Zavier Gozo considers himself a thinker, and during the long flight from Utah to London, there was a seemingly endless amount of time to think. He was heading to England to sign for Crystal Palace. He knew exactly what that meant. He knew that the second he stepped on that plane, his life had changed.
That flight, in effect, marked the end of his childhood. After 19 years living with his parents, he was moving to Europe on his own, leaving his family, his boyhood club, his girlfriend and everything he had ever known back in Utah. Whether he was ready for what awaited him was another question. But that uncertainty was part of the allure.
"On that flight over there, I was like, 'Wow, this is real," he tells GOAL. "The first day in the facility, all those moments were like, 'Wow, I'm here, this is where I want to be. This is my club. This is where I'm going to play, and this is all real now'. When you're signing the deal, you're still in Utah. It doesn't even feel real until you actually leave, and then you're like, 'Okay, I'm actually not going back home this time'.
So, for nearly 10 hours seated on a plane alongside those he loves most, Gozo thought about how, all of a sudden, everything he'd always wanted had arrived, and how difficult it would be now that it had.
"You feel sad, and you're gonna miss it, but you're also excited for what's to come," he explains. "Obviously, everything you've dreamed of is coming true. I was thinking about everything. My mind was racing. What am I going to do? Where am I going to live? Where do I go? You just think about everything."
Fast forward a few weeks and more dreams have come true. Just days after signing with Palace, Gozo made his Premier League debut against Manchester City, of all teams. Just over a month later, he made his debut for the U.S. Men's National Team. It took him years to reach those levels, and he reached both within a matter of weeks.
But those milestones haven’t made the adjustment easy. Since the 22-minute debut, he's played just 23 minutes for Palace. His USMNT runout was brief, as he played 28 minutes across the four games during the international break. It's all been an adjustment period, and adjusting is hard. It doesn't happen all at once.
The truth is that Gozo and those close to him didn't really want all of this to go smoothly; they wanted him to be challenged, both as a player and as a person. There have been times, the winger admits, that he's felt like the worst player at Crystal Palace, and that's a good thing, he says. That means he's the player with the most room to improve.
"I knew coming into this that you're not going to be the best player right away, and that's what I want," he says. "It's just a process, I think, and I'm on a road to get to where I want to be. I feel like, 100 percent, I'll get there; it's a matter of when and how."
So how does he get there? By surviving the hard moments, he says, and there have been plenty of those since that long flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
