FanPost

Anybody ever kick around with notable players?




I'm fascinated by any accounts of when people got to play with professionals. It's a long shot, but somebody out there has to have a story of when they kicked around with big boys. That's got to be a mindblowing memory. The trouble is, it's so rare to have the opportunity to actually play the game with pro dudes. Either they train seriously in secure grounds, or they are at their beach resorts in the south of France, Monaco, etc. and have no desire to waste time with random people.

Unfortunately I don't really have any such stories. The closest I got was during my studies, joining pickup games at the uni park with some second, third and fourth division players in Belgium and Germany. I was on a couple amateur squads and one time we scrimmaged against players from the first division team of Oud-Heverlee Leuven. They got bored quickly, lol.

You can no doubt play with some decent players at Sunday in the park type of games in European cities, but for me nobody famous. I found that even on the fourth division level the physical speed of the players was incredible and it was pretty impossible to mark them, but the speed of thought required was something I'll never forgot. You could see the amount of genius in these young players even at that level where they are getting paid a small sum. It was insane for a pure amateur. What it's actually like on the top level is something else, relatively few people have experienced it.