Writing the post about Pitbull Arena took me considerably longer than it probably should have.

On paper it was straightforward enough. Find out why the stadium carried the name, speak to the club’s commercial department, confirm the dates, make sure I hadn’t misspelled Armando Pérez, then write two hundred cheerful words that would disappear into somebody’s Facebook feed between lunch and dinner. That was the job now. Except I’d spent the previous two years travelling through places where football grounds inherited their identities rather than negotiated them. Stadium names came from rivers, universities, old mills, neighbourhoods or simply the stretch of road they happened to occupy. They belonged to geography long before they belonged to marketing departments.

So I started reading.

I learnt that Armando Pérez had arrived in Miami from Cuba as a child with almost nothing, that he’d built businesses long before the world knew him as Pitbull, and that he’d quietly invested millions into educational programmes across South Florida. Everyone outside Miami seemed to know him as the man shouting “Mr. Worldwide” over dance records. The people I spoke to here were far more interested in the scholarships, the charter schools and the way he’d continued putting money back into communities that had helped shape him. The stadium name suddenly looked less like a sponsorship and more like another extension of that story.

One afternoon I wandered into a little Cuban coffee shop in Little Havana carrying a notebook full of dates and quotes I’d gathered from club staff. The man behind the counter noticed the Miami FC lanyard around my neck and asked whether I was “one of the football people now.” When I admitted I was trying to be, he smiled and told me, “Everybody thinks Pitbull is selling Miami. Really, Miami sold him first.” I wrote that sentence down immediately. It never appeared in the Facebook post, but it stayed with me for weeks afterwards.

The club itself was happy to tell me about partnerships, community outreach and future ambitions. They spoke about academy expansion, new supporters, investment, international visibility and making Miami FC something the city could be proud of. It was polished language, carefully chosen, but underneath it I recognised something familiar. Every football club I’d visited, from Louisiana to Knoxville, wanted exactly the same thing. They all wanted to become inseparable from the place that surrounded them. They simply used different words to describe it.

I think that’s what surprised me most. I’d assumed Miami would feel artificial because everything here appeared newer, brighter and somehow larger than life. Instead I found another city trying to explain itself through football, just as Greenville had done through ambition, Knoxville through community and Chattanooga through history. The accents had changed, the skyline had changed and even the language had changed, but the instinct remained exactly the same.

The post itself took perhaps twenty minutes to write once I’d finally understood it.

The research had taken nearly three days.

That’s becoming a habit of mine.

People will read a few hundred words beneath a photograph of a stadium and move on with their day. They won’t know about the coffee shop in Little Havana, the stack of newspaper clippings in the club archive, or the volunteer who spent half an hour explaining why Miami FC still mattered despite living in the shadow of bigger names. They don’t need to. That’s the difference between the work and the life around it. One is published. The other is collected.

Perhaps that’s what this job really is now. Not writing about football. Translating a city into football, one post at a time.