vale FC in England’s third division stuck with him. It was a Thursday night, and 11,000 packed into the rickety stadium in Stoke-on-Trent.
As players walk onto the field, fans link arms and belt out the Elvis Presley song, “The Wonder of You,” including the requisite whooos and whaaas.
“That,” Connor says, “was more memorable than the match.”