by On Sunday in Las Vegas, Harrison Butker will suit up alongside Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Co. in Super Bowl LVIII and try to claim a third championship in five years for the Kansas City Chiefs.
And if the 28-year-old kicker is as accurate in this Super Bowl as he has been in the previous three – in which he has made five of six field goals, including the game-winner in this year’s edition spent – his success. , he believes, in part because of his past as a high school soccer standout.
“Soccer was my first sport,” Butker told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2020. “I loved playing soccer. I wanted to be a professional soccer player in England, playing in the Premier League.
“For me as a kicker, one starting point in soccer, during the running of the game, you have to kick the ball to your goal at a strange angle. It’s not like in football during a field goal when you take your steps and everything is laid out.
“So back to football… sometimes you might get a bad bite; you might trip or mess for your steps, and you have to be an athlete and kick … have a soccer background as an athlete [you have to] trust that you’re still going to make good contact and hit a good ball.”
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And Butker is far from alone as an elite NFL kicker who began his athletic experience with soccer. The Dallas Cowboys’ season ended in obscurity, with a shock 48-32 home loss to the Green Bay Packers in the wildcard round of the playoffs, but if there’s one Cowboy they can be happy with their work last year, it’s it’s the kicker Brandon. Aubrey.
The 28-year-old rookie finished the regular season with a 94.7% success rate on field goals. He also set the NFL record for the most consecutive field goals made to start a career, with 36. In fact, Aubrey boasted a perfect record until the very last week of the regular season, when, in a victory over the Washington Commanders, he saw. one attempt blocked and another clank back off the upright.
The most remarkable thing about Aubrey’s rise is that he didn’t kick American football seriously until 2019, at the age of 24. Before signing with the Cowboys last year, Aubrey spent two seasons with the USFL’s Birmingham Stallions. Before that, he was a professional soccer player, drafted by Toronto FC MLS. So how much of it did his soccer background help?
“Having a soccer background is a big plus,” says John Carney, who played 23 seasons in the NFL, won Super Bowl XLIV with the New Orleans Saints and now runs a training program for aspiring kickers. “I’d say 99% of kickers who kick at a high level – whether it’s college or the NFL – grew up playing soccer … it’s almost a prerequisite.”
Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers Super Bowl-winning chef Martin Grammatica grew up in Argentina playing soccer and says it helped him in his career. “I always started with a natural style of soccer,” he says. “I naturally sidelined. I didn’t take three steps back and two over. It just felt too robotic. I changed my technique to be free and without robots.”
It’s not as simple as walking off a football field and into the NFL, though. A close-knit soccer upbringing can present its own challenges, which England captain Harry Kane would face if he pursued his dream of playing in the NFL.
“First of all, they’re going to be boring,” says Carney. “There are hundreds of ways to kick a soccer ball in one game – you’re passing, you’re chipping, you’re bending left, bending right, driving it. You don’t have that many kicks in football. But then it becomes a challenge to do it every time. You have to do it with the jump and hold. You have 1.3 seconds or less to get that ball up and out of there before it’s blocked. The margin for error in the NFL is very small. If you’re not in the mid-80s percentile for success rate, you risk getting beat.”
And while soccer players’ long-standing ability to kick the ball means they are familiar with the technical requirements when crossing over to place kicks, they must unlearn old habits to some extent.
“When you’re playing soccer, most of the time you’re cutting the ball – in-foot ball, long pass,” says former Miami Dolphins punter Olindo Mare, who once tried it for the The now defunct MLS. club Miami Fusion in the early 2000s. “And your head is always up. You are always looking around. When you kick, your head has to be down, all the way through impact, which is the complete opposite. That was the hardest thing. When I was playing in the NFL, I would always have to stop playing football during the season around June, because I would have to work on keeping my head down.”
Stephen Hauschka, who played college soccer before embarking on a Super Bowl XLVIII-winning career with the Seattle Seahawks, says the height of kicks can also make a drastic difference. “It’s like kicking a soccer ball, but it’s 20 to 30% different,” he says. “You have to get a good lift on the ball. In soccer, you rarely want to kick the ball over the top. [In American football] you have to lock onto the ball hard and then swing up through the ball to get the lift on it, whereas in soccer you usually try to get your knee over the ball and keep it low.”
There is a difference, too, in the sense of hitting the ball. The feeling of catching a soccer ball is not quite the same as the feeling of nailing a field goal. That takes some getting used to.
“The soccer ball is a good thing,” says Hauschka. “You can kick it with any part of your foot. Football is very strict. The leather is very loose. There is a very small spot on a football that you have to kick, about a quarter of an inch below the center. You have to hit that with your bone. If you hit it with your toe, it really doesn’t go anywhere.”
Gameday offers arguably the most intense adaptation of all for former soccer players. Used to play continuously for 90 minutes, with all 22 players on the pitch involved in defence, attack and transition between the two phases, they are now on the sidelines for most of the game. They have to wait for the special teams unit to be called, and be ready for the particular pressure that comes with the call: like a soccer player coming forward to take a penalty kick.
“A lot of soccer players can probably hit 30, 40, 50 yards,” says Mare. “It comes down to: can you do it when the pressure is on? Can you handle Monday morning criticizing the whole country and can you come and do it again the following week?”
Hauschka agrees that in the NFL, one kick is often under tremendous pressure. “That’s the biggest transition from being a soccer player to a kicker,” says Hauschka. “Every play feels like a penalty. That’s one of the key skills you have to learn: how to fully focus on your kick and what it takes to land a nice, confident kick, rather than being shaky. I think a lot of kickers would admit that they feel nerves from there, but they still find a way to swing with confidence.”
That pressure won’t be more intense than Sunday’s Super Bowl. So, after seeing how quickly and successfully players like Aubrey and Butker have taken their soccer skills into the NFL, are others likely to follow in their footsteps?
“Absolutely,” says Carney. “We’ve had a few calls already.”
