Bobby Wood perfectly describes the emotion of soccer

It’s hard to find someone over the past 20 years or so that perfectly encapsulates what it means to be a professional American soccer player better than Bobby Wood. His career has taken him all over the world and seen so many ups and downs. He’s struggled and fought so hard to get where he is today. The only player who may have him topped is Clint Dempsey and that’s saying something.

Wood is the latest U.S. Soccer star to pen an article for The Players’ Tribune. You can read his amazing story of growing up in Honolulu to making it in the Bundesliga with Hamburg right here. He hits on almost every part of his life, from admitting that he didn’t even like soccer as a kid to not even knowing what the World Cup was.

He eloquently talks about his first ever goal for Hamburg and how one single moment of scoring a goal can send a whole stadium into elation in a split second.

I think back to that day when I was 10 and watching the World Cup with my friends … everyone in their kits, faces painted, just pouring their hearts out. I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t understand what this sport means to people. Or, really, what it could mean to me.

I get it now.

I get it every time I score a goal. In an instant, you can make 50,000 people happy.

I don’t know how to put the feeling that gives me into words.

He can’t put it into words because there are no amount of words to describe how soccer makes us feel. When something truly special happens you lose all sense of awareness and reality for a split second. Bobby Wood is all of us. By not being able to describe the feeling soccer gives him, he describes it perfectly.