As the 2026 World Cup approaches, Donald Trump’s role as the self-styled ‘soccer president’ of the United States is under fresh scrutiny. The tournament, which he helped secure during his first term, returns to North America this summer with Trump back in the White House—a twist few anticipated. But long before he posed with the Club World Cup trophy or welcomed Lionel Messi to the Oval Office, Trump’s relationship with soccer began on a neglected field at New York Military Academy, where myth and reality collided with brutal force. It was here, amid a culture of hazing and survival, that the future commander-in-chief first laced up his boots.
Trump arrived at NYMA in 1959, sent away by his father after a string of behavioral red flags—including an alleged assault on a music teacher and an obsession with switchblades. The school of the 1960s was no pastoral retreat. Commandant Theodore Dobias, a rigid martinet, ran the junior school with an iron fist, pitting cadets against each other in twice-weekly ‘cage matches’ that left students bloodied. Former classmate Sandy McIntosh recalled: “Dobias told Trump to make his bed, and Trump said ‘screw you.’ Dobias punched him out.” For a teenager hoping to avoid the worst of the abuse, sports became a shield. Trump, never a natural athlete, saw football and baseball as pathways into Dobias’s good graces—and eventually, his own survival.
Trump’s soccer career began almost by accident. During the 1962 football season, he suffered an injury—likely on the gridiron—and shifted to the soccer team that fall. At the time, American soccer was a fringe pursuit; the Dutchess County Scholastic League, composed of small Hudson Valley schools, was a far cry from the global stage Trump would later command. NYMA’s ‘booters’ were coached by Col. Paul Curtin, a decorated World War II veteran who had tracked through Burmese jungles and flown resupply missions over the Himalayas. Yet his military prowess did not translate to the touchline. “Curtin didn’t know anything about soccer at all,” remembered Alfred Harrison, a teammate. Tactical guidance came instead from the players themselves, many of them sons of Latin American diplomats and military officers—including, reportedly, the children of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista—who had grown up with the beautiful game.
The team’s backbone was undeniably international. Yearbooks and clippings reveal a lineup built around South and Central American talent: an Argentinian and Peruvian anchored the backline, a Colombian and Venezuelan spearheaded the attack, and a Mexican held the midfield. Into this cosmopolitan mix stepped Trump, deployed as a full-back, a position demanding discipline but not the flair of a forward. His best friend on the team, Peter Ticktin, later insisted the 1964 side went 11-0—a perfect season. “The year we were on the team together, we were 11-0,” Ticktin told the Guardian. The claim, however, dissolves under the slightest examination: archival newspaper records confirm NYMA finished a mediocre 3-8 that year. Another teammate, Harrison, remembered Trump as a physical presence but hardly a standout. The gap between the boast and the box score cuts to the heart of Trump’s relationship with truth—a pattern that would come to define his public life.
The 3-8 campaign was not simply a losing one; it reflected the chaos of a program adrift. With Curtin learning the rules on the fly and no professional infrastructure to support development, matches often descended into bruising affairs. Trump, by multiple accounts, embraced the physicality. “He was a bully on the field,” one classmate recalled, a trait that aligned with the academy’s hazing ethos. In a setting where strength was currency, Trump learned to project dominance, whether berating opponents or jostling for status in the locker room. The soccer field became a microcosm of the NYMA ecosystem: a place where intimidation mattered more than skill, and where a carefully burnished reputation could obscure underlying mediocrity.
Zooming out, Trump’s brief soccer flirtation offers a revealing lens on his later embrace of the sport as president. In 2018, he celebrated when the joint US-Canada-Mexico bid won hosting rights for 2026, and since returning to office, he has turned the World Cup into a personal branding opportunity. Infantino, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Messi have all been drawn into his orbit, yet the president’s football knowledge appears paper-thin. The contrast between his ballyhooed presence on the global stage and his undistinguished playing days raises uncomfortable questions: Is his enthusiasm for the tournament genuine, or is it another vehicle for attention and power? The answer likely lies somewhere in the Hudson Valley dirt, where a young Trump learned to win by rewriting the scoreboard.
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of Trump’s NYMA soccer experience is not the wins or losses, but the method. The unearned 11-0 boasts, the selective memory, the reliance on enablers like Ticktin—all presage the political persona that would captivate and polarize a nation. In an era of alternative facts, the president’s soccer myth is a small but resonant case study. As the world gathers for the 2026 tournament, fans might pause to consider the man at the center of the festivities: a figure who, even as a teenager, seemed to understand that in sports, as in politics, the story often outweighs the score.
Based on reporting from The Guardian.