Russell Canouse wants to show you something about what European soccer really looks like for a young American kid. He wants to show you many things, really. He wants you to see the cold shoulders from teammates, the practice sessions spent running blind because you can’t understand the coach. He wants you to see the lonely evenings spent alone, parents and friends separated by a continent and an ocean. He wants you to see what it looks like for a 15-year-old to take all of this upon himself and while trying to play professional soccer and still keep his shoulders from bowing under the weight of it all.



But he can’t show you those things. Nobody can. And that, perhaps, is why we still don’t really understand what it means to be a young American playing in the great wilderness of European soccer. It is easy enough to assume that the Americans who fail to break in were simply not good enough. It is not so easy to assume that perhaps there is a mental side we...