You cannot tell most stories about football without the city of Miami, and you cannot tell most stories about the city of Miami without football.

Some whole states could produce a competitive NFL team with players who grew up there. And some cities—Los Angeles, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Dallas among them—could probably do the same. But in Miami there are a handful of blocks that would produce a pretty nice depth chart.

Luther Campbell, the Miami icon best known for his work with rap pioneers 2 Live Crew and a cofounder of the Liberty City Warriors, the city’s legendary youth football program, can recount van tours in which he’d haul a handful of his high school players to different colleges in the South so they could see what might come next. Players like Amari Cooper, Devonta Freeman, and Duke Johnson were sharing a row of seats just a decade ago.

“When you hear all the names that have come through, it really is unbelievable,” former NFL star Chad Johnson, one of Campbell’s former players and one of the many NFL stars to come from Liberty City, told me. Other Liberty City products include Antonio Brown and T.Y. Hilton.

An area home to about 20,000 people producing some of the best athletes in the world is a sort of football wonder. It is also not an accident. “The closest thing to compare it to is Chinese gymnastics,” Campbell told me. “Where, from the time you are 4 years old, it is not recreation. It is, in no way, shape, form, or fashion, recreational. It is very serious. Grandmothers and mothers watch you practice, and if you are not practicing hard, your grandmother will come through the fence and tell you to toughen up.”

This high-pressure environment is the subject of the new Starz docuseries Warriors of Liberty City, a six-episode run that premiered this week and follows the Liberty City Warriors, the attached cheerleading squad, as well as Miami Northwestern Senior High School, another Liberty City staple that’s produced recent first-round picks like Cooper, Teddy Bridgewater, and Artie Burns (along with Moonlight director Barry Jenkins). The show—which debuted this past Sunday and was produced in part by LeBron James and his business partner Maverick Carter—opens with the NFL hook, telling us that the area can claim 47 percent more pro players than any other city. There are interviews with Chad Johnson and Freeman, but then after that, very little else about the NFL life—except when one player on the Liberty City Warriors’ “Boom Squad,” which consists of 6-year-olds, says that he’ll buy a Ferrari and a Mercedes for his parents when he makes it to the league. Instead, the show reveals daily Liberty City life—football and otherwise. That includes everything from talk of nearby gunshots canceling practice to parental separations to tension-filled parties that seem to be on the edge of trouble to heated confrontations over third-down play-calling in a game for elementary school players.

Though there has been a recent proliferation of sports docuseries, few series are as gripping as Warriors of Liberty City. While most other shows of its kind deal with the drama of professional sports, this show traffics in real-life stakes for kids with uncertain futures. This is football against the backdrop of a neighborhood The New York Times describes as a place where “violence has been an intractable problem for generations.” One of the players who should be playing for the Warriors in the series was gunned down in 2016 on his way to buy candy.

HBO has produced hours of compelling television with Hard Knocks and 24/7. Some boxing 24/7s qualify as among my favorite sports television ever. Amazon has recently gotten deeper into the genre with All or Nothing and its affiliated behind-the-scenes looks at sports teams. But with those shows what matters is whether someone like Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola wins the Premier League title. If the team falls short, he’ll slink back into his very comfortable life. The same can be said for nearly anyone involved in these shows—from Amazon’s very good McLaren Formula 1 series to even most players who are cut on Hard Knocks. On Warriors of Liberty City, you get a mother of a player saying she simply wants to live in an apartment where you don’t hear gunshots.

The Dallas Cowboys, subjects of the most recent All or Nothing, are not the only NFL team with internal problems. But Miami is the only city that produces this many NFL players and Liberty City is the most interesting neighborhood within that universe. Duke Johnson told me that in your late teens, you start to figure out that Liberty City is different. “You learn it in college, or maybe in high school once you start a playoff run and you really get out of the city,” he said. “You meet all these kids from different teams and you start to see the difference between where they are from and Liberty City. You see a different hunger.”

This show is more spiritually aligned with Netflix’s Last Chance U, another fascinating narrative—though that features far more football and far less of the world the football is played in. Warriors of Liberty City really has more in common with various pieces of written journalism, like Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights (the book, not the TV show or the movie) or George Dohrmann’s  Play Their Hearts Out, a great look at AAU basketball culture.

