Among a Chicago Fire team that features players from 10 different nations, ESPN Soccernet’s Maria Burna Ortiz writes of a trio of Chicago Fire internationals – Patrick Nyarko of Ghana, Yugslavian-born Baggio Husidic and Bakary Soumare of Mali – that had “chance meetings turn into life-altering events” and while “everyone has worked and battled to earn his spot, it has been a harder journey for some.”
Nyarko came to the USA after a random tryout in the nearby town of Kumasi, where Virginia Tech coach Oliver Weiss “took a chance on” a player who would later become “one of the best players to don a Hokies uniform,” helping lead VaTech to a College Cup appearance while becoming a Hermann/MAC Trophy finalist.
Husidic “knows what it means to be hungry. Not just in the sports-clichéd, want-to-win sense, but as in wanting for food,” as Ortiz recounts how his family “were among hundreds of thousands of refugees left homeless when civil war broke out” before immigrating to Chicago by way of Hamburg in 1997. Soumare, who plays for Mali’s national team, came to the USA as a teen from Paris, where his family arrived when he was a toddler.