Kicking into Action: For ENG Student Bashir Khalil, “Soccer Is Everything”
Kicking into Action: For ENG Student Bashir Khalil, “Soccer Is Everything”
Kicking into Action: For ENG Student Bashir Khalil, “Soccer Is Everything”
Some of Bashir Khalil’s earliest memories are of kicking a soccer ball. His father played professional soccer for the Libya national team and instilled in his son a love for the sport. Khalil fondly recalls setting up water bottles as goalposts so he could play soccer on the streets with his friends for hours.
“In Libya, soccer is everything,” he says. “It’s almost like a religion.”
While he was born in Kansas City, Mo., biomedical engineering major Khalil (ENG’26) had the opportunity to play soccer in many countries, including Libya, where he spent much of his childhood, Germany, Morocco, and Turkey. When he came to BU, he immediately joined the men’s club soccer team, where he met many players with different soccer backgrounds.
“It’s the same game, but everyone plays it a bit differently based on how they grew up, who taught them,” he says. “You come out to this field, and you meet so many people.”
The one thing all his teammates have in common is their love of the game. The highly competitive club sport competes in the Eastern Massachusetts Division of the NIRSA Region 1 Collegiate Club Soccer League in the fall and participates in the New England Premier League in the spring.
Khalil loves the sport, but says he’s long known that many talented young soccer players are forced to drop out of the sport because they can’t afford the costs involved (he calls the cost to play in the United States “ridiculous”). “I know so many kids that I grew up with—immensely talented—that didn’t end up playing at the level they deserve to,” he says.
So with two close his friends, Khalil cofounded the Elite Footballers Tournament (EFT), an organization that provides talented soccer players with scholarships so they can compete in tournaments without having to worry about the cost.
The goal of EFT is to bring people from all over the world together to build community and eliminate the pay-to-play soccer tournament model in the United States.
“It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what you look like, your race, religion, anything,” Khalil says. “Soccer connects everybody. It’s not for the poor, it’s not for the rich. It’s for everybody.”
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