Welcome to Two Left Feet, a place to process my thoughts on women’s soccer and hopefully expand my understanding of the beautiful game. I am a relative newcomer to the sport but the players, their storylines, and the game have captivated me. Now a couple of years into watching I want to deepen my knowledge of football tactics and player profiles. I want to improve my ability to analyze a game past the eye test. I want to keep myself accountable for writing more and learning data analysis tools. If it’s not clear by now, I do not claim to be a journalist, soccer whiz, or industry expert. This is just my way of learning new skills, having fun with the sport, and expanding my comprehension of the game. If you’re interested in following along in this journey, happy to have you! Those are the basics. If you want to learn a little bit more about me and the project, keep reading!

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Unlike many American children, I never played soccer growing up. In fact, for more than half my life I thought it was a boring sport. Too slow, not enough happening. That sort of thing. Eventually, I changed my tune on the sport when I started watching friends’ games in high school and college, but I wouldn’t say I had been converted to a fan. It wasn’t personal though. I didn’t follow any sports growing up. I was more of an “I’d rather play than watch” kind of kid when it came to sports. Just not soccer!

Up until about 2022 I could count my memories about soccer on one hand despite growing up in Portland where soccer feels like the predominant professional sport, at least to me. In 2011 my club lacrosse team crammed around the outside of an airport bar watching the World Cup final’s dying minutes of regulation. We would not get to watch the outcome, which would end up being a USWNT loss to Japan in a penalty shootout. Eight years later I would be sitting in a crowded Pasadena bar with my now fiance and her co-worker watching the USWNT in another World Cup final. This time in, what seemed to me, a decisive 2-0 win over the Netherlands with their fight for equal pay as the backdrop.

So what happened in 2022? My sister was visiting from Seattle on the weekend that OL Reign was playing Angel City. My partner had seen that tickets were affordable and it was as good a time as any to give it a try. Well, we missed the first half due to a combination of Los Angeles traffic and event staff allowing us to pay for entry into the parking structures for Banc of California Stadium when there were actually no available spots. We managed to get to our seats in time for the second half during which OL Reign would score three goals to best Angel City. My sister absolutely shrieked in our otherwise silenced section when Tobin Heath scored what would now seem to be her final career goal before flashing a little easter egg for all the Preath Truthers out there. Despite the parking fiasco and missing the half where Angel City scored their two goals, my partner and I loved the atmosphere and had so much fun that we took a trip later that year to watch them play in San Diego. Angel City lost again but we were hooked and became season ticket holders for the 2023, 2024, and now 2025, seasons. Our love for the players only deepened after watching their HBO documentary. You got us Julie Uhrman, but you are not forgiven.

We bought our Angel City 2023 season tickets with minimal soccer knowledge and high on vibes.. Arguably we were, at the time, the personification of Angel City as an organization. However, I’m not the kind of person to be a casual fan of things. I tend to be either very or barely into my interests. If I’m into something I’m analyzing the content, listening to podcasts, scouring subreddits, watching interviews, and reading articles. Essentially trying to take in any morsel of information on the topic that I can. I’ve been doing this with prestige TV series, my favorite artists, Survivor, and various Real Housewives franchises. Now women’s soccer has joined the ranks. Despite all this investment, it feels like my understanding of the game has kind of plateaued at an impassioned eye test. I’ve become a pretty dedicated viewer of not just Angel City but the NWSL as a whole, not just the USWNT but international women’s football. However, sometimes I’ll be watching and think that a team played well but the hosts of a podcast will disagree. There are times when I feel a player performed poorly but hosts of another podcast will rattle off their incredible game statistics and it’s actually everyone else around them that sucks. I played a different field sport for eight years and have a general understanding of movement and space but I could not tell you the pros and cons of any particular formation in soccer. Although I love my podcasts, these are the types of things that I would like to be able to understand and analyze more independently.

Thus, Two Left Feet. I’ve grown to enjoy writing over the years and I don’t have opportunities at my day job to write in any creative capacity. Additionally, I want to expand my skill set to include data analytics. I do not claim to be an expert in any way shape or form but this project was born as a way for me to keep myself accountable while learning a bunch of new things and have some fun while doing it. If that sounds good to you, I hope you’ll follow along!

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