Wrexham madness, Noah Beck trash talk and $1 million on the line: Inside the first TST tournament ·

19 May 2024, 00:00

The first half is winding down, and Team Dempsey is in trouble.

We’re at The Soccer Tournament (TST) in Cary, North Carolina. What we’re watching is soccer, but not in any traditional sense. Each team on this shortened field has seven players. The offside rule, throw-ins, slide tackles and a host of other regulations have gone out the window.

Team Dempsey is coached by, who else, U.S. men’s national team legend Clint Dempsey. Decked out in a camouflage hat, Crocs and a gray t-shirt, “Deuce” is losing his patience. His side’s opponents, a group of former MLS stalwarts who call themselves Sneaky Fox FC, are bossing the game.

Now, the ball is at Dempsey’s feet. It’s rolled out of play, and he traps it under his Croc, then backheels it a little further out of bounds. He’s buying his side a little time to recover. A few feet away, former San Jose Earthquakes troublemaker Steven Lenhart is not happy.

“What the f—, man,” Lenhart bellows. “Give us the ball back.” Dempsey, a prolific trash-talker in his day, turns to Lenhart, who is sporting his usual shock of tightly-curled blond hair.

“Shut the f— up, you Curly Sue-ass looking motherf—er,” he says. One of Dempsey’s teammates, former national teamer Eddie Johnson, backs him up. “You don’t want this,” Johnson yells as he looks over Dempsey’s shoulder. Lenhart looks genuinely confused at Johnson’s intervention.

“Who the f— are you?” he responds.

In the stands, a mother holds her hands over her young son’s ears as both teams launch expletive-laden rants at each other. The kid’s dad shrieks with glee. This, it seems, was not what he expected to see at a soccer match.

To TST’s founder, Jon Mugar, that’s the point. Mugar is the latest in a long line of entrepreneurs who’ve sought to re-work the rules of the most popular game on earth to be a little more, well, American. It has almost never worked.

But here in Cary, as we watch Team Dempsey and former U.S. national team veteran Jermaine Jones launch an opponent into a water cooler, we’re starting to think that TST may just pull it off.

(Courtesy Rooted Creative / TST)

TST is the brainchild of Mugar, a former Hollywood producer-turned-entrepreneur. Fans of absurdist comedy might recognize him from “Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!”, which he produced and occasionally appeared in. There, Mugar once appeared on screen with an entire pack of hot dogs in his mouth.

A decade ago, Mugar, a former college basketball player, started TBT, the basketball equivalent of this soccer endeavor. That $1 million, winner-take-all tournament has grown into a widely-consumed product, with regional qualifying tournaments and a broadcast arrangement with ESPN. About a year-and-a-half ago, Mike Volk, a former national champion in soccer at Virginia, reached out to ask if Mugar had ever considered doing a 7-v-7 soccer tourney with similar stakes.

Within months, Mugar had looped in former MLS veteran Alecko Eskandarian and NBA star Chris Paul. MLS referee Ted Unkel joined to help with officiating, and Dempsey was the tournament’s first featured attraction. TST organizers held test games in New York and Boston, tinkering with the rules.

Hundreds of teams expressed interest in playing. The 32 that were chosen to play in the tourney paid an entry fee between $10,000 and $30,000, depending on when they entered. By the end of the selection process, slots in the tourney were in such high demand that tournament organizers said some of the early entrants had re-sold their spots in the tourney at well above what they paid.

What Mugar and company ended up with feels familiar enough to fans of full-field soccer but different enough to feel a little exotic. The TST playing surface is 65 yards long and 45 yards wide, about half of the size of a traditional pitch. The goals, too, are about 20% smaller than usual. Throw-ins were replaced by kick-ins. The offside rule and slide tackling were eliminated.

The TST Grounds at WakeMed Soccer Park (TST/Rooted Creative)

TST’s signature feature is something they call “target score time.” At the end of regulation play, one goal is added to the leading team’s score and teams continue to play until that score is reached. Think of it this way: if your team is up 4-1 at the end of regulation play, it becomes a game to 5. Score one more goal and the game is over, but your opponents could also score four unanswered goals and win the match. What’s more, for every five minutes the game remains in target score time, one player from each team is removed from the field.

Mugar says the rule promotes attacking play and ensures that every match ends with a goal. It’s a brilliant gimmick, and in TST’s first-ever edition, it will bear fruit all weekend long, with games occasionally going down to three-versus-three or even two-versus-two.

What Mugar and the rest of the team hadn’t thought of was what would happen if a game got down to one-on-one. You can’t kick a ball into yourself, right? The game would enter into an endless feedback loop of nothingness, essentially the soccer representation of a Microsoft blue screen.

