Taiwo Leo Atieno

A season an AI analysis rated the second best in twenty years of North American club football

Atieno played 39 of the 48 competitive matches in Puerto Rico Islanders' 2008-09 campaign: USL First Division regular-season champions, beaten finalists in the play-offs, CONCACAF Champions League semi-finalists, and third in the CFU Club Championship. On the way they beat Alajuelense of Costa Rica, came out of a group with Santos Laguna, and beat Cruz Azul of Mexico 2-0 in the first leg of the semi-final before going out on penalties. An AI-assisted review of every standout MLS, USL and CONCACAF Champions League season between 2006 and 2026 placed it second overall — behind only Toronto FC's treble of 2017, and ahead of Inter Miami's record-breaking 2024 and LAFC's 2023 — and judged it the greatest combined domestic and continental season by a North American second-division club in that whole period. He did it in the year he lost his father, eight years after losing his mother.

A meteorologist on one side, a professor of journalism on the other

Taiwo Leo Atieno is a direct descendant, through his mother Bridget Mary Glaisher, of James Glaisher, the English meteorologist and aeronaut. On 5 September 1862, Glaisher and Henry Coxwell took a hot-air balloon out of Wolverhampton and climbed to an estimated 37,000 feet — some accounts put it close to 40,000 — higher than any human being had ever been. Glaisher lost consciousness and Coxwell, hands frozen, pulled the valve cord with his teeth to bring them down. Glaisher was not chasing a record: he was taking temperature and humidity readings at altitude, and the data he brought back founded modern weather forecasting. On the other side of the family his father, Moussa Allan Awuonda, was a journalist at Nation Media Group in Kenya and went on to become a professor of journalism in Stockholm, Sweden. Five generations after Glaisher, their son became the first Kenyan to play professional football in England.

The story his mother told him before every match

The Glaisher story was not family trivia: it was a ritual. Before each of his matches as a boy, his mother Bridget Mary Glaisher would tell him where he came from — the balloon over Wolverhampton, the readings taken at 37,000 feet, the ancestor who went higher than anyone had been because the work mattered more than the fear. She told it to arm him, because the touchline was not a kind place. Opposition parents screamed racial abuse at a child from the side of pitches across the country, and doubt about him was constant. The story was the answer to it: you are not here by accident, and none of that noise decides who you are. He was ten, playing the final of a youth tournament against a side that had won it four years in a row, and he scored twice before half time. The opposition parents came onto the pitch and refused to let it continue, convinced a boy that good had to be older than he claimed. The referee had to stop the match, asked him to point out his parent, and was walked over to his mother. He asked her whether she could prove his age. She went to her car and came back with his birth certificate. Born in August, with the school year starting in September, he turned out to be the youngest player on the pitch.

Taiwo Leo Atieno, first-hand account

Offered a national team in 2008, and he said no

In 2008, in his season with the Puerto Rico Islanders, he was approached to represent Puerto Rico at international level. It was the straightforward route to a senior international career, and he turned it down. He was Kenyan, he intended to play for Kenya, and he was not going to be capped by anyone else. The same period took him home for reasons that had nothing to do with football: his father, Moussa Allan Awuonda, was ill with cancer, and he spent that time caring for him. He waited for the country he wanted, and he got there — five caps for the Harambee Stars, including the 2-1 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying win over Togo in February 2012.

Taiwo Leo Atieno, first-hand account