Heartstopper meets Red, White, & Royal Blue in a college football (the real football) YA contemporary romance with all the Mexican-American vibes to be expected from Jonny Garza Villa, author of Fifteen Hundred Miles From the Sun.
Gabriel Piña knows who he is: a college goalkeeper, an aspiring professional athlete, and definitely straight. He's starting his freshman year at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi with a lot of eyes on him and even more potential, but he's got this. Nothing will have him straying off the path to greatness.
That is, until Vale, a philosophy classmate (who Gabi might've kissed very briefly, and only once, to help him out at a party) volunteers to tutor him. As a friendship blooms and the two spend more and more time together, Gabi begins to recognize something about himself: that maybe he's not as straight as he thought he was. And a larger and much more brooding realization lingers. Someone like him-a brown, Mexican futbolista with dreams of playing for El Tri-can't also be bisexual. It would be the exact type of straying off path that destroys his future.
Or, maybe Gabi could embrace all those parts of himself and create his own path. One that includes football and a boyfriend. If only he could find that courage to fight for himself and a future he deserves.
A sports romance for those who keep rewatching Bend It Like Beckham and fans of the incredible collection of queer YA soc-football stories, Futbolista follows the first semester of one guy's freshman year of college, navigating who he is and who he wants to be.
