Lost among the inked-on portraits of Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith and John Carlos is Chris Richards’ first tattoo. A simple Roman numeral, it’s easy to miss among the more striking art elsewhere on his arms: “VIII-VI-MMXVI” — 8-6-2016. August 6, 2016. The day Richards left home.
Richards was then only 16 years old. A couple of months before, he had decided to give up a promising basketball career so he could devote all of his time and energy to soccer. He was long on talent, but a bit short on imagination. Richards grew up in Hoover, Alabama, a sprawling suburb about 10 miles south of downtown Birmingham. Like the rest of Alabama, the town is football mad. Hoover High School has won 13 state titles; their games are periodically broadcast on national television; MTV even produced a couple of seasons of a controversial “Hard Knocks”-esque reality show highlighting the team and school in the mid-2000s.
In Alabama, soccer exists in the margins. When Richards was growing up, there wasn’t a single club in the entire state that fielded a team in the top US boys’ academy league. He could develop his skills and his dreams in his home state, but only to a point. To realise his full potential, to even understand that he had the ability to reach some of the sport’s highest levels, he had to leave.
His first choice was to go to FC Dallas. Home to one of the most productive academies in the US. By then, FC Dallas had already recruited a few Birmingham-area natives to their youth program. Richards arranged a trial through one of them. After five days of training with current US men’s national team players Weston McKennie, Jesus Ferreira and Reggie Cannon and the club’s under-18s, Luchi Gonzalez, then Dallas’ academy director and now a USMNT assistant coach, called Richards into his office.
He cut him.
Less than two years later, Richards was starting for Bayern Munich in a pre-season match against Manchester City. And now, at 22-years-old, Richards has completed a high-profile, $12million-plus move from Munich to Crystal Palace.
The Premier League — and, this winter, the World Cup — await.
“Summer 2016, I was packing my stuff, getting ready to move,” Richards told The Athletic at his parents’ home in Hoover. “Then, in summer 2018, I was playing in Hard Rock Stadium in Miami in front of 50,000 people against Manchester City. I was like, ‘Uhhhh, what?’ If I had told myself two years before that I would’ve been doing that, it would’ve just been a straight ‘no.’ Nope. I will not be doing that. Hopefully I’ll be prepping for my freshman year at college. That was my hope when I left home. So all of this? All of this is surreal.”
Today, the perimeter of the Richards’ driveway in Hoover is lined with several wooden backstops. A few feet high and five- or six-feet across, the homemade barriers are a neat little home training tool, a convenient way for a developing player to work on their touch without the need for a practice partner.
The backstops weren’t around when Chris was a kid — they’re a newer addition, made for his 10-year-old brother Christian. Unlike some of his US team-mates whose parents played professionally or in college, Richards wasn’t really raised around the game. His parents, Ken and Carrie, were good athletes, but neither had any experience with soccer. Ken played basketball at Birmingham-Southern College in the mid-1990s and had a four-year professional career that took him to Iceland, Australia and Bolivia.
Accordingly, when Chris was young, hoops was the main sport in the Richards’ household. Ken would devise basketball drills for Chris to perform in the driveway or the garage, movements that would help agility, ball handling and the jump shot of a promising young point guard who played on AAU teams and at Hoover High. Now listed at 6ft 2in, Chris was still just 5ft 9in when he quit basketball. Had he stuck with it, the elder Richards thinks his son had a real future on the court — a stance Ken said was backed up by ex-NBA executive and current University of Tennessee assistant coach Gregg Polinsky, a family friend.
“He was a true point guard, great ball handler, great vision, he was fast,” Ken said. “I most definitely think if he would’ve kept playing basketball, given he grew to the height that he is, he most definitely would have been a big-time Division I player.
“Chris used to go to Gregg’s basketball camps and Gregg would always say that he had some natural things that you couldn’t teach. He’d tell me back then: ‘Man, just the way he comes off the pick and roll, he does stuff that we have to teach NBA players. He does it naturally.’ He wasn’t saying that he was going to be an NBA player or anything, he just had a lot of talent, a lot of natural instincts for the game.”
