Facundo Torres is too polite to roll his eyes. Yet you can hear it in his voice as the familiar, memorable childhood tale is brought up once again, nearly a quarter-century after it happened.
“Yes, my dad always tells that same story,” Austin FC’s playmaker told MLSsoccer.com in Spanish during a one-on-one conversation at the Verde & Black's preseason camp in Indio, California.
While today he is among MLS’s elite attackers, a key dangerman in Austin’s clash with Texan rivals Houston Dynamo FC in Matchday 10’s Walmart Saturday Showdown at Q2 Stadium (8:30 pm ET | Apple TV), Torres’ early exposure to the beautiful game didn’t exactly light his fire from the jump.
“He didn’t like it; he used to play with dirt,” Jorge Torres recounted to a Uruguayan outlet when his son broke into Peñarol's senior team in 2020. “He would make little mounds in the middle of the field or go with his mother to fetch water. I thought: 'This one isn’t going to like soccer.'”
Young Facu can surely be forgiven for being easily distracted, considering he was barely out of diapers.
“It was back before I had even started playing – I think I was three years old or something like that,” Torres recalled with a chuckle. “And soccer had never really caught my interest. He always tells the story that the very first time he took me to a practice session, the last thing I did was actually play soccer.
“Anyway, eventually I developed that passion for playing the game.”
National pastime
That’s evident by Torres' centerpiece role in Austin and dreams of representing his homeland at the 2026 FIFA World Cup on North American soil.
Uruguay’s obsession with the sport is such that the toddler-age Facu might well have been considered an outlier. Nearly a century after La Celeste (the Sky Blue) won the first-ever World Cup in 1930, the South American nation remains one of the most remarkable stories in global soccer, a perennial trophy contender and a prolific exporter of world-class talent despite a population of around 3.5 million people.
“Uruguay has an incredible knack for producing players, especially considering how small the country is,” said Torres. “You can always find Uruguayan players all over the world.”
For a North American comparison: That’s smaller, by a safe margin, than the Minneapolis-St. Paul or Montréal métropolises. It’s the cradle that nurtured Torres into a creative force capable of both the killer pass and the finishing touch in front of goal, who has already inspired somewhere north of $30 million in transfer fees across his six-plus years as a first-team professional.
“It really is very different because, for us – or for any child growing up in Uruguay – the greatest passion is, without a doubt, football,” he said of his homeland’s deep footballing culture. “It’s different here because there are other sports and other attractions; in Uruguay, it’s all about football.
“The people's greatest passion is football. And often, football dictates your mood for the next day or for the start of the week. If your team won, you feel great; if your team lost, you feel down.”
Uruguayan pedigree
Probably no nation on earth produces such a lofty standard of quality per capita. It’s both a prolific powerhouse and a family-style environment where future pros often play together in childhood, as was the case for Torres and Real Madrid superstar Federico Valverde.
“Fede comes from the same club where I grew up. So we have a strong connection,” noted Torres, who also crossed paths with Columbus Crew mainstay Diego Rossi back in the day. “Nowadays, there are many players on the Uruguayan national team who come from Peñarol, the club where I grew up. And having that sense of familiarity – knowing so many people since we were kids – gives you a different kind of confidence.”
That’s part of what fuels their national team’s hopes of a deep World Cup run under Marcelo Bielsa, the iconic manager who Torres hopes to receive that fateful call from when the roster is finalized next month. Known as ‘El Loco’ for his idiosyncratic quirks and obsessive approach to the game, Bielsa has already changed how Torres approaches his craft.
“Marcelo taught me how to look at myself critically after matches – how to analyze my own performance on video,” he explained. “I didn't really watch myself play much before meeting Marcelo. After I started watching myself, I began to spot errors I was making, or patterns of behavior I was repeating very frequently.
“That helped me tremendously.”
His respect for Bielsa is such that Torres sought the manager’s perspective when Austin sporting director Rodolfo Borrell reached out last winter to pitch him on a return to MLS.