That problem gets solved on the fly. Early on in the tournament, Mugar wanders over to Paul, who is posted up in the tournament’s “cabana area,” the closest thing that TST has to a luxury suite.

Paul is deeply involved with the tournament, it turns out. His excitement about the concept is palpable. He enjoys soccer, as does his son, who wanders nearby wearing a Bayern Munich jersey. Paul himself says he’s tried to become involved in MLS and made an attempt to get in on LAFC’s founding ownership group.

This, Paul says, isn’t the first time Mugar has reached out for his input. He gets emotional when talking about the partnership.

“To be involved in all of this,” Paul says, “it gives me goosebumps. Just look around. What’s so cool about the concept and competition is that you can have a team that comes with 50 people, with masseuses, all the bells and whistles. And then you have the team that is wearing the same shirt but they all have different shorts. I mean, I’ve seen a man over here playing with a full head of gray hair. And he can still ball.”

After a few minutes of chatting, Mugar and Paul make their executive decision when it comes to the rule — games will never go below two-versus-two. Problem solved.

Noah Beck was perhaps Dortmund’s most well-known player (TST/Rooted Creative)

It’s Wednesday morning, and we’re on field two, inside the main stadium at WakeMed Soccer Park, the mid-sized stadium that serves as the home of the Raleigh-Durham area’s USL and NWSL teams.

Borussia Dortmund is getting ready to take on its first opponent, Hoosier Army FC, in the very first game of the tournament. The 32 teams participating in the tournament start out in group play, much like the World Cup.

Of the handful of European sides participating in TST, Dortmund is among the bigger names, with a long history that should make picking a “legends”-style team pretty easy. The crowd at WakeMed, though, doesn’t quite know what to make of the squad in front of them. There are a few players longtime fans might recognize, but drift far enough down the club’s TST roster and you’ll start finding office employees.

Dortmund’s highest-profile player has no previous association with the club. It’s Noah Beck, a 19-year-old with boyish good looks, eight-pack abs and 30 million TikTok followers. Beck played a year of college soccer and came up through the Real Salt Lake academy system, so he can play a bit of ball. Dortmund recruited him, Beck says, to raise its visibility.

Hoosier Army, on the other hand, is a no-nonsense side of former Indiana University players who look like they drink a lot of milk, eat a lot of red meat and watch a lot of “Leave it to Beaver.” Their training regiment feels distinctly American as well: a day earlier, players who missed the mark in the “crossbar challenge” were forced to drop and do push-ups, right then and there.

Hoosier Army wins 4-0, and Beck is the only Dortmund player smiling. Even the club’s mascot, an anthropomorphic bee named Emma, looks depressed.

After its defeat, Dortmund wanders over to Field 3 for its next match against Newtown Pride FC.

Hailing from Sandy Hook, Ct., Newtown’s squad comprises a mix of locals and professional players, many culled from the Major Arena Soccer League (MASL), the U.S. pro indoor league. The parent club, Newtown Pride, won the U.S. Amateur Cup last year and has been heavily involved in community efforts since the horrific mass shooting at Newtown Elementary School in 2012.

Once again, Dortmund gets crushed, and it becomes apparent very quickly that Beck is being targeted. The player doing most of the trash-talking is Newtown defender Stefan Mijactovic – an MASL journeyman sporting a faux-hawk and tree-trunk-sized legs. It doesn’t take much to get under Beck’s skin. Eventually, he chirps back.

“Is $1 million a lot of money to you?” says Beck.

“Yeah, it is,” replies Mijatovic. “And it’s going to be mine.”

Beck, Mijatovic will later say, proceeds to spend the next several minutes repeating the same retort over and over again. “Here bro, you need some money? You want some money man? I can give you some money.”

Moments later, when Beck offers a two-hand shove to one of Mijatovic’s teammates, the Utica City, Orlando Seawolves, Florida Tropics, Chicago Mustangs and St. Louis Ambush player cracks Beck right across the jaw. A skirmish ensues, with both Beck and Mijatovic receiving red cards..

“He’s a TikTok star,” says Mijatovic, who describes his action against Beck as more of a shove than a punch. “I told him, ‘This isn’t TikTok. You’re disrespecting the game of soccer.’ I’m not saying I play professionally at a high level, but I know a good player when I see one, and he isn’t s—.”

Beck would later have his red overturned. Mijatovic will say later that he’d been banned for life from TST competition. Tournament organizers seemed confused why he’d even think that. Either way, the dust-up against Dortmund would be Mijatovic’s final appearance for Newtown.

