Until recently, the members of the Talking Headers, a coed recreational soccer team in Brooklyn, could rely on the services of an affable teammate they mostly referred to as Z.
Z’s best traits were his fleet footwork and powerful shot. His worst, perhaps, was a penchant for curiously timed risk-taking.
Playing as a defender, he would sometimes take possession of the ball and attempt to dribble mazily up the field through the entire opposing team, an audacious maneuver that once in a while would result in a spectacular goal, but more often would leave his teammates rolling their eyes.
Patrick Kargol, the Talking Headers’ longtime captain, occasionally yelled at him in frustration.
“But he wasn’t the mayor-elect then,” Mr. Kargol said, laughing. “He was just Z.”
Before being elected mayor of New York City — the most audacious run of his life — Zohran Mamdani won a league title with his weeknight soccer team.
While the start of his campaign last year brought an end to his playing days, it did not suppress his lifelong obsession with the sport, which has bubbled repeatedly into public view — Mr. Mamdani kicking around in shirtsleeves or swooning over his favorite English club — amid the otherwise disciplined messaging of his candidacy.
This obsession could prove timely and consequential. Months after Mr. Mamdani’s inauguration, New York will become the center of the soccer universe, helping to host eight matches of the World Cup, the most watched sporting event on earth. It will be an early test, putting the new mayor toe to toe with FIFA, the global soccer behemoth, and with President Trump, who has at once aligned himself closely with the tournament and threatened to disrupt its operations.
In a moment of generational turnover for New York politics, the emergence of the city’s first soccer-mad mayor is somehow fitting. Once a marginalized pastime, soccer in the five boroughs has become as much a millennial and Gen Z signifier as an immigrant one, with a coalition of fans and practitioners roughly mirroring the one that drove Mr. Mamdani’s unlikely ascent.
Colm Dillane, 34, a fashion designer known as KidSuper, who went to great lengths this year to install a soccer field on the roof of his Williamsburg studio (and was recently named to the mayor-elect’s transition advisory committee for arts and culture), suggested that Mr. Mamdani embodied a broader cultural shift around the game.
“Soccer is the cool sport now,” Mr. Dillane said.
‘Is that our Zohran?’
Mr. Mamdani grew up playing soccer at Riverside Park on the Upper West Side, where he realized that, for all his enthusiasm, he was probably not destined for greatness.
“I remember having powdered doughnuts at halftime and asking how serious, really, was this game?” Mr. Mamdani, 34, said in a recent interview.
Still, the game was a constant in his life. He was picked as a team captain in his senior year at the Bronx High School of Science. He scored eight goals that season and helped lead the group to its first playoff berth in years.
“He was unassuming as a player — not the fastest or strongest — but he never quit,” said Phil Cancellaro, 47, the team’s coach that season. “And he always had this smile, like you see now on TV.”
In his 20s, like so many urban professionals with energy to spare, Mr. Mamdani joined a rec soccer league. Registering as a free agent, he listed Senegal as his favorite national team and Arsenal as his favorite professional club, according to Tarek Pertew, one of the founders of the league, NYC Footy.
Within his first year, Mr. Mamdani became captain of his own team, LIRR FC, named for the Long Island commuter train. Among those he recruited was William Spisak, his boss at the Queens nonprofit where he worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor.
“He’d be hyping me up over the course of the day, like, “I hope you’re ready!’” said Mr. Spisak, 38, who also recalled conspiring with Mr. Mamdani to set up a television in the office to watch the 2019 Women’s World Cup during the workday.
In 2020, when Mr. Mamdani successfully ran for the State Assembly, his soccer teammates were some of the earliest contributors to his campaign. The pandemic by then had forced a shutdown of the league. But he returned to the field the next year, latching onto a group in Brooklyn that would become the Talking Headers.
Asked in the interview to compare himself to a professional player, Mr. Mamdani named Nicklas Bendtner, a former Arsenal striker known for his modest production and surplus of self-confidence.
“Just absurdly believing in my own abilities,” Mr. Mamdani said, laughing.
Mr. Mamdani tagged along with his teammates for postgame hangs at dive bars like Windjammer in Ridgewood and duckduck in Williamsburg. He joined their online fantasy soccer league. After a game one particularly balmy night, he walked to an Italian ice vendor and bought cold treats for the entire team.
Riley Norris, 30, a fashion designer from Greenpoint, said the players would joke that Mr. Mamdani was chronically in a hurry, often tearing off his dress shoes seconds before kickoff. Many of them, it turned out, were unaware of his job as a legislator — or his grander ambitions.
“I finally Googled him one day and said to my girlfriend, ‘Zohran is like a high-level politician!’” said Sean Zorn, 31, a comedian from Ridgewood. “I don’t know what I thought he did. I just liked him as a dude.”
Things became clearer when Mr. Mamdani stopped showing up for games to prepare for the mayor’s race. On the morning of the Democratic primary, the players flooded their group chat with good wishes. Mr. Mamdani responded with an inside joke about their half-serious rivalry with a team called Peachtree’s Army.
“Peachtree voting for Andrew Cuomo,” he wrote.
Mr. Mamdani’s primary victory raised eyebrows in other corners of the city’s rec soccer community, too. Nikolas Schreiber, 33, a data strategist from Woodside, was watching the news when he experienced a flicker of recognition.
“I was like, ‘Is that our Zohran?’” he said.
He realized that Mr. Mamdani, the democratic socialist candidate on television, had played six years earlier for the team he had organized in Queens. He remembered him as a solid player — “not the best, never the worst” — who got along with everyone. Importantly, he had paid his fees on time.
