INGLEWOOD — Folarin Balogun, Flo to his friends, has got game.
Just ask him.
“I’m very, very good at ping-pong,” Balogun once told Sky Sports.
How good?
Olympic Games good, Balogun claimed.
The question was what nation would he play for?
When Balogun won a Team USA intra-squad table tennis tournament before the 2024 Copa America, U.S. midfielder Weston McKennie pranked him by playing “God Save the King.”
Balogun laughed along with his new teammates to an anthem that was part of the soundtrack to his unusual journey to the center of the world’s biggest stage Friday evening
In front of a SoFi Stadium crowd of 70,492 that included Hollywood A-listers George Lucas, Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx among others, Balogun, Brooklyn-born a day shy of the Fourth of July to Nigerian parents, raised in London, employed in Monaco, emerged as the first breakout star of this summer’s blockbuster, Flo Supreme.
Balogun scored a pair of clinical first-half goals in Team USA’s 4-1 romp over Paraguay in World Cup Group D’s opening match, 90 minutes that revealed the world-class striker American soccer has been searching decades for.
“An incredible star,” said U.S. forward Christian Pulisic. “The kid is just insane. We’re really lucky to have him.”
The brace, the first multi-goal World Cup match by an American since Bert Patenaude did it 96 years ago, also against Paraguay, came with assists from Pulisic … and the New York Yankees, New York Knicks and Orlando Magic. Flo Supreme nearly had a hat-trick, scoring in the 28th minute only to have the goal waved off when a review revealed Pulisic was offside in the build-up to the score.
Even with the waved-off strike, Balogun’s pair and a Paraguay own goal gave the U.S. as many goals in the opening 45 minutes of this tournament as it had in all four of its matches at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
“Yeah, make three goals in the first half of the opening game of the World Cup, you know, on home soil is fantastic,” Balogun said. “So I’m delighted with everything, you know,. What a beautiful, what a beautiful evening. And you know just looking forward to the next one.”
Just what Balogun considered home soil has been the source of debate and intense interest by fans in three countries for most of the past decade.
“I feel like my individual journey is a bit full circle now, approaching the World Cup,” Balogun, who plays for AS Monaco, said last week. “Especially with the World Cup being here, the opportunity to represent my nation in front of a home crowd is going to be something special for me, for my family, for my friends and for the team. I’m definitely looking forward to it, and very proud.”
Balogun was just a month old when his parents moved to London. He had try-outs at bitter North London rivals Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspurs, opting to join Arsenal’s renown Hale End academy where he trained alongside current Gunners and England star Bukayo Saka.
Balogun played four times for England’s Under-17 national team in 2018 and four times for the U.S. U-17s that same year before progressing through the England national team structure: 10 matches (with three goals) for England’s U-18s in 2018-19, three matches for the U-20s in 2020, 13 games (and seven goals) for England’s U-21s in 2021-22.
He struggled to break into the starting lineup at Arsenal and was loaned to Reims in France’s Ligue 1, where he had a breakout season in the 2022-23 campaign, scoring 22 goals, the most ever by an American in one of Europe’s top five leagues.
But was he American? Or English? Or Nigerian?
Balogun finally made up his mind in spring of 2023. Despite his scoring run at Reims, he was not selected for the top England squad during an international break in March 2023, inviting him to a U-23 camp instead.
Balogun withdrew from the England camp and instead traveled to Orlando on what was essentially a recruiting trip by U.S. Soccer. Balogun went out to dinner with U.S. players Pulisic, McKennnie, Yunus Musah, a former Arsenal teammate and Matt Turner, then the Arsenal goalkeeper. He went to the Yankees’ spring training and a Knicks-Magic game.
U.S. fans also got in on the sales pitch. Balogun posted a photo of himself and friends on the trip on social media. A U.S. fan, through no small effort, was able to identify a bar in the background of the photo as Pups Pub in Orlando and revealed his discovery on U.S. supporter platforms. Within a matter of minutes, American fans were flooding Balogun’s social media with U.S. flag emojis.
Not long afterward, Balogun made it official: he was going to be a Yank. His decision was based in no small degree on the opportunity to play in the World Cup, especially in the country of his birth.
“My decision to represent the United States came together with my family,” Balogun said at the time. “In the end, it became a no-brainer, but for sure it’s just something I wanted to do and it feels like I’m at home here. To represent the United States means a lot, more than people would know. I’m very proud and honored to have this opportunity, and I want to give everything I have to make our team successful.”
With a pair of goals within 20 minutes of each other, Balogun not only gave U.S. fans hope that the Americans can reach the World Cup quarterfinals for the first time since 2002, and showed why former Team USA striker Eric Wynalda calls him “one of the biggest emerging stars in world football.”
The first strike came from the center of the box off a pass from Pulisic in the 31st minute. Then in stoppage time at the end of the half, he shook a pair of Paraguay defenders and then blasted a shot into the upper left corner.
“It was definitely a statement, three goals in the opening game in the first half,” Flo Supreme said afterward. A real statement, and that’s what we wanted to do.
“When I committed through the whole cycle, the whole journey to get to this point, it gave me so much motivation. The most important thing has always been to repay that. I just want to continue to show the fans, I made the right decision.”