There is a moment in the new U2 short film Street of Dreams when the young girl at the heart of the story, Calle, stands alone with a soccer ball at her feet. Her world has been upended by homelessness, and everything around her whispers reasons to give up. Yet, she keeps dreaming and playing. And beside her, unseen by anyone else, walks Sir David Beckham, the personification of her inner voice, a guardian of belief when belief is hardest to find.
The 4-minute film, released to coincide with the 2026 World Cup, is a collaboration between Bank of America, Beckham, U2, and the charity Street Child United. Set to a new U2 song of the same name, the film tells the story of resilience in its most human form: not resilience as toughness, not resilience as denial, but resilience as the quiet, stubborn refusal to abandon what matters most, even when circumstances demand that perhaps you should.
As King She, the film's director, put it: "The film is one girl's journey, but really the story is about resilience and what can happen when someone believes in you."
That single sentence captures nearly everything Kimberley Young Milani and I try to convey in our upcoming book on resilience, "Lead with Character, Rise with Resilience. "
Resilience Is Not a Bounce
We are living, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney recently observed at Davos, through a rupture, not a gentle transition. Familiar assurances have fractured. Young people, in particular, are navigating a convergence of economic insecurity, political polarization, technological acceleration, loneliness, and mental health strain that would test any human nervous system.
In such moments, we reach reflexively for the word resilience. Yet, we often reduce it to a cliché such as the ability to "bounce back." Street of Dreams rejects that framing, and so does the research. Human beings are not rubber balls. Adversity rarely leaves normal intact. Homelessness, loss, illness, grief, betrayal - none of these can simply be "bounced" past. What Calle demonstrates in the film is something far more powerful: agency. She takes the next small step, and then the next, even when she cannot see the whole road.
Olympian Jeremiah Brown, whom we quote in the book, put it plainly: "Resilience is finding, in difficult moments, the courage to take a small step forward. Remain in motion, no matter how small the step." Calle's kicks, her drills, and her stubborn training on cracked pavement are small steps that metabolize struggle into capacity.
Resilience Needs Hope — the Fierce Kind
If resilience is the strength to continue, hope is the reason we bother. But hope, as we argue in the book, is not the delicate, sentimental thing pop culture makes it out to be. Real hope, in the words often attributed to writer Amanda Lovelace, "has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go."
That is precisely the hope on display in Street of Dreams. Calle is not naïve. Her circumstances are real. But she holds onto soccer as a source of purpose and possibility. And purpose, as decades of research has revealed, is the anchor that resilience requires. Friedrich Nietzsche's famous line applies: "Those who have a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how.'" Soccer is Calle's why.
Resilience Is Relational
Perhaps the most important message of the film, and one of the central points we raised in the book, is that resilience is not a solo act. The myth of the self-made survivor is exactly that: a myth. Resilience is built, sustained, and rescued through relationships. Calle is not alone. Sir David Beckham walks beside her, unseen but present.
William Nash, former Director of Psychological Health for the U.S. Marine Corps and one of the leaders we interviewed for the book, identifies three sustaining attachments essential to human resilience: valuing others, being valued, and belonging to a kindred group. When those attachments fray, people fragment. When they hold, people endure and grow.
Bank of America's Sports with Us platform, which underwrites the film, is a long-term community investment program designed to inspire and connect communities through the power of sports. Its core objective is to use sports as a tool for youth development, social mobility, and life skills, fostering meaningful, lasting impact. That commitment matters because it addresses resilience where it is actually built: in the connective tissue between an individual and a community willing to invest in people.
Belief as Infrastructure
Beckham's own words in launching the film echo one of the ten habits of resilience we identify in the book: "Football has given me opportunities I could never have imagined, but none of it would have been possible without people who believed in me along the way."
Belief is infrastructure. It is what allows a child to keep training when adults have written her off. It is what allows a soldier to keep fighting when the plan has collapsed. It is what allows a leader to keep showing up when applause is scarce. And it is transmissible, passed from mentor to mentee, from parent to child, from stranger to stranger, from a global icon to a girl on a broken street who cannot yet see her own future.
What the Film Asks of Us
Street of Dreams is a story. It is also a challenge. I believe it asks each of us: whose Beckham are we? Whose inner voice are we reinforcing? Whose dream are we protecting when it would be easier to look away?
Resilience is not a slogan. It is a set of habits – purpose, community, help-seeking, reframing, agency, preparation, recovery, reflection, growth, and service – that can be learned, taught, and cultivated. The young people watching sports, including the 2026 World Cup, are the leaders of tomorrow. They will need resilience to carry them through.
The good news, as Calle reminds us, is that they can build it. Especially if we walk beside them.