The heart and soul of LA’s exploding street soccer scene

Ocean Front Walk, Venice Beach. The sun drops behind the Pacific Ocean and the floodlights come on. Something special is happening here: a soccer tournament, four young players a side, concrete underfoot, scouts in the crowd, and a whole city watching. This is the third stop of four on the TOMA La Noche tour, the nighttime edition of Nike’s small-sided street soccer movement powered by a local community institution, Venice Beach Football Club. And on this night in May 2026, it came to one of the most culturally loaded patches of pavement (and coastline) in Los Angeles.

TOMA El Juego, translated as “Take the Game”, launched in LA in June 2025 as Nike’s answer to a question the sport had been quietly asking for years: what does soccer look like when you give it back to the community it belongs to? Not the academy kids in structured leagues but the players in parking lots and schoolyards. The diamonds in the rough. Nike has always been embedded in the soccer world, from the commercials to the product to its commitment to youth development. But TOMA La Noche adds a new dimension: more than just harnessing (and formalizing) street soccer’s raw energy, these electric community-building events are cultural catalysts. The beautiful game is redefined for a new generation with music, food and fashion. The platform has since expanded to Seoul, Mexico City, Lima, Miami and Atlanta, and is now primed to reach six continents and more than 20 cities.

The knockout tournament format is deliberately stripped back to eight neighborhood teams of young men and women aged 14 to 18 and, best of all, it is free to enter, watch and play. Culture FC (Orange County), Football For Her (South Los Angeles), House of 626 (San Gabriel Valley), Insainz (San Fernando Valley), La Comunidad (East Los Angeles), Tiki-Taka Futbol (Central Los Angeles), Toque (South-East Los Angeles) and Venice Beach Football Club (Westside) competed in this edition to qualify for the LA Finals this summer. 

To understand why TOMA started in and keeps returning to Los Angeles specifically, you need to understand what street soccer is and isn’t. Pitch soccer has referees, substitution boards and formations. Street soccer has no time for any of that. It rewards the audacious, the improvisational, the player who tries something nobody’s seen before. Soccer entertainer Elischa Edouard puts it plainly: “The perimeter becomes smaller but your mind expands. You get more freedom and the fluidity of play is exponentially higher.” Soccer freestyler Janella Hernandez agrees: “You have more freedom on the street. You move with more style and are able to showcase different moves.”

LA’s soccer culture is inseparable from its people. Los Angeles County has the nation’s largest Hispanic population, according to the Pew Research Center. Those communities didn’t arrive and adopt soccer; they brought it with them. Content creator Megan Reyes felt that during the very first edition: “It felt like a celebration of LA’s Latino community and its cultural influence on soccer, from the local food and retail vendors to the teams and neighborhoods represented.” Hernandez adds: “Street soccer has lived for years on a smaller scale. I remember my neighborhood playing against others.” Edouard goes further: “TOMA is everywhere. It’s in Haiti, it’s in Harlem, it’s in south-east London, it’s in Soweto. We’re just lucky to have it packaged through the lens of TOMA now.” And with that packaging comes structure, a stage and a pathway to the professional game for kids who always had the talent but never had the platform.

TOMA La Noche started at The Lawn in Compton, then The Bridge on 6th Street, and now Venice Beach has set the bar and drawn the city’s finest talent. The ocean backdrop just made everything more special on a night built on ten years of VBFC’s street soccer legacy. Players pulled out their flair and trick shots, spurred on by the ohs and ahhs of the crowd, and they became the beating heart of the spectacle.

Never just about the sport, people come to TOMA La Noche for much more. The music was live, with Andre Power, NAM and Brazilian artist Rogê providing the soundtrack, reinforcing how deeply music and soccer are intertwined. The food celebrates every culture that calls this city home, and the fashion is its own event, usually complemented by limited merch drops made in collaboration with local streetwear brands. The hair and nails on the court are not incidental either. These players bring everything they are onto the concrete. As Reyes puts it: “About 80 per cent of TOMA La Noche is happening off the ball – fashion, hair, music and flair. What we see on the pitch feels like a personification of it all.”

A year on, the question worth asking is whether any of this sticks. The answer, so far, is yes. At the July 2025 finals, MVPs Noe Morales and Jennifer Alvarez signed two-year Nike athlete contracts and entered into the US Soccer Talent ID Camp for a genuine shot at the national team. Hernandez believes the pathway is real: “It is a route to the professional game, because talent is talent, off the pitch or on.” Edouard sees the broader shift: “People don’t underestimate LA anymore. You don’t get that type of match without a genuinely established and already existing culture.”

In 1990, the USMNT had two Black players. Fast forward to 2022 and there are a record 12 Black players on the squad. The 2023 Women’s World Championship squad included a record seven Black women and two Mexican American players. Initiatives such as TOMA La Noche matter because they put more eyes on the diverse talent this country has. According to For Soccer, 80 per cent of teenage Hispanic soccer players are male but participation among young women has skyrocketed by 82 per cent year on year, and 185 per cent since 2021. On the pitch, the shift is visible. “TOMA La Noche gives young street ballers a voice and a place to shine,” says Edouard. “The girls are ballers and the competition is just as fierce. I’ve seen the girls take a lot more risks, get a little more creative, and the crowd champions it as great soccer.” As far as Hernandez is concerned: “TOMA gives kids from the hood hope.”

There is a line from the original United States motto that keeps coming up in conversations about soccer and this city: E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one. It was coined for a nation, but it describes a good soccer team and street tournament just as well. What TOMA La Noche has done in Los Angeles, imperfectly and ambitiously, is to gather the many. The Salvadoran kid with the silky first touch, the young girl from East LA whose skills make you question reality, or the spectator capturing it all on their phone. They are all here; the game is theirs. This is soccer in America in 2026: community, expression and celebration.