The game of soccer is full of origin stories, near-mythical tales of humble beginnings. They say Messi’s magic touch was born on the streets of Rosario. Pelé’s was formed on a patch of dirt in front of a house in Bauru, his bare feet firing a bundle of socks and newspaper through homemade goals made of bamboo. D.C. United captain Wayne Rooney recalls rattling the shutters of an old-folks’ home in Croxteth, a working-class suburb in the north of Liverpool.



“I remember as a young lad where me mum and dad lived, there was a nursing home,” Rooney tells me. The club manages his time very tightly, but they’ve given me 20 precious minutes to talk about free kicks with Rooney, a master of the form. “It closed at about 5 p.m. and they brought the shutters down around then. I used to put the ball down and figure out where the wall would be, tried to hit it (over or around) the wall. I used the shutters as a goal.”



Today,...