To better understand the U.S. men’s national team before it begins the World Cup in Qatar, The Athletic traveled to the hometowns of several of its most important figures. We found a squad shaped not only by American society, but also influenced by traditions from every corner of the globe.

Taken together, their stories provide a glimpse into a growing, increasingly vibrant American soccer culture that will be on full display between now and the World Cup final on Dec. 18.

There’s a place like Marc’s Deli and Pizza in just about every town in this part of the world. The scene is standard issue: A few Formica tables in the front, a deli case in the middle, pizza boxes stacked to the ceiling atop an oven churning out slices and pies in the back.

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Tucked between the colonnaded facade of the town’s high school and its post office, Marc’s is a standalone red brick building a short drive down the hill from Matt Turner’s childhood home in Park Ridge, New Jersey. Turner has been a regular at the shop most of his life. The owner, Marc Moschello, greets Turner’s mom, Cindy, by name when she walks in on a hot August afternoon. Marc’s son Anthony is running the counter. He jokes with Cindy about the floor hockey team that he and Matt played on as six-year-olds, laughs that he needs to send some Marc’s T-shirts to London for Matt to give to his Arsenal teammates, then makes sandwiches for me and Vinny Macaluso, Turner’s best friend from high school.

We both get the Italian: ham, salami, provolone, lettuce, tomato, onions, peppers, oil and vinegar. As we wait for our heroes, Macaluso shows me a note on his iPhone. Turner had called the day before and told Macaluso to make sure I ordered the Italian, his usual.

“That was the place that you go in, they know your name, they know what you get every time,” Turner told me over the phone from London a few days before I headed to Park Ridge. “Really just one of my favorite spots. Every time I go back to Jersey, it’s destination No. 1, for sure.”

Though only 30 miles from Times Square, Park Ridge seems like a world apart from New York City. Located in the northern reaches of Bergen County, nestled into the woods lining the border of New Jersey and New York, the town has been home to roughly 8,000 people for the last 50 years. The population isn’t the only thing that hasn’t changed much. The street that Marc’s sits on, Park Ave., may as well be straight out of the 1950s, with a local insurance agency and popular diner bookending opposite ends of a strip that includes Park Ridge High School, borough hall, a stationary shop/convenience store, a nail salon, a few nicely-maintained old colonials and an aquamarine train station that’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

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Park Ridge is the kind of town that was readily dreamed up by mid-20th-century Hollywood executives as their siloed version of idyllic America: suburban, small, mostly White, well-to-do, right-of-center. Richard Nixon spent his final years here, living in a gated community called Bears Nest located just around the corner from where Turner grew up. It’s not the type of place where sports are viewed as a way out. For many, towns like Park Ridge are where you go when you make it out.

“It’s quiet. Peaceful,” Cindy said. “Everything is compact. When he was a little kid, Matt would wear his baseball hat backward, ride around town on his bike, go fishing in the brook, play on the field. It’s a nice place to grow up; it’s a really good place to raise your kids.”

If a few things had broken just a little bit differently, Turner could easily be back here now, working an ordinary job, living an ordinary life close to his family and friends, many of whom remain in the area. Instead, he’s a goalkeeper headed to the World Cup with the U.S. men’s national team. The backup at Arsenal, he’ll likely start for the Americans in Qatar with Zack Steffen left off the squad entirely.

Any player’s odds of making a World Cup roster are incredibly long. For Turner, they were almost singularly astronomical. He didn’t even start playing soccer until he was 14, an age at which some of his U.S. teammates were already on the brink of turning professional. He never played high-level club soccer as a kid. He didn’t start for his high school varsity squad until midway through his junior season. Same for his time at Fairfield University, where a viral, embarrassing mistake made him briefly consider quitting the sport. He wasn’t drafted into MLS, only making the New England Revolution as an unproven trialist. It took him three-and-a-half years to become their regular starter, then another two to break in with the national team.