His teammates, though, are just getting started.

Goalkeeper Luis Robles required treatment after a collision (Pablo Maurer)

Team Dempsey opens group stage play against Jackson Boom, an unheralded collection of talent from Tennessee. Dempsey’s roster is a little different, as it includes former World Cup veterans Jones, Johnson and Chris Wondolowski. He’s also brought along a trio of players he culled from tryouts in Texas and Georgia.

It’s a chippy match, and very quickly, Dempsey’s crew gets knocked down a peg when Johnson pulls up with a hamstring injury. Moments later, former New York Red Bulls and Inter Miami goalie Luis Robles gets caught in the face by a player’s shin while diving in to make a save. The resulting shiner looks like something out of a cartoon:

It’s clear someone will have to drain Robles’ eye, which is swollen shut. He’s ferried off to the tournament’s makeshift medical center in a golf cart. For now, Wondolowski — MLS’ all-time leading goalscorer — throws on gloves and a goalkeeper’s shirt. He still looks to be in excellent shape, with competitive instincts still intact. He’s not half bad between the pipes.

And he can still find the back of the net. Only in TST can you see Chris Wondolowski score a hat trick, all while playing in goal. Dempsey’s side ends the match on top.

Like a crop of golf fans at the Masters, everybody migrates to watch Blade and Grass FC take on DMV Diplomats. Blade and Grass, put together by Premier League, MLS and USMNT veterans Brek Shea and Geoff Cameron, look like early favorites to make a deep run. We’ve already realized that if you have a goalkeeper who is decent with his feet and a large, physical target up top, you’ll go far. Cameron’s crew has both.

A day earlier, during a chat with a few reporters, Cameron lamented not being able to get stuck in on opponents. “There’s no slide tackling,” he said. “So you can’t leave your mark on anyone, or keep them in line.”

Cameron almost feels like a shrinking violet next to his teammate, former Manchester City attacker Steven Ireland, who is downright scary. When Ireland jostles with a match official over a questionable call, the ref laughs and says “It’s fine, lad.” Ireland offers his own retort:

“Don’t f—ing call me lad.”

Accommodations at the TST athletes’ village (Pablo Maurer)

Up a road away from the pristine playing fields sits TST’s “athlete’s village”: A few rows of trailers, one per team, in a fenced-in gravel lot. It’s borderline Fyre Festival stuff.

Robles, and a few other players, mention the athlete experience as the one thing that TST could truly improve on in future editions. Mugar and company know it, too. Year one feels pretty experimental at times. Tournament organizers have dreams of attracting the top clubs in the world to the competition. If they’re going to do so, they’ll need something a bit nicer than a trailer park.

We’re approached by a dude who calls himself “Cisco.” He’s a Cali surfer type, covered in tattoos, flown in from the west coast to run power for the athlete’s village and medical center. Leaning up against a generator, he tells us he’s made friends with Newtown Pride.

“I hooked them up before everybody else,” he says. Cisco looks around, then smacks the generator behind him. “I could turn this whole tournament off if I wanted to.”

Later in the weekend, Cisco would say he planned to celebrate a successful event with dinner at the local Hooters.

The Wrexham Red Dragons are in a league of their own at the tournament, with nearly 60% of the 35,000 tickets sold for the four-day tournament sold to people who identified as Wrexham fans, say tournament organizers. None of the players will be familiar to viewers of “Welcome to Wrexham,” the FX series produced by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney that’s made the Welsh club a household name, but it doesn’t seem to matter. For one weekend only, names like Lee Trundle and Mark Howard are household ones to an audience of Carolinans.

The next-largest fandom? Wrexham’s opponents in the group stage’s featured attraction at the main stadium on Wednesday night: U.S. Women. They are a crew of college players and former USWNT standouts led by World Cup and NWSL champion Heather O’Reilly, and coached by WNT legend Mia Hamm.

From the opening whistle, it’s obvious the women are outmatched. The tournament is certainly a branding exercise for Wrexham, but they’re also here to win it. The women are tough. They press. Their goalkeeper, Lindsey Harris, is a former NWSL backup, but tonight, she becomes the game’s featured attraction. In 40 minutes, she makes 18 saves. U.S. Women end up losing 12-0, but without Harris’ heroics, the margin may have been much wider.

Just after the final whistle, O’Reilly walks out and approaches Trundle. “Thanks for beating the s— out of us,” she says. “Honestly. Thanks for not letting up.”

