Dominican Republic soccer is on a bold journey to raise hope and challenge baseball

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This article is part of our Finding Fútbol series, a special feature produced by The Athletic to chronicle how the U.S.’s Hispanic communities celebrate and enrich the beautiful game.

LOS ANGELES — Javier Aguirre felt the need to apologize. As the Mexico national team manager prepared his team to meet the Dominican Republic in the opening match of the 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup, he noticed something on film. The DR soccer team wasn’t just debuting in the Gold Cup to make up the numbers. The team was good.

“If I have to be honest, I remember as a young player many years ago, the Dominican Republic had no visibility in soccer. It was known for baseball and … kind people,” Aguirre said this week.

But the truth is, he wasn’t so wrong. More than a few Mexico fans arriving at SoFi Stadium on Saturday joked the match might be more compelling if it were the World Baseball Classic rather than the continental soccer championship.

After a spirited showing in a 3-2 loss to El Tri, with lovely goals from Peter González and Edison Azcona in defeat, it seemed everyone went home happy to have seen the teams play on the pitch instead of the diamond — and many were converted to an idea that is becoming more and more believable.

The Dominican Republic might always be a ‘baseball country,’ but now it’s a ‘soccer country,’ too.

Marcelo Neveleff is Argentine, but he has been working as a coach in the United States since the 1990s, building a modest career that has primarily focused on working with youth players in Florida and California. In 2023, the call came for him to leave the Orlando City setup and take over as head coach of the Dominican Republic’s senior men’s national team.

Neveleff quickly noticed that the DR had more in common with the U.S. soccer setup than it initially appeared. While the countries are very different, they are both relatively early in their development as soccer-loving nations and are still working out the best way to develop.

Marcelo Neveleff has big ambitions for the Dominican Republic. (Omar Vega / Getty Images)

Neveleff remembers Major League Soccer forming the Development Academy. In those matches, he watched teenagers develop into pros who quickly suited up for senior MLS teams, went abroad to Europe and eventually debuted for the U.S. senior national team.

Unlike the massive U.S., however, Neveleff is optimistic the DR can borrow concepts from a nation like Uruguay, where a small group can easily scout multiple regions in the country. He is now pushing for a similar youth league to get started in the DR, where he said sometimes tournaments like the U-17 league start two days after the schedule is announced.

Even as he tries to overhaul the country’s youth setup, the early results Neveleff has achieved with the DR have turned the heads not just of colleagues like Aguirre but also of other teams hoping to pry him away from the long-term plan he wants to carry out.

“You get calls and proposals to do something else, but my project — not just on the field but in life — is to leave a mark on Dominican football,” he told The Athletic before meeting Mexico. “Maybe it’s my ego or self-confidence speaking, but I’d like there to be a before and after Marcelo Neveleff. A legacy.”

He’s off to a good start.

While the work began under previous leaders, the first significant achievement by Dominican soccer was qualifying for the 2024 Olympics, making a shocking run through the qualification rounds to the final of the 2022 Concacaf U-20 Championship, which was used to qualify teams for Paris.

The Paris Olympics were a major challenge and marked a significant step forward for the Dominican Republic’s program. (Alex Grimm / FIFA via Getty Images)

The manager used the international platform to help convince the large number of Dominican-eligible players in Spain, the United States and elsewhere to link up with the team’s domestic base and raise the level not just of the U-23 team that went to the Olympics — with ex-Barcelona left back Junior Firpo one of the team’s three overage players — but also the senior national team.

Currently, six players on his Gold Cup roster play club soccer in Spain, and more veteran players are expected to join. Portugal-based, Germany-raised Heinz Mörschel was an early adopter. Spain-born González and Edgar Pujol, a Real Madrid youth prospect, joined up before the Olympics. While longtime Dominican target Mariano Díaz, the former Real Madrid forward, isn’t participating in the Gold Cup, Nice midfielder Pablo Rosario completed his one-time switch from the Netherlands and made his debut this month.

“I couldn’t say no,” Rosario told The Athletic. “I think everyone outside the Dominican Republic thinks it’s a country that didn’t know about soccer, but now it’s growing a lot. In a short time, we’ve gotten very far from where we came.”

José Bautista put together a promising career as a baseball player. A six-time MLB All-Star, the Santo Domingo native is a huge soccer fan, so much so that he bought the Las Vegas Lights of the USL Championship after wrapping up his playing career by representing the Dominican baseball squad at the Tokyo Olympics.

“It’s no secret why we’re better in baseball than most sports: It’s where we’ve dedicated more resources,” he tells The Athletic. “It’s the sport that at the highest level has spent more money growing within our country, arming us with a path and giving us the resources to be great at it.

“A lot of young Dominican kids love baseball and play baseball for the love of the sport, but also because there’s a path out of maybe hardships into a better life through the sport.”

That was the case for Bautista and hundreds of others. More than 100 Dominicans were on MLB Opening Day rosters, surpassing the number from any other country besides the United States. All 30 MLB teams have an academy in the country, which houses residential programs that generally host between 80 and 100 young hopefuls, starting at the age of 16.

José Bautista made his name in baseball, but he is deeply interested in his country’s soccer story. (Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)

The Dominican Football Federation reports that 15,000 male and female players are registered in the country, indicating that soccer still has a way to go in terms of competitive numbers.

“We could use a little more participation,” Bautista said. “Community has to invest in this, but at the end of the day, it’s up to our country, it’s up to our nation’s sport ministry, it’s up to the federation, it’s up to the soccer federation, our Olympic committee members to create that pathway. Easier said than done. It’s not simple to achieve, but that’s where it has to be.”

When soccer players begin to emulate the success that baseball players, as well as basketball players, musicians and actors have enjoyed, there is no doubt that many Dominicans passionate about their country will follow. Already, the groundbreaking showings are winning over new fans.

“I’m a baseball fan, but I’ve been in Arizona for 19 years and have learned to appreciate soccer,” said Bienvenido Paredes, who traveled from Phoenix to see Los Quisqueyanos’ opening match against Mexico. “For me, it’s a huge source of pride, something I can’t describe, that the Dominican Republic is here in SoFi Stadium. We don’t have a soccer tradition, but I’m proud the world can now know us for this, too.”

While Neveleff agrees, he gave a typical manager’s response about what comes after the narrow loss to Mexico.

“In the Dominican we have football, not only beaches and baseball and basketball,” he said. “We want people to get to know the soccer culture of our country.”

“We’ve got to win the first game in an international tournament,” he continued. “I think this is a good moment, without lacking respect for Costa Rica and Suriname, which are the opponents coming up. It’s the challenge we have as a national team.

“We went to a U-20 World Cup, the Olympics, we played in the Pan-American Games and we couldn’t achieve a victory. It’s time for the national team to take that jump.

When it comes, it will be another achievement to celebrate, and another moment that shows the DR is a soccer nation leaping to new heights.

(Top photo: Hugo Rivera / Jam Media / Getty Images)

The Finding Fútbol series is sponsored by Modelo. The Athletic maintains complete editorial independence. Sponsors have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.

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