For Campbell, the show is an honest and fascinating look at the program he built as part of a promise to himself that when he had the money, he would build an infrastructure so that kids wouldn’t have to bus across town to play football like he did. Vice dedicated an episode of Vice World of Sports to the Warriors, but Campbell said the network declined to do a full docuseries, so the idea found its way to James’s production team. (“He can relate to it,” Campbell said of LeBron.) Chad Johnson told me he personally wanted to be included in the project because “some people are going through the same struggle” that he went through. He wanted to emphasize that it will “not always be pretty, not always going to be beautiful but that you’ve got to keep on fighting.”  

The series takes us inside a high school class in the neighborhood, inside countless apartments and houses, inside late-night sprints at the end of practice. “There’s just something in the water about football,” Chad Johnson said.

My favorite story about youth football in Miami is the time that my Orlando high school played Miami Northwestern in the state championship two years after I’d graduated. It was a bloodbath; Miami Northwestern’s roster was so deep that seemingly no one noticed that Lavonte David, a future NFL All-Pro, was on the team. One hiccup on the way to Northwestern’s 41-0 win was a knee injury to Jacory Harris, the Miami team’s starting quarterback who would eventually play for the Miami Hurricanes. A backup came in and immediately threw a deep touchdown to Aldarius Johnson, another future Hurricane. When Teddy Bridgewater, who was a freshman that year, later rose to prominence, I wondered if Bridgewater was the player who made the throw. A few years ago, I spoke with another Northwestern player about it. No, he clarified, that team was so stacked that Bridgewater wasn’t even the backup.  

There is a poignant scene early in the series when one of the youth players, Lamont Beneby, is on the phone with his father, who is in jail. His father asks him about the NFL player protests and the movement that Colin Kaepernick started. He asks his son how much he knew. Beneby did not know a lot, and in response his father told him there is a lot to learn about the country.

It is a particularly intriguing time to make a football show. The sport is as politically charged as it ever has been. Participation in high school football is down, even though participation in athletics overall has spiked. This is a problem for the Warriors too. I asked Campbell what running a youth football team is like in the current era. From a participation standpoint, it’s essentially the same as every place else, he said: the numbers are lower than they were a decade ago. He said the hardest group to keep playing are teenagers. “Football was God’s gift to America and right now it’s not as special as it was before,” Campbell said. “Football was an addiction and I feel like it’s not an addiction anymore.”

He has some theories: the obvious safety concerns and the growing number of technological distractions among them. He also thinks the situation with Kaepernick, who has not played since the 2016 season when he launched a protest against racial injustice, has something to do with it.

“At that age, you are curious, you’re 13 years old and you think you’re a little man. That’s the unique age where you get curious about social issues,” Campbell said. “Those are the kids who are at the age where they might be protesting the president or on social issues, and I think with all the unique issues you might say, ‘Football might not be for me.’”

Football, however, is definitely for the kids involved in the show, who are in tears after losses. The parents are often near tears too. One loss by the 6-year-old team leads to not only a massive blowup between parents and the coaching staff after the game but a continuation of the same blowup at one child’s birthday party days later.

In watching the games captured in the show, I kept coming back to something Campbell said: that the difference between making it and not making it is not only razor thin, but also has very little to do with god-given gifts. He said that Freeman—one of the NFL’s best running backs, currently on a five-year, $41 million deal—was maybe the 10th most talented player in terms of athleticism and speed on the team.

“Everyone was much more athletic,” Campbell said. “But he wanted each stride to be the best because he wasn’t the most athletic one. He’d always say ‘I listen’ and others don’t. The ones that make it are the smart ones. A lot of kids stray off, they want to be thugs. If you can break the chain you can be successful. The worst thing you can do is get an education.”

Campbell also thought Duke Johnson might never become a football player, since he spent most of his time early in practice doing flips around the field.

“Growing up where we did, it comes down to one or two bad decisions. There were a lot of talented guys who didn’t make it—some of it was out of their control, some if it wasn’t,” Duke Johnson told me. “It is so easy to focus on things that don’t matter.”

Some of the beauty of this show is that we don’t know who made it. It is not Hoop Dreams, where you follow these kids for years, nor Last Chance U, where viewers get the immediate gratification of knowing whether the junior college player got a scholarship or not. Instead, it is simply an examination of a neighborhood, a group of people, and the sport that connects everything. There are many sports series; there is only one of these.

Kevin Clark