The most overwrought of clichés conflate sports with life and death. It’s a trivialization of real-life consequences, encouraging base emotions that should probably be dialed back, rather than the opposite.



For Whitecaps defender Ali Adnan, though, the metaphor has been more concrete, and from an early age.



Adnan grew up in Baghdad, and was 10 years old when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Already a promising youth soccer prospect, he remembers newscasts warning citizens against going outside, and the very real risk of bombs falling over his neighborhood.



“My father would tell me not to go to training today,” Adnan recalls. “I said, ‘I have to go. If I die, I want to go there.’ Because I love soccer. I worked so hard for everything from the time I was young. And we are here right now.”



“Here,” in this case, is the Whitecaps training facility, drenched in the brilliant sunshine of a...