Tune into World Cup coverage and you’ll mostly see waves of male, screaming, sweaty fans. But in a recent NPR reporter’s notebook, correspondent Jasmine Garsd writes that one of the quiet joys of covering the 2026 tournament has been the women who love soccer, starting with a detail she almost missed: their nails.
As NPR reportedly traveled from city to city, producer Liz Baker pointed out the intricate soccer-themed designs on many women’s manicures. That’s how Garsd‘s team ended up asking photographers to capture the fingertips and fashions of the tournament, and visiting Houston nail salons where customers ranked players and got elaborate flags and trophies inked on their nails over hours of work.
But the manicures were just the entry point to something more personal.
A story that shook her
One of the first women Garsd met was 22-year-old Zhraa Hamidy, in Dearborn, Michigan, where Garsd was reporting on what it meant for the Iraqi-American community to watch Iraq play in a World Cup for the first time in 40 years. Hamidy had fallen in love with soccer young and played through high school, even earning a college soccer scholarship. That’s where it stopped: her father felt soccer was not for women, and she never took the scholarship. As she spoke, Garsd writes, she was visibly sad.
The conversation shook Garsd, because it echoed her own.
Her own pitch, and the secret tryout
Garsd grew up in Argentina, in a family of men obsessed with fútbol, a grandfather who was a card-carrying league member, a cousin in the minor leagues, a father who, like so many Argentine kids, had dreamed of going pro. The dream is so common it has a name, she notes: el sueño del pibe. As a child she played obsessively, usually the only girl among the neighborhood boys, and it became one of the few ways she could connect with her strict father, who narrated their backyard games as if they were World Cups.
Then, at 16, she secretly tried out for one of the biggest fútbol clubs in the country. When her father found out, she writes, he told her in no uncertain terms that soccer was no place for girls, and that she was never to set foot on a pitch again. “It was crushing,” Garsd writes. “I felt grief and anger.” In the years after, she was a rebellious teenager, and she still wonders how things might have gone differently if she’d been allowed to run free on a field.
Finding a way back onto the pitch
As time passed, Garsd found her way back to the game, by writing a podcast about soccer and the rise of Lionel Messi, and then reporting on the World Cup itself. And so did Hamidy: she now coaches the Michigan FC girls team, which she calls her dream job, a squad made up largely of young Muslim women.
One of her star players, 16-year-old Fatima Alzahraa Yazdchi, originally from Kuwait, stunned the NPR team with her aggressive dribbling and hopes to earn a college soccer scholarship of her own. Garsd asked her the question she’d been posing to fans across the country: what’s your favorite goal of all time? Yazdchi answered in a way no one else had. “Mine,” she said, smiling, then described getting up after a hard slide tackle, still in pain, and firing a foul kick from 40 yards straight into the net, just above the goalie’s hand.
The 2026 World Cup has brought enormous joy, Garsd acknowledges, even as it has been clouded by controversies and accusations. Through all of it, she lands on a simple takeaway: soccer’s soul lives in the neighborhood pitch, where girls and boys dream big and celebrate goals as if it were them, out on the world stage.
Garsd’s notebook is a reminder that the biggest tournament on earth is built from the smallest, most personal moments, a girl’s secret tryout, a coach living her dream, a teenager naming her own goal as the greatest ever seen. The women she met were told, in one way or another, that the game wasn’t theirs. Their answer, painted on their nails and lived out on the field, was to claim it anyway.
Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my experimental learning process. For more information, check out the original article listed below.