In many ways, the privileges of Park Ridge helped Turner overcome his late start to reach the highest levels of the sport. His parents could afford to send him to St. Joseph Regional High School — a well-regarded, sports-mad Catholic school a few minutes up the road from Marc’s and Park Ridge High. While there, his dad, Stu, shot and edited highlight videos that Turner would send out to college coaches in hopes of being offered a roster spot. Stu and Cindy provided enough so that Matt could spend his summers training instead of working. Park Ridge itself has a first-class public park that allowed him the space to hone his skills. Without all that, Turner may not have eked out his lone offer to play Division I. Without a place in D-I, MLS would have been a pipe dream, nevermind the World Cup.

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Read more: What does USA draw against England mean for their knockout stage hopes?

There was the work, too. Countless hours of it. Much of it took place at Memorial Field. Located just off Park Ave., wedged between the small brook where he’d fish as a youngster and the town fire station, Turner has been coming to Memorial for as long as he can remember. At first, he was a spectator, tagging along with his parents to watch his older sisters play softball and soccer at the multi-purpose field. As he grew older, he’d bike past the public library and meet friends there for touch football games. As a teenager, when he began to fall in love with soccer, he’d head to Memorial many mornings to train.

Turner would often be on his own for those sessions, working through agility drills and goal kicks, launching ball after ball from the artificial surface into the netting that extends upwards behind one of the goals, shielding the playground behind. On weekends, he’d do his best to drag a buddy or two down to the field with him. Macaluso, who grew up and still lives close by in Emerson, N.J., was a regular partner.

“We’d start early,” he said from a picnic table next to the Memorial Field playground, not far from a banner promoting a softball and cornhole tournament that took place the previous weekend. “He’d always want to wake up and practice before the Arsenal game or whoever was playing, so he could watch them at 9, 10 o’clock. We’re coming out at 7, 8 a.m., get a quick workout in, and this was after, for me, a night out, doing whatever, staying up late, and he’d drag my butt up, get me out here. He was great with that.”

After the sessions, the pair would hit Marc’s for sandwiches, then head back to Turner’s house to watch Premier League matches. The ritual continued throughout college, with Turner heading to Memorial every day he could when Fairfield was out of school, logging more and more training time in hopes of one day becoming a professional player.

For a long time, that quest looked quixotic. His late start in the game meant that hoping for a spot in MLS was, charitably speaking, unrealistic. But places like Park Ridge breed optimism. Growing up here, surrounded by nice homes, attending nice schools, supported by a loving family, succeeding in school and in sports, a young Turner would have little reason not to be hopeful. Little reason not to think that as long as he had faith in himself, he could be anything he wanted. The circumstances in which he grew up contributed to his uncommon sense of self-belief, every drop of which was needed as he chased a dream many would have deemed delusional.

“The town shaped me in that way,” Turner said. “I always think to myself, without growing up in that town, I don’t think I would be where I am today.”

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Of course, Park Ridge is also part of the reason he got such a late start in the sport. As is the case in all but a few parts of the U.S., including a couple of other pockets of northern New Jersey, soccer isn’t the main game in town. Even in Turner’s own family, it was at best secondary.

I’m reminded of that shortly after Cindy, Macaluso and I leave Marc’s, sandwiches in tow, and drive to Turner’s childhood home where the family still lives, a pale yellow house with a long front porch located at the end of a short cul-de-sac. As I walk past the basketball hoop in the driveway and enter through the garage, one of the first things I see is a framed illustration of home plate, a visual marker that this was a softball and baseball household.

Cindy was an accomplished softball player when she was growing up in nearby Westwood, N.J., coached Matt’s sisters in the sport at Park Ridge High and still plays for an over-50 team that competes nationally. True to his familial roots, Matt’s first love was baseball. A middle infielder, he devoted himself to the game as a kid, taking individual hitting lessons and playing for a local travel team. When it came time to decide if he’d go to public Park Ridge or private St. Joe’s for high school, baseball was a determining factor. A few friends from his travel team were headed to St. Joe’s, which had just hired their youth coach to lead the school’s JV squad. The program had a much higher profile than the one at smaller Park Ridge.

