{"id":268207,"date":"2026-06-16T04:32:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T04:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/268207\/"},"modified":"2026-06-16T04:32:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T04:32:45","slug":"born-in-brooklyn-raised-in-london-folarin-balogun-lights-up-the-world-cup-for-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/268207\/","title":{"rendered":"Born in Brooklyn, raised in London, Folarin Balogun lights up the World Cup for the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SEATTLE\u00a0\u2014\u00a0If a pregnant Nigerian woman had been allowed to board a plane 25 years ago, the U.S. team\u2019s path through this summer\u2019s World Cup<\/a> may have unfolded much differently. Instead, a gate agent turned her away, insisting it wasn\u2019t safe for her to fly from New York to London.<\/p>\n

So Florence Balogun returned to Brooklyn, where she had been visiting relatives, and waited for her second son to be born. And when Folarin<\/a> arrived a few weeks later, entering the world just hours before Independence Day dawned, he did so as an American citizen.<\/p>\n

It was that quirk of fate that allowed Balogun, who lived just two months in the U.S., to represent the country on soccer\u2019s biggest stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m extremely proud my individual journey will come full circle now,\u201d he said before the tournament started. \u201cEspecially the World Cup being here, the opportunity to represent my nation. It\u2019s going to be something special for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first game certainly was, with Balogun scoring twice in the first half of a dominant 4-1 win over Paraguay<\/a>, becoming the first American with multiple goals in a World Cup game in 96 years while introducing himself to a country that may have known his name, but not his unique talent.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you don\u2019t know the type of player he is, you could see it today,\u201d midfielder Weston McKennie said. \u201cIt\u2019s the World Cup, everyone steps up to their maximum. In the past a lot of people maybe have not made him out to be a player like that.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe showed everyone he\u2019s willing to do the dirty work as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Balogun once had his pick of countries to represent. His birth in Brooklyn made him eligible to play for the U.S., his long-term residency in London made him eligible to play for England and his parents\u2019 nationality qualified him to play for Nigeria.<\/p>\n

He picked the U.S.<\/p>\n

And he\u2019s not the only one on the American team who had a choice. Half the men on the World Cup roster \u2014 including Christian Pulisic<\/a>, Gio Reyna and Malik Tillman, who each had a goal or an assist against Paraguay \u2014 are dual nationals, meaning they\u2019re playing for the U.S. because they want to, not because they have to.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re more American if you were not born over there because you had the choice to choose and you chose America,\u201d Kenneth Dest, the Surinamese-American father of Dutch-born defender Sergi\u00f1o Dest<\/a>, said in an HBO Max documentary.<\/p>\n

If America is a nation of immigrants, it only seems right that it should be represented in the World Cup by a team of immigrants. Like Tillman and Dest, who were born and raised in Europe, the sons of U.S. soldiers. Or forwards Tim Weah, the Brooklyn-born son of the former president of Liberia, and Alejandro Zendejas, who was born in Mexico but became a U.S. citizen at 13 after his father was naturalized.<\/p>\n

\"U.S. <\/p>\n

U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, right, celebrates his goal with Sergi\u00f1o Dest (2) and Chris Richards (3) against Paraguay.<\/p>\n

(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

The paternal great-grandmother of goalie Matt Turner fled religious persecution in Lithuania, with his Jewish ancestors changing their family name from Turnovski to Turner when they arrived at Ellis Island. The parents of midfielder Cristian Roldan came to the U.S. to escape civil wars in Central America, his father from Guatemala and his mother from El Salvador.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t wind up wearing the same uniform by accident, however. The recruitment of dual nationals dates to the 1980s under Hungarian-born manager Bob Gansler, who qualified the U.S. for the World Cup for the first time in 40 years with a team that included players born in Uruguay, Greece, Germany and El Salvador.<\/p>\n

It really began to scale up about 15 years ago under Bob Bradley and his successor Jurgen Klinsmann. Gregg Berhalter then took it to another level, recruiting more than a dozen dual nationals \u2014 including Dest, Tillman, Balogun and Turner \u2014 in his five years as coach.<\/p>\n

The practice isn\u2019t limited to the USMNT. When France won the World Cup in 2018, 16 of the 23 players on the team came from families that recently immigrated from places such as2 Zaire, Cameroon, Morocco, Angola, Congo or Algeria. More than half the players on Algeria\u2019s team in this summer\u2019s tournament were born in Europe while only seven men on Morocco\u2019s roster are from Morocco.<\/p>\n

Even Japan, famously homogeneous, has a Black goalkeeper who was born in Arkansas to a father from Ghana.<\/p>\n

\u201cInclusion always pulls sport forward,\u201d said Ronen Dorfan, a journalist and sports historian based in Budapest.<\/p>\n

Still, Balogun\u2019s journey is unusual \u2014 and not just because of the way it started.<\/p>\n

He was 2 months old when he and his mother finally made it to London and eight years later he was good enough to enter Arsenal\u2019s academy system. He made his junior international debut with England at 17, then three months later was invited to play four games for the U.S. U18 team.<\/p>\n

But Balogun\u2019s future appeared to be with England, especially after he scored seven times in 13 appearances with the U21 team, then followed that up with a career-high 21 goals for Reims in France\u2019s Ligue 1 in 2022-23.<\/p>\n

Yet neither performance earned him a call-up to a senior national team that was deep at forward.<\/p>\n

So the U.S., which desperately needed a fast, technical, two-footed No. 9, pounced, getting Balogun to withdraw from England\u2019s U21 training camp to make a secret visit to Florida. Once there, U.S. Soccer arranged for him to sit courtside at an NBA game, receive VIP passes to Universal Orlando Resort, attend spring training with the Yankees and meet with a number of U.S. national team players.<\/p>\n

With a schedule like this, his visit didn\u2019t stay secret for long. After studying pictures Balogun had posted on social media, some U.S. fans determined he was in Orlando and began peppering his feeds with American flag emojis. Others found him at his hotel and urged him to commit to the U.S., a plea his parents, citing a quirk in fate, had been making for years.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re American, they argued. You were born there.<\/p>\n

Six weeks later he did commit, with FIFA approving his request to switch allegiances from England to the U.S. A month after that, he scored his first senior international goal in the 2023 Nations League Finals and he\u2019s never looked back. Because if Balogun, 24, felt overlooked in England, he\u2019s felt looked after in the colonies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I committed and throughout this whole cycle and the whole journey to me being at this point, I\u2019ve always said the fans gave me so much motivation, showed me so much support,\u201d said Balogun, who speaks in a pronounced London accent. \u201cThe most important thing has been to repay that.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want to continue to show the fans I made the right decision. I want to continue to make the fans proud as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

He made a great start on that in his World Cup debut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEATTLE\u00a0\u2014\u00a0If a pregnant Nigerian woman had been allowed to board a plane 25 years ago, the U.S. team\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268208,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[103587,98,100,99,16325,103586,103591,103589,19163,68725,9,24,63,31810,33851,103588,103590,4107,14771,3442],"class_list":["post-268207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-american-team","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-england","tag-florence-balogun","tag-kenneth-dest","tag-malik-tillman","tag-month","tag-morocco","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-parent","tag-player","tag-surinamese-american-father","tag-u-s-team","tag-u-s","tag-world-cup","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268207\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}