The final weekend of the 2014 Major League Soccer hasn't even kicked off, and yet the year's final AT&T Goal of the Week may have already been scored.
The scorer of this amazing goal isn't one of the usual suspects like Bradley Wright-Phillips, Dom Dwyer or Robbie Keane. No, this is an even more special goalscorer than the league leaders.
Five-year-old Irelyn Maloney was signed by the New York Red Bulls on Thursday and the Brick, N.J., native wasted no time in scoring her first golazo in training. The quality of this goal (above video) is easy to see as Irelyn skins the entire Red Bulls team on her way from the center circle to the back of the net.
Irelyn was born with Familial Mediterranean fever, or FMF, a rare genetic disease that causes recurrent fevers and inflammation in the abdomen, chest and joints. The disease has damaged her spinal cord, which prevents her from playing sports.
But that hasn't stopped her from falling in love with soccer.
“If she could play soccer every day, and every minute of every day, she would,” Shannon Maloney, Irelyn’s mother, said. “She wears her cleats to school, she wears her cleats to the food store and to the doctors. She just absolutely adores it.”
The Red Bulls tell Irelyn's story in great detail on their website.