Of course, soccer was a serious pursuit, too. Richards grew up playing for Hoover SC, one of the bigger youth clubs in Birmingham. Home games were mostly held on a set of fields adjacent to a water treatment plant. If the wind was blowing the wrong way, the whole complex would smell like sewage. He battled there against fellow Alabamians and future FC Dallas homegrowns Tanner Tessmann and Brandon Servania, who played for rival local teams. He even spent one season, in the spring of 2015, with Hoover High’s junior varsity squad, lining up in midfield — he wasn’t a centre-back until his final year in Alabama — and playing home matches in a tiny stadium in the shadow of the school’s football facility.
As he grew older, Richards eventually made his way to the South Region Olympic Development Program (ODP) team, which gave him the chance to travel to Argentina for a camp early in 2016. For USMNT players like Christian Pulisic, Gio Reyna or Tyler Adams, who grew up in US Soccer Development Academy programs and were selected to youth national teams from a young age, those kinds of chances were somewhat normal. By age 16, Pulisic and Reyna had already moved to Borussia Dortmund and Adams had already signed a pro contract with the New York Red Bulls. They were used to travelling the world and playing against top international opponents at the youth level. For Richards, the trip to Argentina was completely new. It would end up changing the trajectory of his life.
Chris Richards during the 2019 FIFA Under-20 World Cup between Ukraine and the USA on May 24, 2019 (Photo: TF-Images/Getty Images)
“That was my first time being out of the country, my first time really seeing professional soccer and a professional environment up close,” he said. “We went to a big derby match between two Argentine teams, Velez Sarsfield was one of them. I remember pulling up in a charter bus and people were throwing stuff at our bus. It was scary but, for me, it was this amazing experience. I came back home and that was when I told my dad that I didn’t want to play basketball anymore, this is what I want — I want soccer.”
The family swung into action. Ken contacted Servania’s father, who helped arrange the trial with Dallas, where Brandon was already in the academy. Richards thought he performed OK, but Gonzalez and FC Dallas wanted more of a polished product at centre-back. They told him to keep working, that maybe he could come back in a year, but the denial was still devastating. When Richards called home to break the news, he was in tears.
“That was my first real rejection in soccer,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I didn’t think it was for me, but I was also wondering a bit if I was making the right decision just sticking to soccer.”
Thankfully, he quickly got thrown a lifeline. One of the coaches of the ODP team that Richards went with to Argentina had a full-time role at US Soccer Development Academy club Houston Texans SC. That coach, Carl Fleming, got word to Texans club director and under-18 head coach Eric Quill that there was a centre-back out of Alabama worth taking a look at. Quill had never seen Richards play, but Fleming’s recommendation was strong enough for Quill to bring him in for a trial on the heels of being cut by Dallas. He could play with the Texans holdovers, meet his potential host family and see if he might like to move to Houston. Ken and Chris made the 670-mile drive from Hoover not long after.
“He was still kind of gangly, but you could tell he was super athletic,” said Quill, who is now an assistant in MLS with the Columbus Crew. “You frickin’ saw what his body was probably going to turn into down the road. If that matched up with his technique and his brain for the game and his ideas, it was gonna be an interesting combination. So I decided to make the call and say let’s go for it. They obviously, on their part, did the same thing, and it kind of became this match made in heaven.”
Not that it was an easy decision for Richards and his family.
Christian, his younger brother, was three or four years old at the time. His younger sister, Mackenzie, was only 10 or 11. If Richards left home, he knew he’d probably be leaving for good.
In the world of high-level youth sports, leaving home at 16 to pursue a professional career or college scholarship has become somewhat standard. That doesn’t change the gravity of the situation for the people living it, though. Richards and his parents, naturally, needed a little bit of convincing.
Texans SC wasn’t FC Dallas. The team wasn’t as successful, the facilities weren’t as nice and Richards would be the first player in the history of the club to be brought in from out of the area to live with a host family. Thankfully, Quill had the off-field concerns covered. He’d lined up a host family that had a younger son playing at the club. They got on well with Chris and his parents, who still keep in touch with them. On the field, Quill didn’t harbour any illusions about Texans SC’s place in the soccer pyramid. He pitched Ken on using the club as a stepping stone for Chris, a place he could grow before moving to an MLS academy or college program. Quill made Chris feel comfortable right away, then appealed to his competitive streak.
