Javi Goes to the World Cup

The pressure of deadlines is a shared familiarity between journalists and university students. It was crunch time, the stakes were high, and finals were nearing their deadlines for CSUDH Journalism major and professional photojournalist Javier Perez.

Right as he was about to graduate, Perez was given the biggest, most career defining assignment in his lifetime.

Literally, while trying to finish his senior project, the soccer superfan was given a weeklong assignment to attend four games at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar as a multimedia journalist for Cabra Sports.

Graduation heavily relied on his senior year courses where he was met with a fork in the road.

His choice? Finish college or embrace his looming career.

The abruptness of covering news as both a journalism student and a professional journalist kicked in for Perez, as he was faced with the reality of juggling his overlapping schedule.

As a Mexican-Honduran American, Perez cherishes the memories growing up watching the Mexico National Futebol Team on television with his Mexican father.

Considering the fact Mexico was scheduled to compete, declining an opportunity to attend the 2022 World Cup was not an option for Perez, but neither was neglecting his college coursework.

Perez had to think quickly on how to complete his senior semester when his career required him to report from Doha, Qatar.

“I tried to make sure that in the best way possible I didn’t complicate them,” said Perez, who was given the blessing from his professors to leave the classroom to get out and report on the field. “I turned everything in on time and I got everything done, but it was bit of a hassle. When you have 15-hour flight, you just put everything on offline mode, and you type away, that’s what I did.”

Perez is a unique example of a student who is already employed in the field he is majoring in before earning his degree.

The situation is usually reversed as it’s common for students to wait until they graduate to find a career or neglect to use their degree at all.

Perez currently has media credentials to cover Los Angeles Galaxy and is a photographer for their rival team, LAFC.

Prior to being media for Galaxy and LAFC and reporting on the World Cup, Perez opened up about his humble beginnings.

Perez had a job working construction with his father, but he couldn’t envision it becoming his career. He became eager to explore real world hands-on experience on the field within his journalism major.

As an Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) member, he took initiative and contacted his advisor for career counseling. EOP provides services such as mentoring, to historically low-income, historically educationally disadvantaged, first-generation college students.

It was through EOP where Perez met the mentor that gave him his first reporting assignments covering high school sports in the Los Angeles area.

“I had an advisor named George,” Perez said. “I came up to him one day, I was in my sophomore year, and I felt like I wasn’t doing enough, like I needed to be out there. I told him I needed an internship, and he gave me the number of one of my now mentors, Mr. Rico Cabrera, the founder of East LA Sports Scene, and he brought me on.”

“He was very punctual, very diligent, very eager and ambitious to take on the assignments,” said Cabrera.

Perez reminisced about the cold nights filling his tank with his own money and driving long distances across Los Angeles to cover high school sports on as an unpaid intern.

“There’s this thing Mr. Rico Cabrera told me, and it was you have to pay your dues sometimes, and I feel like I paid my dues for a year covering high school football,” Perez said. “Everyone wants to get their opportunity and get into the big leagues, but sometimes you have to pay your dues.”

Perez covered high school football and accompanied Mr. Carrera to photograph Roosevelt High school, Garfield High School, and even covered the East LA Classic ELAC.

“I was with an outdated little video camera just recording the game from the press box,” Perez said.

Perez noticed they primarily covered basketball and football and convinced Mr. Carrera they should cover soccer as well.

As they began to work together and see success in their coverage, Carrera suggested they cover professional sports teams for the MLB, NFL and NBA.

Perez suggested LA Sports Scene expand their coverage to soccer, as well, which led the duo to begin covering LAFC.

“Once I knew I was doing professional teams, I upgraded, I bought myself a camera,” Perez said.

Perez uses the words “confidence,” “consistency” and “self-marketing” to describe the factors that helped him build his reputation as a reporter.

“You can’t wait around, you gotta put yourself out there,” said Perez, who combined his love for soccer and journalism to use his social media platform to report on soccer games as an independent. “I’m a very avid sports fan, I love soccer, that’s my passion.”

Perez said once he started tweeting, he was on Twitter just every day.

“Whatever news came out from another journalist; I wasn’t the first one,” said Perez, explaining his initial idea to use Twitter to report on soccer. “I was never the first one, I don’t have the sources other established journalists have in the industry.”

All journalists were tweeting out for the Mexico National Team, Perez realized.

“Which is something I am very passionate about. It was in Spanish,” Perez said. “I’m Mexican American. I belong to a community of kids who grew up with parents who spoke Spanish but all the content we consume on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter is in English, so how can I bridge the gap?”

Perez began using the aggregate journalism method to report soccer to his social media followers.

“I was taking, a lot of the stuff these journalists reported and, obviously giving them credit, I just translated it in English, and I built a following,” Perez explained. “People started following my stuff, liking my stuff, and asking me for opinions and, through there, my company that I now work for had just opened up and they were looking for content creators, so they were like, ‘hey, we really like your writing style, your Twitter, and we see that you’ve gotten a fair amount of followers’...they [Cabra Sports] brought me on.”

Today, Perez continues his career as a professional soccer photojournalist. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in Journalism from CSUDH in spring 2023.