"It's never too late to accomplish your dreams," Cristo Fernández said this week — and given what just happened, he's earned the right to say it.
Fernández, 35, best known for playing the endlessly cheerful Dani Rojas across all three seasons of Ted Lasso, has signed a professional contract with El Paso Locomotive FC of the USL Championship. Not an ambassador deal. Not a promotional stunt. An actual contract, earned through preseason tryouts and friendly matches with various clubs.
The coach is serious about this
El Paso head coach Othoniel "Junior" Gonzalez was direct about what Fernández brings — and equally direct about what this isn't.
"This isn't a gimmick for us," Gonzalez said. "It's about the team and team first." He described Fernández as an attacking player — a goal scorer who can play center forward or out wide — and said he brings "skills, leadership and humility." In a league where depth across the front line determines how far teams can go in long seasons, that's a legitimate roster argument.
Fernández will have to earn playing time like everyone else. Gonzalez made that clear too.
A career path that doesn't have many parallels
The backstory matters here. Fernández grew up in Guadalajara, made a professional youth setup at 15 — leaving high school for night classes to do it — and was tracking toward a real career in the game before injuries ended it. He sold insurance for two years to save money, moved to the UK with no work visa, scraped for parts, and eventually landed Ted Lasso.
Last year he started thinking about coming back to football. He did the work quietly — training sessions, friendly matches, preseason trials — before this deal came through.
Soccer analyst Joseph Lowery, who covers American football closely, put it simply: "I don't really think there's ever been any parallel to this."
Whether Fernández actually gets minutes on the pitch and contributes competitively is the open question. But El Paso's coaching staff has seen enough to put him on the roster. That alone is the story — not the TV fame, but the fact that someone who gave up the game at 15 and built an entire second life is back inside professional football on merit, two decades later.
"My inner child is very happy," he said. Hard to argue with that.