“Eric was like, ‘We play FC Dallas twice a year’,” Richards said. “‘We heard that you might want to play them again’.”
It was enough for Richards, who moved to Houston later that summer.
He took a game or two to get used to the higher standard of play, but things soon started to move pretty fast.
Richards began shooting up, growing over the course of his season with Texans SC from 5ft 9in to 6ft 1in. His added height didn’t come as a detriment to his athleticism, and he began to improve technically, as well, with Quill lining him up as a left-sided centre-back so he could work on his weaker foot.
As the season progressed, Quill made it something of his own personal mission to help Richards and Texans midfielder Christian Cappis, now with Danish Superliga side Brondby IF, develop into pros.
“From him, at least at first, there was a sense that he was shooting to be a Division One college player,” Quill said. “But as time went on, after a few months went by, as you saw how fast he was getting better and what he was doing, I saw star power. I remember saying at the time that he’d start for the US in a World Cup. And I still believe that. His progress was just so fast.”
Texans SC started racking up positive results, beating FC Dallas during the regular season before making something of a Cinderella run to win the under-18 national title over an LA Galaxy team that featured current LA first-team starter and Mexico international Efrain Alvarez. Dallas had been eliminated earlier in the competition, but Luchi Gonzalez happened to be in LA at the time of the semi-finals and final. Quill saw him there and urged him to take another look at Richards.
“We were staying at the same hotel and I got with him and said, ‘Listen, Luchi, I know you had this kid a year ago, you didn’t see him in the cards for you, but you need to watch him. Take a look at him in the finals and if you want him, he’s yours’,” Quill said. “Coming back (to Houston) would have just stagnated his progress, in my opinion. So (Gonzalez) watched him over the course of a couple games and was like, ‘This kid is amazing. Are you sure we can have him?’ I told him, ‘Absolutely. Have the other one, too — Christian Cappis.’ I think that took them by surprise, but you knew these guys could be pros and moving to a team like Dallas was a step they needed to take.”
Richards had trained with Dallas again for a few days that April, but his performances at the finals in July sealed his invite. He felt a little conflicted about going back only a year after their stinging rejection —“I was like, man, y’all just cut me not even a year ago, I don’t want to come back and play with y’all.” — but Quill pushed him to make the move to North Texas.
Life in Dallas was significantly different than in Houston. Instead of living with a host family, Richards moved into an apartment that the club arranged for him, along with Cappis, who had also made the move from Houston, and two other players. They were mostly left to their own devices. FIFA and Fortnite were the main forms of entertainment; chicken fingers were a staple of their diet. Richards, who had by then verbally committed to play at the University of North Carolina, continued to progress, earning his first youth national team call-up in January 2018.
It was there that he first caught the eye of European scouts. German clubs Borussia Dortmund, Borussia Monchengladbach and Hoffenheim flew him over for trials that February; he said a couple of them wanted to offer him pro deals as soon as he turned 18 in March. That threw FC Dallas into a bit of a panic.
The club had lost McKennie for free to Schalke shortly after Richards’ initial trial in Dallas in the summer of 2016. They were committed to not having another big talent walk away for nothing. So, even though an MLS rule requiring homegrown signings to spend at least 12 months in their club’s academy before they debuted for the first-team meant Richards couldn’t play for Dallas in MLS until later that summer, the club inked him to a pro contract in April.
“I guess growing up in Birmingham, you never really think about playing professionally,” he said. “It was kind of one of those things where you would try to go to a Division One college and then see what happens afterwards. But then, playing in that Dallas environment, it kind of made me realise that if I wanted to play pro, this is the time to do it, this is the time to sign.”
Richards made sure to have a buyout clause written into the deal. If a European team offered Dallas $1.5million, he would be able to move abroad.