So Mr. Schreiber grabbed his phone and did what any respectable rec team captain would do.
“I’m putting together a team for Mondays,” he texted his former teammate. “Is that you running for mayor? If it is, I’m guessing you’ll be a little bit busy. But either way, there’s a spot open for you.”
‘He’s one of us’
Mr. Mamdani rarely seemed flustered during his roller coaster political rise. But one topic consistently knocked him off his axis: Arsenal.
He was introduced to the team, a powerhouse of the English Premier League, by an uncle when he was a child. Born in Uganda and raised for a time in South Africa, Mr. Mamdani was drawn to Arsenal’s elegant playing style and willingness to recruit players from Africa.
Excavations of Mr. Mamdani’s social media posts in the early days of his candidacy unearthed edgy political posts (“#DefundTheNYPD”) but also a trove of Arsenal-centric banter that became catnip for soccer fans.
“Never thought I’d be more hopeful about socialism than arsenal and yet here we are,” Mr. Mamdani posted on Twitter in 2020.
In September, Mr. Mamdani squeezed into a corner seat at FancyFree, a Fort Greene bar, to watch an Arsenal match with Spike Lee, the film director, and dozens of members of the Brooklyn Invincibles, a local fan club.
“It was like, ‘Oh, my God. We’ve got the next mayor on board. He’s one of us,’ ” said Jason Burelle, the bar’s owner.
Mr. Mamdani has experienced his own star-struck moments this year. At a news conference the day after the election, he momentarily lost his composure when a British correspondent asked a question.
“To be honest, when you said you were from Sky News, I just got very excited,” Mr. Mamdani said, explaining that he used to spend hours watching the network for soccer transfer news. “Could you repeat the question one more time?”
New York politicians have more typically basked in the aura of local teams. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani was a fixture at Yankee Stadium, and Gov. Kathy Hochul is often spotted bedecked in Buffalo Bills paraphernalia.
Mr. Mamdani has characterized himself as a “casual” Mets fan. And he sat in the nosebleed seats at a Knicks game the night before the election, occasioning a sneer from The New York Post because he had apparently never posted online about the team before running for mayor.
His devotion to Arsenal, though, exists in another dimension altogether.
Last month, he appeared on “The Adam Friedland Show,” a comedy podcast, where he was introduced as “mayor-elect of New York City and the former striker for the Bronx Science Wolverines.”
Before the interview, Mr. Friedland pulled out his phone and surprised his guest with a personalized video message from Ian Wright, a former English striker who starred for Arsenal in the 1990s.
Mr. Mamdani gripped the device and practically melted in his seat.
“What?!” he said, gazing into the screen. “I love you.”
‘A Socialist Sport’
Perhaps inevitably, Mr. Mamdani’s passion for soccer has seeped into his politics.
His campaign hosted a soccer tournament in Coney Island to rally supporters in the weeks before the election. (He had organized one previously, in 2023, to raise money for Palestinian refugees.)
And in September, he released a video critiquing FIFA’s ticketing policies, including dynamic pricing, for the upcoming World Cup, all while executing a series of soccer moves on a turf pitch.
It was a chance to expand his affordability message onto the fertile terrain of world sports — even if FIFA was unlikely to change its protocols. The organization did announce this month that a subset of tickets would be available at fixed prices, which Mr. Mamdani said he was “heartened” to hear.
The spotlight next summer will be bright: More than 1 million people are expected to visit New York and New Jersey during the World Cup, with the host committee projecting a $3.3 billion economic impact for the region.
Among the potential challenges looms Mr. Trump, who has conspicuously cultivated a friendship of sorts with Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, and recently claimed the two could move games away from any of the 11 American host cities Mr. Trump deemed “unsafe.”
Mr. Mamdani, so far, has expressed only a general vision for the tournament, including public viewing events, increased marketing funds and the appointment of a World Cup czar. He said he wanted “a World Cup that New Yorkers not only watch from afar but can afford to watch from up close.”
Not long ago, a politician’s affection for soccer could have been fodder for his opponents.
In 2010, Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President Bush, quipped in an essay — titled “Soccer is a Socialist Sport” — that its fans “are excited by an egalitarian 0-0 tie.” In 2014, Ann Coulter, a conservative commentator, called soccer’s growing popularity “a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”
But times change, and not even Mr. Mamdani’s harshest critics sought to paint his fandom as a character flaw.
‘Cheaper than therapy’
For Mr. Mamdani, soccer has been a through-line and a source of equilibrium in the zigzag path of his life.
He said watching Senegal defeat France in the opening game of the 2002 World Cup on television — “the one time my dad let me go late to school” — was among the “seminal moments” of his life.
He attended the 2010 World Cup and cried inside the Johannesburg stadium after witnessing Ghana lose a heartbreaking semifinal match to Uruguay.
In 2012, while attending college at Bowdoin, he bought a $13 share of Real Oviedo, a Spanish club facing financial difficulties, that made him, by his own estimation, “possibly Oviedo’s first shareholder based in Maine.”
This feeling of soccer as a haven drove him to keep playing through the years, even when it was inconvenient.
“NYC Footy is cheaper than therapy,” Mr. Mamdani said. “It was not just a great way to keep playing the game, but I would also just find that my head was much clearer after the fact.”
Now, weeks before taking office, he has yet to determine how soccer might fit into the contours of his new life. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio famously maintained his workout routine at a Y.M.C.A. near his pre-mayoral home. Could Mr. Mamdani carve out time, one night week, to lace up his cleats?
“I’m hopeful,” Mr. Mamdani said. “I would love to, frankly.”
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
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