Soccer fan Joe Mazzulla hopes to bring some lessons from the World Cup back to the court with the Celtics

In December 2008, West Virginia point guard Joe Mazzulla severely injured his left shoulder when he collided with an Ole Miss player during a game.

Read more Brooks Koepka goes on late birdie run and shares Canadian Open lead with five players

Before undergoing season-ending surgery two months later, Mazzulla confided in coach Bob Huggins that he feared his career might be over. Huggins responded that the good news was that Mazzulla would not need arms to play soccer.

“He wasn’t 100 percent messing around,” Mazzulla said by telephone last week.

Joking or not, Huggins and those close to Mazzulla were aware of his fondness for the sport. Growing up in Johnston, R.I., basketball and soccer were equal passions for Mazzulla. He joined a competitive youth club team and was a member of the varsity squad at Bishop Hendricken High School in Warwick.

“I wasn’t very skilled,” he said. “I was just athletic and a little fast. Sometimes I played striker, sometimes I played sweeper. They had to hide the fact that I wasn’t skilled, so they put me in all the athletic positions.”

Mazzulla committed to the Mountaineers’ basketball team near the end of his junior year at Bishop Hendricken and stopped playing soccer to fully focus on the sport that had helped him secure a scholarship. But his love for the pitch endured.

The footwork he developed as a soccer player helped him as a point guard, and the game’s methods and styles have influenced him as a basketball coach. With the World Cup descending upon Boston for the next month, Mazzulla is eager to see what else can be extracted.

“There’s spacing, there’s cutting, there’s timing, there’s making runs, there’s having outlets against different coverages,” he said. “So, I think you kind of put it into the basketball form. Players might not hear it that way, but I think from watching a soccer game it’s like, ‘OK how can that translate to something from basketball?’ ”

Perhaps it is partly a hazard of the job, but Mazzulla said soccer brings him more joy than basketball because the principles of teamwork are usually more visible because of the game’s structure.

“Each possession in basketball is a results-oriented possession, from the standpoint of someone has to shoot and you have a time constraint,” Mazzulla said, “as opposed to soccer where there’s no time constraint and you can have an amazing possession without getting a shot off. So, when you go practice, you can pass it 50 times and eight people touch it, and you’re getting better.”

All 11 players on the field work together to build toward a scoring chance. Several minutes often pass without a shot being fired at the goal. Mazzulla finds beauty in that.

“I think it just simulates a different level of connectivity and joy, which is why I think it’s one of the most popular sports in the world, because of that connection, that joy, that passion that it creates,” Mazzulla said. “I’ve always appreciated that.”

Read more Nelly Korda and ‘Legally Blonde’ team three shots back of Dow Championship

Mazzulla has always been fascinated by soccer coaches and finds studying their tactics useful. In basketball, for example, there are timeouts every few minutes, along with end-of-quarter breaks and constant stoppages for dead balls and free throws.

Soccer is more constant, with essentially just a halftime break to gather the team and detail instructions and adjustments.

“So, what you do as a teacher, what you do as a communicator leading up to the game sets the stage for your players, because you have no timeouts and can only make adjustments every 45 minutes,” Mazzulla said. “So you have to really prepare your guys in the film room and practice. That ability to teach is where I go to soccer to get better as a teacher. A teacher in film, a teacher in practice, a teacher in communication.”

After reading “The Barcelona Way: How to Create a High-Performance Culture,” Mazzulla became increasingly intrigued by the Spanish power’s former manager, Pep Guardiola, who went on to coach Bayern Munich and Manchester City. He appreciated Guardiola’s “holistic approach” to leadership.

The two met about four years ago and have become close friends. Guardiola has attended Celtics games at TD Garden, and Mazzulla has traveled overseas to see Guardiola’s teams play, most recently last month, when Guardiola coached his final match for Manchester City before stepping down.

“Just his overall approach as a coach, leader, and how he got his beginning was what I was drawn to,” Mazzulla said. “He’s helped me in many different ways throughout our time here.”

Mazzulla hopes to attend at least a couple of the World Cup games in Foxborough. He is eager to see the world’s best players on its biggest stage and intends to study their approaches to achieving greatness.

But the former Rhode Island high school soccer player will also take a moment to simply be a fan.

“I don’t think people realize how great of an experience it is to have the World Cup in your country,” Mazzulla said. “You’re opening up to different cultures, different styles of play, but really the meaning of the competition and what it means to different people is interesting. There are teams that come and have a chance to win it and there’s teams that have no chance, and they all treat it the same.”

Read more Cohasset flips the script in title-game rematch, capturing Division 3 girls’ lacrosse championship