Sandwiched between Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami, the Mandarin Oriental on Brickell Key is not the kind of place an MLS academy team might stay on an away trip. Nor would an MLS team, for that matter. It is, however, the sort of hotel that a club like Bayern Munich might use as a base during a pre-season tour through the US.
In the summer of 2018, the perennial German champions took it over. Bayern rented out entire floors of the hotel, implementing a strict security policy for any area in which team personnel were staying. If you wanted to get up to a floor that a player, coach or administrator was booked on, you had to get their express permission beforehand.
Richards learned that the hard way. He went on a 10-day training stint to Bayern, which formed a partnership with Dallas in February 2018, just a few weeks after he signed his MLS deal with FC Dallas that spring. The club liked him so much they invited him back in July. This time, Richards was going not on a training stint, but a six-month loan with their under-19s.
But with a number of Bayern stars given a break during the beginning of that pre-season after playing in the World Cup in Russia earlier that summer, Richards was included in the first-team squad for the trip to the US.
His parents made the trip down to Miami for the friendly against Manchester City, but as they waited in the lobby for an elevator, Richards, ignorant to the protocol, had to scramble to find a security person to get them cleared to come up to his room.
“There’s David Alaba, there’s Franck Ribery, Arjen Robben, they’re all on the same floor as me. My parents are walking to the room and I have to go find security to tell them that these people are my parents. Like, what am I doing here?” he laughed. “It was kind of this awkward — it almost felt like I wasn’t there. It didn’t feel real at the time. My mom and dad come into the room and they’re like, ‘This is the coolest thing ever’. It was just amazing. Something you can’t even begin to fathom.”
A couple of nights later, Richards made his first start for Bayern against the reigning Premier League champs. Just a few months before, he’d been living with his academy team-mates in Texas, playing as his new team on FIFA while eating fast food from Raising Cane’s.
The rest of his journey at Bayern wasn’t quite as smooth. He did well in his initial foray with the under-19s, showing enough for Bayern to trigger the buyout clause he’d inserted into his contract with Dallas in January 2019. After a successful run with the US in the Under-20 World Cup that summer, he moved up to Bayern’s reserve team, making 30 appearances to help them to the German third-division title.
He was promoted to the first-team in the summer of 2020, once the Bundesliga returned to play following its COVID-19 hiatus.
That’s where things got a little bit sticky.
Richards after scoring for Bayern Munich II against SV Waldhof Mannheim on June 14, 2020 (Photo: Uwe Anspach/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
Clubs like Bayern rarely promote players from the academy through to the first team. There’s too much quality, too many incoming highly priced transfers and too little opportunities for unproven youngsters. Richards got caught in that tangled web. He made a few Bundesliga appearances in the opening half of the 2020-21 season, tallying an assist in his first-ever Bundesliga start in a 4-3 win against Hertha Berlin in October, but he spent the bulk of his time with the under-23s in the third-division. When the January transfer window rolled around, he asked for a loan move.
“I think the rejection at Dallas, in the academy, made me realise that not everything is going to be a straight-line path,” he said. “So once I got into the first team at Bayern, I kind of realised that I wasn’t going to get the game time that I wanted. I’ve never been so enamoured by the big name, I don’t want to be at Bayern just to be at Bayern. I want to go play and prove myself. So that’s what I did. I asked for a loan pretty quickly, they were kind of shocked, they were like, ‘You don’t want to play a game here, a game there, play Champions League?’ And I just thought it wouldn’t help me. I mean, it would, but to get to where I want to go, I need to be playing more regularly.”
It wasn’t too tough to find a destination. Sebastian Hoeness, who coached Richards in the Bayern under-19s and under-23s, had taken over as manager of Hoffenheim ahead of the 2020-21 season. He eagerly brought Richards for the remainder of the campaign, starting him at centre-back whenever he was healthy.
After the season ended, Richards, who missed the final few matches of Hoffenheim’s campaign and the US’s run to the CONCACAF Nations League title that June with an injury, returned to Munich to take his chances under new Bayern manager Julian Nagelsmann. The young coach wasn’t the only new arrival. Nagelsmann brought centre-back Dayot Upamecano with him to Munich from RB Leipzig for a price of $47million.