“I actually called him to ask for his opinion. I did so because he is the national team coach, and the national team means a great deal to me,” said Torres. “He told me that coming here wouldn't change his opinion of me. He said that if I came to MLS, as long as I continued to perform well and deliver strong performances, I would still be called up to the national team.”
Austin come calling
Part of Torres' appeal to Austin was his success at Orlando City, where he was greeted by lofty expectations as a club-record (a reported $7.5 million) Designated Player signing in 2022 and methodically transcended them, becoming the Lions’ all-time leading scorer and leading them to a US Open Cup trophy, their first in their MLS era.
Torres departed for Brazilian giants Palmeiras three years later, again for a club-record fee, this one reportedly around $14 million. He says he felt fulfilled with Palmeiras, perennial trophy hunters who impressed at last year’s Stateside FIFA Club World Cup.
Something about MLS and life in the US stayed with him, though.
“My family and I had already made all our arrangements to begin our second year in Brazil,” said Torres. “So Rodo's offer caught us a bit off guard, but he was very straightforward with me. He knew exactly what he wanted from me. Both he and [head coach Nico Estévez] gave me a brief overview of Austin’s project – where they’re aiming, and where they stand right now. To be honest, I saw myself fitting in very well within that project, so we decided to take on the challenge.
“It was partly for my family – specifically, the chance to live in the United States again, which is something we really enjoy,” he added. “Personally, I also really like being here; it’s very laid-back. Plus, I missed the league a bit, too. MLS and all the ‘showbiz’ surrounding it is really great.”
While Torres has begun his ATX chapter reasonably well with 1g/4a in his first nine matches, it’s been overshadowed by the team’s middling results. With just one win so far, the Verde & Black have drifted towards the bottom of the Western Conference standings and an eight-game winless skid hit a new low with Wednesday’s 5-1 defeat at league leaders San Jose.
World Cup pressure
That’s placed the onus on Austin to seize the initiative against Houston. Strangely, another 5-1 scoreline has also reverberated across the international side of Torres’ career.
Drawn into the World Cup’s Group H alongside Saudi Arabia, mighty Spain and Cinderella story Cape Verde, Uruguay will play their first two group-stage matches in Miami and the third in Guadalajara. Their third-place run at the Copa América on U.S. soil two years ago would seem to offer encouragement about this summer’s prospects.
But as is so often the case with Bielsa, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
That Copa América run ended in rancor, as a semifinal loss to Colombia was capped by a brawl in which Celeste players waded into the stands to confront fans who allegedly threatened their families, triggering a raft of hefty suspensions. Uruguay won just two of their next 10 matches; meanwhile, Inter Miami CF star Luis Suárez criticized Bielsa’s methods in depth after he retired from the national team in September 2024.
That was the backdrop for the fallout from November’s stunning 5-1 friendly loss to the United States in Tampa, a rout engineered by a rotated Yanks lineup and followed by characteristically – and brutally – frank self-criticism from Bielsa.
“The beginning of my job was positive, as was the Copa América and the World Cup qualifiers, where we were just one point away from finishing third,” Bielsa said last month. “The points and positions achieved by the team are acceptable, but our performance on the field lost its edge.
“All of that created a distance, diminished the value of my management, and the match against the United States became a turning point for expressing that discontent. It's impossible to lose 5-1 and think that it has no effect. To summarize, it went from good to bad.”
March draws vs. England and Algeria steadied the ship a bit, though tension seems likely to linger, for better or worse. That sense of urgency around the program is familiar to Torres, and reflects his own mentality as he tries to make the best possible case for both roster inclusion and minutes on the pitch come summer.
“Working with him has had its ups and downs, or whatever you want to call the challenges we've faced during this national team campaign,” Torres said of the Bielsa experience. “But fortunately, things are improving now. And so here we are, preparing to face a World Cup in a short while. Hopefully, we'll have a very successful run.
“You have to be prepared to the absolute max, operating at your peak, in order to compete on equal terms with very strong national teams – very strong countries that possess excellent squads. That is our objective: to be able to compete on equal footing with any national team.”
