At some point in our World Cup travels, as NPR journeyed from city to city talking to fans and watching games, producer Liz Baker pointed out a detail I’d missed: the beautiful, intricate soccer-themed designs on many of the women’s manicures.

This is how we ended up asking photographers to capture the gorgeous fingertips and fashions of the tournament. In Houston, when we got some downtime between games, we even visited several nail salons where customers were talking fútbol, ranking players and getting the elaborate flags and trophies on their nails that took hours to make.

Tune into World Cup coverage, and you are likely to see waves of male, screaming, sweaty fans. But one of the joys of covering this World Cup has been speaking to women who love soccer.

One of the first women I met on this journey was 22-year-old Zhraa Hamidy. We crossed paths in Dearborn, Mich., where I was working on a story about what it meant for the Iraqi-American community to watch Iraq play in a World Cup for the first time in 40 years.

As we spoke, Hamidy told me she had fallen in love with soccer at an early age and played through high school. She’d gotten a soccer scholarship to go to college, which is where the buck stopped: her father told her he felt soccer was not for women. She never took the scholarship. As she spoke, she was visibly sad.

I was shaken by our conversation. I grew up in Argentina, in a family of Argentine men obsessed with fútbol. My grandfather was a card-carrying member of one of the big leagues. I had a cousin who played in a minor league. My father, like a great many Argentine kids, had wanted to be a professional player himself (this is such a pervasive dream it even has its own name in Argentine culture: “el sueño del pibe”. Our very slang contained soccer terms: when you want to say “pay attention to me,” you say “hey, pass me the ball”; when something great happens to you, it’s a “golazo.”

As a kid, weekends were either for playing or for watching. I did both, but only as a child: I played obsessively, usually the only girl among the neighborhood boys (not counting a terrified girlfriend who would often be placed as goalie, where no one else wanted the job.) My father would join in and narrate the games as though they were World Cups. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of players, having watched greats like Argentina’s Diego Maradona and Brazilian legend Pelé out on the pitch.

I discovered at a young age that it was one of the few ways I could connect with my Dad. But I knew to keep it a secret when, at 16, I secretly tried out for one of the biggest fútbol clubs in the country. He was a very strict man, and when he found out, he told me in no uncertain terms that soccer was no place for girls, and I was never to set foot in a pitch again.

It was crushing — and I felt grief and anger.

In the years that followed, I was a rebellious teenager, more often in trouble than out of it, and looking back, I wonder if I’d been allowed to run free on a field, how things might have turned out differently.

But in time, I found a way to cheat, and step back into the pitch: writing a podcast about soccer and the rise of Argentina superstar Lionel Messi, and then report on the World Cup. And so did Coach Zhraa Hamidy: these days, she coaches the Michigan FC girls team, which she says is her dream job. The team attracts young ladies of all ages, but is primarily a squad of young Muslim women. One of her star players, sixteen-year-old Fatima Alzahraa Yazdchi, originally from Kuwait, stunned us with her aggressive dribbling. She’s aiming to earn a soccer scholarship in the next few years to attend college.

I asked her a question I’ve been posing to fans as I travel the country: What is your favorite goal of all time?

She answered in a way no one else did: “Mine.”

“I was standing from the 40-yard line,” she smiled, “and there was a bunch of people in front of the net, because it was a foul kick. And I had gotten up straight after being slide tackled, and I was in pain. Got up, kicked the ball, it went straight in the net, above the goalie’s hand.”

The 2026 World Cup has brought much joy, but it has also been clouded by controversies and accusations. Through it all, my personal takeaway is this: soccer’s soul lives in the neighborhood pitch, where girls and boys dream big, and celebrate goals as if it were them, playing on the world stage.