“Because Nagelsmann came, they wanted him to see me, but when he brought in Upamecano, I was like, ‘OK, this is going to be the same situation’,” Richards said. “I didn’t take it personally, I just wanted to play. I didn’t care if it was at Bayern or Hoffenheim. I can’t just sit on the bench again. It was a World Cup qualifying year, I wanted to play with the national team and I knew they weren’t going to pick me if I wasn’t playing games.”
Palace made a move to acquire him on a full transfer late in the summer window, but Richards ended up returning to Hoffenheim for another loan, this time for the full season. USMNT head coach Gregg Berhalter didn’t call him up for the first round of World Cup qualifiers in September, in part so that Richards could remain in Europe to finalise the deal, but a run of Bundesliga games got him into the USMNT for the October contests against Jamaica, Panama and against Costa Rica. He made his first start of qualifying against Los Ticos, playing well in a 2-1 win in front of a good number of immediate and extended family members in Columbus, Ohio, near where his mom grew up.
He did well later in qualifying to contain Michail Antonio in a 1-1 draw at Jamaica in November and performed solidly again in a 1-0 win against El Salvador in January, but went down with a foot injury in the subsequent match at Canada. That kept him out for nearly a month, then he suffered a thigh injury in April that ruled him out for the final weeks of the Bundesliga season and prevented him from joining the US for their friendlies and Nations League matches in June.
Around that time is when the interest from Palace really began to heat up. Richards was hopeful that the transfer would be finalised in late June — he had already spoken with manager Patrick Vieira a few times at that point — but negotiations between Bayern and Palace were drawn out. Though he never really broke through with the Bayern first team, they liked Richards and didn’t want to let him go cheaply, especially just a few months before he’ll have a chance to raise his profile significantly at the World Cup in Qatar. Bayern considered loaning him again, but eventually reached an agreement with Palace for a base fee of $12million that could rise as high as $18million, depending on various benchmarks.
If he can stay healthy, he should have a good chance to break into the Palace line-up early in the season. He’ll have to adjust to the pace and physicality of the Premier League, but he’s a solid passer, capable of playing as a right- or left-sided centre-back, good in the air and a strong athlete.
He’s thoughtful, as well — a vocal campaigner against racism and, according to Quill, “the most coachable player you’ll ever find”.
Richards is confident that he’ll be able to manage the jump.
“It’s definitely faster,” he said. “Every week you’re playing two, three games, you’re playing against the best of the best. It’s going to be tough, but every time I’ve pushed to a new level, I’ve risen to it. I just think I’m ready for it.”
Even before the move, Richards had good odds to start alongside Walker Zimmerman as one of the USMNT’s two centre-backs at the World Cup. His speed could be particularly important, as Zimmerman isn’t the quickest player and the US likes to play with a high defensive line. If he performs well for Palace, where US head coach Gregg Berhalter played during the 2001-02 season, he’ll only bolster his case for minutes in Qatar.
“I’d love to see Chris go there,” Berhalter told ESPN’s Futbol Americas earlier this week, before the move was finalised. “I’d love to see that. Crystal Palace is a great club, great stadium, great fans. Patrick Vieira is a great coach. Love it from every side.”
Richards, of course, has his mind on getting off to a good start in London, but the World Cup looms large. He’s a young, inexperienced and talented member of a young, inexperienced and talented US team. He probably had a harder time imagining his journey than some of his international team-mates did theirs, but he’s now standing on the cusp of an incredible opportunity. If he can take it, the once-unknown kid from Alabama could wind up as one of American soccer’s biggest stars.
“People kind of laugh when they ask me, ‘How far do you guys want to go in the World Cup?’ And I’m like, ‘Damn, man, I want to win it’,” he said. “I don’t want to go into something and downplay ourselves, like, ‘Well, maybe we can get out of the group stage’. No, I want to win it. Same with (Crystal Palace). I want to win the league, win as many trophies as possible and just show out.”
(Top photo: Robin Alam/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images))