“I am so full of joy right now,” O’Reilly tells us moments later. “Anybody who watched this, to any young girl — just live your life. What’s the worst thing that can happen to you? You lose 12-0 to Wrexham? It’s no big deal. We have our integrity intact and we went for something bold and brave. And honestly I have always thought that the biggest sign of respect you can give an opponent is to beat the s— out of them.”

The Red Dragons mill about after the match and sign a few autographs. The women, who will end up crashing out in the group stage, are mobbed.

In North Carolina, Wrexham is a recent fad. The U.S. women’s national team, even in this very diluted form, has been a national treasure for decades.

GO DEEPER

Wrexham's 'sensational' first encounter with their American fans at TST

On an adjacent field, West Ham’s match against Dallas United has been stopped for 10 minutes, but there isn’t an injured player in sight. Players from both sides are speaking with match officials. Slowly, we begin to understand what’s happened: West Ham’s Frank Nouble has accused a Dallas player of using a racial slur.

At this tournament, where things had previously felt so entertaining and carefree, the incident feels both horrifying and bizarre. West Ham, led by captain Anton Ferdinand, abandons the match.

Mugar spends the next few hours glued to his phone, consulting with fellow tournament organizers. He heads up to the broadcast position and works to cull footage of the incident, trying to find some audio of exactly what was said. The tournament’s organizers speak with West Ham’s players, the match referee and others. Chris Paul, who has been here since the opening match, is also looped in.

When anything like this happens in leagues across the planet, the resulting discipline can take weeks, or longer, to be levied. Often, as was the case multiple times in MLS just last year, discipline never comes. At TST, a solution is reached within hours. Dallas agrees to withdraw from the competition. West Ham, unfortunately, is issued a forfeit, which dashes its hopes of advancing out of the group stage. The Hammers, though, still have a group stage game to play, even if it’s a meaningless one.

The next morning, Ferdinand, Nouble and company are on the field and in good spirits. They’d considered leaving the tournament altogether, they’d say later, but the swift response to the racist incident kept them around. They go on to play one of the more entertaining matches of the tournament, emerging victorious and sending the few dozen West Ham die-hards that turned out for the match home happy.

“The topic of conversation that was laid bare (Thursday) is bigger than football,” Ferdinand says afterward. “And the way that TST dealt with it, so swiftly — the no-nonsense action. A lot of people around the world, organizations around the world can take them (as an example). The support that they’ve given us as a team and as a squad, not just to us but for the staff right here with us has been second to none. We have to remember that this ain’t just a football issue. It’s a societal issue that needs addressing and if more people were addressing the way TST addressed it, the world would be a better place.”

By the time Team Dempsey plays its final game, Dempsey looks frustrated. His side gives up goal after goal to Zala FFF — a team organized by former LA Galaxy midfielder A.J. DeLaGarza — in a 7-1 loss that ends its tournament in the group stage.

“I don’t know whether I want to do it again,” Dempsey says of TST. “I have to reflect on that. It’s just too hard to get people organized, to find players.”

You can feel the frustration in his voice as Dempsey takes a few steps back and acts out all of the things a few of his players did wrong throughout the tournament — overcommitting and “diving in” on challenges, not keeping a high enough line. He rails on the refs, too. During his playing career, nobody could ever teach Dempsey anything about competitiveness. Some things, it seems, haven’t changed.

Cesc Fabregas was a late scratch as a player, and ended up leading Como as a coach (TST/Rooted Creative)

Sixteen teams advance from the group stage into the knockout round. Most of the higher-profile European squads — West Ham, Dortmund and the like — have already been sent packing.

One squad from overseas remains: Como 1907. The small side from Italy’s Serie B plays its matches in a tiny, lakeside stadium. Its roster at TST, though, features a pair of very recognizable names: Spanish World Cup winner Cesc Fabregas and NBA legend Steve Nash.

After his time at Arsenal, Chelsea and Barcelona, seeing Fabregas in this setting is surreal. No player at the tournament has reached the heights that he has. The 36-year-old is listed as a player/coach, but certainly looks fit enough to play in an amateur 7-a-side competition. Those plans were scuttled just before the tournament when he tweaked his hamstring.

The Italians are here to compete but it’s also impossible to miss Como’s branding exercise. Fans snap selfies in front of a row of fake Como lockers on the concourse behind the stadium. They also slurp down team-supplied Aperol Spritz’ in the summer sun — within days, the area’s supply of Aperol has nearly run out, one staffer tells us.

Most of Como’s players are drawn from the club’s academy but the standout is Patrick Cutrone, a man who got his start at AC Milan and was on the books at English side Wolves just a year ago. As a teenager, he was pegged as an up-and-comer as he climbed through the Italian national team’s youth ranks. But those dreams haven’t panned out, and after the untimely death of his father in 2022, he signed with Como, his hometown team.

