As we gear up for year 15 of the Kicking + Screening Soccer Film Festival this week, I thought I’d share a few thoughts about our story.

Here’s the truth: Fifteen years ago, my Kicking + Screening cofounder and friend Rachel Markus and I didn’t know what we were getting into when we decided, basically on a whim, to put on a soccer film festival.

We were younger then, with more vim and vinegar and less complicated lives. We just wanted to throw a party for soccer fans in New York and share some of the great soccer films we knew existed that had never found their audience.

That first festival in 2009 was magical. We hosted opening night at a fancy French restaurant called Opia on New York’s Upper East Side. It was owned by renowned restaurateur Fred Lesort, whom I had known from the downtown NYC rec league soccer circuit. We showed Stephane Meurier’s brilliant “Les Yeux dans les Bleus,” an insider’s view of the 1998 World Cup-winning French team. Everyone ate delicious French cuisine and drank wine. Not your typical soccer experience.

We mixed it up on other nights at K+S New York 2009. We showed FC Barcelona Confidential at a Spanish cultural center, In the Hands of the Gods at an Irish pub, and our first screening-room event — Once in a Lifetime at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. This was DIY all the way, from building the website to decorating venues to taking tickets, but it showed us something, namely, that there was an audience for these films and a craving for this kind of soccer culture.

Since then, we’ve been on a wondrous journey.

We’ve organized K+S festivals in some very expected places, like London, Liverpool, Rio de Janeiro, and Amsterdam. And we’ve done them in some very unexpected places, like Abu Dhabi, Kerala (India), and North Adams, Massachusetts. We’ve shown more than 150 films and screened probably 10 times that in order to find the best ones.

We’ve welcomed a steady stream of soccer luminaries, including everyone from French World Cup star Youri Djorkaeff to fashionista Simon Doonan, NY Cosmos legend Shep Messing to foosball world champion Tony Spredeman. More than once, soccer film historian Jan Tilman Schwab joined us, as did soccer philanthropist Ethan Zohn. Then there was that time that the late Chuck Blazer, disgraced former head of Concacaf, showed up and held court in the corner of the long-gone Tribeca Cinemas.

A frequent special guest of K+S was the journalist and author Grant Wahl. He promoted our events on his channels and participated in multiple panels. Even after his untimely and tragic death in 2022, he remains a spiritual friend of the festival.

When we launched in 2009, there was only one other film festival dedicated to soccer films — the brilliant 11mm Film Festival in Germany. Today, there are more than a dozen festivals that we know about, from Brazil to Bilbao. We like to think we played a role in building this small, but vibrant, soccer film industry.

Now, as we get ready to celebrate our 15th year with K+S New York 2024, we can reflect and admit that this K+S journey hasn’t always been easy. It’s had its ups and downs, it’s good and its bad.

But for Rachel and me — and Oliver, who joined not only the K+S family, but also married Rachel — and all the other people who have helped us along the way, it’s been worth it. There are amazingly talented filmmakers telling unique and memorable stories about this game. These stories deserve to be told. And heard or seen, and we have helped do that.

Most importantly, we’ve made lifelong friends with soccer people in our hometown and around the world. That’s the best K+S story of all.