LOS ANGELES — You might have seen the old photographs from their youth team days at Chivas de Guadalajara in 2003. One of them shows Carlos Vela (then 14 years old) and Javier "Chicharito" Hernández (then 15) on a field together, so inconsequential that their uniform numbers are 125 and 101, their baby faces framed by glorious amounts of hair—and hair product. Another shows them in a team photo, Vela standing behind a squatting Chicharito, both of them wearing semi-fake tough-guy looks that everyone who was ever a teenage soccer player knows all too well.
Soccer is different from other pro sports.