Playing in a 7-a-side tournament in North Carolina at just 26 years old doesn’t dampen his spirits. He finished the group stage with five goals and has the best touch of anyone at the tournament. Against Hashtag United, he looks possessed. Como’s curva, its supporters’ group, has sent about 30 members to North Carolina – they whistle when they disagree with a call and raucously celebrate every Como goal.

The match is a tense affair. Como gets the opening goal in the first half, and Hashtag equalizes towards the end of regulation. It sets up a “next goal wins” situation in target score time. Fabregas is dialed in, pulling players aside to offer his instructions for the overtime period.

Six minutes into target score time, Cutrone plays a teammate through for Como’s winner. The place turns into a madhouse. All of Como’s players sprint down the field, leaping into the stands and celebrating with the curva. Fabregas, a fairly reserved character, is in his own world momentarily, screaming “Motherf—–r!” and pumping his fists wildly.

Fabregas is a long way from the glory of the World Cup final, but at this very moment, Como’s upset in a small-sided competition that didn’t even exist last year looks pretty meaningful to him. Como is headed to the quarterfinals.

Newtown Pride celebrates (TST/Rooted Creative)

After all the chatter about the celebrities at the tournament, all the excitement about former national team players and World Cup champions, it’s a pair of lesser-known squads who make the final. Newtown will meet SLC FC, a Canadian outfit, for the $1 million payday.

The rest of the field has come out to watch. The cabana section is stocked with the tournament’s all-stars. Anton Ferdinand sips on a cocktail wearing a linen suit. The Wrexham guys, slathered in sunscreen, are doing their best to hide from the midday sun. The U.S. women have their own area. Florida boys Shea and Cameron, who went down in a very tense semifinal against an outfit led by former national teamer Jimmy Conrad, toss back a couple of light beers and take in the scenery.

Behind the scenes, things have been a lot less relaxed. Newtown, it turns out, never discussed how they’d split the $1 million if they won. It’s not as simple as splitting the prize evenly between players. There are coaches, staff and the team has boosters who ponied up the entry fee. And then there’s the fact that Newtown itself is a functional, year-round club, so some of the money needs to get pumped back into that operation.

“Money brings out the worst in people sometimes,” says Mijatovic, the Newtown player who clocked Noah Beck in the face a few days earlier. “But we got it figured out. Everything’s fine now.”

Possibly serving a lifetime ban, Mijactovic is taking this one in from the sidelines. He’ll still get his cut, though, he tells us.

“I’m going straight to Miami.”

The final, like the semis before it, is a nervy affair that lacks some of the frenetic energy of the earlier games. Newtown gets the only goal of regulation five minutes from time. Brazilian tekker Kelvin Nunes, an indoor player who is among the tournament’s standouts, slots that one home.

Target score time is unbelievably stressful, ending with a flash-bulb moment when Newtown scores a well-worked match-winner. The entire team storms the field.

Each of the team’s players will get somewhere between $20-$30,000, a Newtown booster estimates. This is life-changing money to many of them. It’s credit card debt evaporated, or child care paid for. Many players are in tears.

Wandering about amongst the ensuing celebration is Steve Parkin, a Newtown assistant.

“This is about being grateful and playing for something more than just yourself,” he says, in tears. “This is for those 26 kids that died in that shooting and we just want to represent Sandy Hook the best we can. And we just did.”

The tournament ends and everybody goes home. The grounds crew is busy tearing up the turf on the main field, which has to be replaced before the stadium’s permanent residents resume play. Mugar and his partners, it seems, are pretty happy with how things have gone. The tournament is not profitable in year one – it was never expected to be – but it’s generated plenty of buzz locally and nationally.

And then there are the more unquantifiable metrics. Most of the tournament’s experimental rules seemed a success. Amongst players, the officiating seemed to be the main sticking point, but what else is new?

Overall, the tournament seems to have won over the hearts and minds of its participants.

“This whole tournament is brilliant,” says former MLS MVP Mike Magee, who served as the head coach of Sneaky Fox. “It is just f—king awesome, it’s been one of the most incredible four days of my life. I didn’t think I’d ever get this feeling back. That game-winning goal feeling. When I retired, I thought it was done.”

And with that, Magee – and the rest of Sneaky Fox FC – loaded into the party bus they’d rented for the weekend, popped open some beers and rode off into the sunset.

(Top photos courtesy Rooted Creative / TST; Design: Sam Richardson)

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Wrexham madness, Noah Beck trash talk and $1 million on the line: Inside the first TST tournament

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