Why Jimmy Nielsen, always a one-of-a-kind keeper, is about to become a Sporting Legend
When he was 10, Jimmy Nielsen’s school teacher asked him to step up to the front of the classroom and write the top three things he wanted to be when he grew up.
Walking up to the whiteboard, this was his list:
Professional soccer player
Professional soccer player
Professional soccer player
Nielsen’s teacher called his parents down to the school to suggest the young lad awaken to the real world and stop dreaming. She told them that if Nielsen put as much time into schoolwork as he did daydreaming about soccer, he could be the prime minister of Denmark, Nielsen’s native country.
But that didn’t stop Nielsen. Just two years later he signed a youth contract with English club Norwich City. And Nielsen eventually became a league champion with his boyhood club, Aalborg BK.
“I think right now there are six million people in Denmark who are very, very happy that I didn’t put anymore time in my classroom,” Nielsen laughed in a recent interview with The Star.
Wednesday evening, 34 years after scribbling his life aspirations in the aforementioned whiteboard incident, Nielsen will be inducted as a Sporting Legend ahead of Sporting Kansas City’s home match against the Colorado Rapids.
Nielsen will become the 11th Sporting Legend, SKC’s Hall of Fame. KC’s goalkeeper in 2010-13, he won the 2013 MLS Cup and 2012 U.S. Open Cup here, burnishing his legend with heroics when championships were on the line.
“I was just very, very lucky to be a part of a very, very successful group,” Nielsen said. “When you’re part of something successful there will be individual rewards.”
A new home: 2011
Chicago Fire forward Dominic Oduro charged through on goal in the 67th minute of Sporting KC’s first game at Children’s Mercy Park. Nielsen came out to meet him, but Oduro got to the ball first and chipped it over Nielsen, who was outside the box.
Without a second thought, Nielsen reached up and blocked the shot with his hands. He was shown a straight red card.
“My only damn red card!” Nielsen said.
He doesn’t regret the decision. The game finished 0-0. Nielsen’s block salvaged a point for KC.
As Oduro raced toward him that day, Nielsen recalls going through the options in his mind: If it was early in the game, he’d let the ball go in and trust his team to equalize and pull ahead. But that late in the game? Nielsen took one for the team and made the stop.
“He was a fantastic captain and looked after his players,” said Sporting defender Graham Zusi, who rose to prominence in Nielsen’s years with the club.
That first game in the new stadium made Nielsen realize what it meant to play soccer in Kansas City.
“That first Chicago game, we left with the feeling that we don’t want to let those people down,” he said. “We want to give everything we have in the tank at every single game at that stadium.
“I honestly don’t remember one game where we as a minimum didn’t give everything we had in the tank,” he continued. “It was not always the best soccer, but as a minimum, we gave everything we had. I think the fans appreciated that.”
The making of a legend: 2012
Nielsen was always known as a calm, cool and collected leader.
“He had a completely different approach than most goalkeepers,” Sporting KC coach Peter Vermes said. “When something happens, a goalkeeper gets flamboyant and loses themselves a little bit, where he was always calm.”
So when Sporting went to penalties with the Seattle Sounders in the 2012 U.S. Open Cup final at Children’s Mercy Park, that was going to be Nielsen’s approach: calm, cool and collected.
But through the first two rounds of penalties, Seattle sent Nielsen the wrong way both times and KC was already 2-1 down.
“I’ve got to change this strategy, it’s not working,” Nielsen thought to himself (though there was an expletive in there, too.)
The next penalty, the Dane began frantically pointing toward the right side of the goal, telling Sounders midfielder Osvaldo Alonso where to shoot. Alonso fired the ball over the bar.
Next penalty, more frantic pointing. An inch-perfect dive to the bottom-left corner, but Nielsen pushed it away.
“I kind of became a guy I even couldn’t recognize when I saw it on TV,” Nielsen said. “Like a semi-psycho in the goal. And trying to get into the head of the shooter.”
Seattle’s final penalty brought more frantic pointing from Nielsen. And another Seattle penalty sailed over the bar.
Nielsen wheeled away, swinging his arms as the ball got lost in the joyous Cauldron.
It was his first trophy since his league triumph with Aalborg in 1999. It was Sporting KC’s first trophy since 2004, and Nielsen was the captain who led the team.
“That was a massive relief and I was dead proud to be able to do that in front of your own fans,” Nielsen said. “It doesn’t get any bigger than that.”
Going out on top: 2013
A year later, another penalty shootout. But this time the stage was the 2013 MLS Cup Final against Real Salt Lake.
The teams had run out to a 1-1 tie at Children’s Mercy Park. RSL missed on its first two penalty attempts, with Nielsen saving one, but clawed its way back into the shootout and took it sudden death.
A near-certain victory had turned into despair when Lawrence Olum missed KC’s eighth penalty of the shootout. So Real Salt Lake had a chance to win it.
But much as he did in the U.S. Open Cup, Nielsen dived down to his left and smothered Sebastián Velásquez’s shot.
“People after had said, ‘That must have been nerve-racking,’ but that’s not how you think when you’re in there,” Nielsen said. “I approached that PK like I approach all the other PK’s, and I was just lucky to get in the way of that damn ball.”
Another pair of penalties went in and the shootout entered its 10th round. The only two players in Sporting’s lineup who hadn’t taken a penalty were Nielsen and Aurélien Collin.
And Nielsen wanted a turn.
“I’m screaming at the coaching staff that I wanted to take it because Aurélien Collin had been absolutely shockingly bad in practice on PKs,” Nielsen said.
The SKC coaching staff opted for Collin, and the Frenchman caressed the ball into the right-side netting.
Moments later, Salt Lake’s Lovel Palmer fired his own penalty off the bar, securing the cup for KC. It took a second for Nielsen to start celebrating, because he was watching the ball as it bounced away.
“I had to double-check and triple-check that that ball had bounced away when he missed that 10th PK,” he said.
Two days later, Nielsen announced his retirement in front of a packed crowd celebrating the victory at Union Station.
“I had a tough time holding back my emotions,” Nielsen said. “Because I’m going to quit what I have loved for so many years, that’s been a part of me for so many years.”
Since retirement, he’s spent time coaching at the USL level, most recently with Hartford Athletic.
When Nielsen left Hartford in 2019, he and his family decided that they were going to move anywhere in the world. They would all write a location on a piece of paper then take them out of a hat one at a time.
All four pieces of paper read “Kansas City.”
“It felt like home from the beginning. It did,” Nielsen said. “I can’t really explain why, but everything just went hand-in-hand from the beginning, with myself on the field, all the stuff off the field, my kids in school, my wife, everything.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Why Jimmy Nielsen, always a one-of-a-kind keeper, is about to become a Sporting Legend."