“If I played soccer, basketball and baseball at Park Ridge, I would have been a stud, but I wouldn’t have been taken seriously by universities because I would’ve been at a school with 60 kids per grade,” he said. “You really would have to stand out above and beyond in order to even sniff an opportunity. And this is my thought process for baseball, by the way. I wasn’t thinking about soccer. Whereas at St. Joe’s, if I just made it to the varsity there, I would have had a better chance of playing college baseball than I would have if I was a star at Park Ridge.”

Still, at least in one way, St. Joe’s was a bit of an odd choice for Turner. It’s a Catholic school, and while Cindy was raised Catholic, Stu, his father, was brought up Jewish. Turner was neither baptized nor did he ever become a bar mitzvah, but he identifies more with Jewish traditions than Christian ones. Turner had some trepidation about how he would fit in, but he ended up feeling more comfortable there than he ever did when he attended secular Park Ridge Middle School, where he said he was occasionally teased by classmates for having a Jewish parent.

“Park Ridge is pretty much just a White town,” Turner said. “White people all over the shop. If you’re a little bit different, you can be looked at as an outsider. Going to St. Joe’s, I was in school with a lot more Black people, Asian people, guys that have now come out of the closet as gay, and everybody always gave each other an equal amount of respect.”

But even given that respect, soccer wasn’t exactly held in high regard at St. Joe’s.

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“Football was king, then baseball, then basketball, then wrestling,” said Macaluso. “Soccer was a distant fifth.”

Macaluso, a holding midfielder, made the varsity team straightaway, but he remembers Turner and the other kids on the freshman team being trained by a coach who would walk around the practice field barefoot. Their sessions consisted of two types of drills: conditioning and shooting. That was it. Not exactly the best way to develop field players, though not necessarily the worst thing for a budding goalkeeper. Things got a bit more sophisticated by the time Turner moved up to varsity, but it wasn’t as if the team was dominant. St. Joe’s compiled a decent record, but only because of what Macaluso described as some otherworldly goalkeeping from Turner. There certainly was never any significant emphasis put on the sport, with St. Joe’s cutting the freshman soccer program during Turner’s junior year.

“We were probably like a .500 team or something. We were OK,” said Macaluso, who Turner, driven in part by superstition, part by routine, still makes a point to call in the hours before every single one of his matches. “But Matt was the only reason for that. He would save, it felt like, 30 to 40 shots a game.”

Thirty or 40 a game? Truly?

“Oh yeah. Oh yeah,” he said. “We would tie people 0-0, 1-1. We were not good, but we had an OK record because Matt kept us in every game. We would let up so many shots, penalties, it was so, so bad.”

Turner continued playing baseball and basketball into his upperclassmen years, but he didn’t stand out in those sports at St. Joe’s like he thought he would have at Park Ridge. Paradoxically, that worked in his favor. Had he stayed at Park Ridge and starred in baseball and basketball, he thinks he wouldn’t have taken soccer all that seriously. That he wasn’t a big player in those sports at St. Joe’s probably helped nudge him more towards goalkeeping, putting him on the path that, a decade after he left home, has him at the World Cup.

“If he stayed at Park Ridge, I don’t really know if he plays soccer all that much,” Macaluso said as we tucked into our sandwiches in the Turners’  kitchen. “100 percent,” added Cindy. “100 percent agree. He probably would’ve played, but this? This wouldn’t have happened for him.”

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Turner’s story is riddled with those kinds of anecdotes. There were countless inflection points that could have changed the course of his career, innumerable moments when he could have easily quit soccer. That’s true of many players who reach this level, of course. Talent alone is never enough. Luck and timing and doggedness are always required. Turner had all that — and he had his hometown.

(Top photo: John Dorton/ISI Photos/Getty Images)