This is all it is
I was visiting family in Minnesota a few years back and spent one afternoon watching my cousin play baseball. It was Memorial Day weekend, late May, warm without being hot — baseball weather.
The kids hung around the parking lot next to the field as they waited for their teammates to arrive, looking at their phones, leaning on their parents’ cars. They migrated eventually to the dugouts, laced up their cleats, removed their gloves from their bags. The coach hit fly balls toward his players. The sun hung low in the sky, the shadows lengthened. The umpire arrived unnoticed, parked his car, smoked a cigarette.
Eventually the boys made it out onto the field and the umpire took his place behind home plate. I watched from behind a chain link fence, listened to those unmistakable baseball noises: the pop of the ball off aluminum bats, its dull thud into the catcher’s mitt, the huff huff of cleats on diamond dirt, the umpire calling out balls and strikes in that special, clipped, umpire’s way, like coughs or sneezes. There’s a beat to it, a rhythm, and the time passed in that special baseball way, too — sliding by, never rushed.
There was a point watching all this the thought occurred to me something like: this is baseball. Go to any baseball diamond in America on any summer afternoon and you’ll see the same game. Go to Fenway, go to Wrigley Field, go to Yankee Stadium in late October and you’ll see the same game, too. Bigger, sure. Better. But not really all that different when it comes right down to it. The same sounds — wood instead of aluminum — but essentially the same. The same, lazy passage of time. This is it: a summer afternoon, kids grunting and running and throwing and rolling their eyes. This is all it is.
Is this a cliché?
Baseball, like any sport, is its own language, and built into that language is a kind of platonic ideal of a game; the venue may change, but the essence of the thing does not. I might well have made this point with a different story, set on a different afternoon — major league bleachers, cold beer, Cracker Jacks, you already know the details. Which is exactly the point. If these are clichés, I want to suggest they are good clichés.
There’s a basketball equivalent of this, too. Somewhere in a playground, in New York City or Chicago — the asphalt legends — or on a gravel drive in Indiana. Somewhere in there is basketball’s heart and soul. There’s one for football. In a backyard, maybe, on Thanksgiving. And hockey, on a frozen pond in New England or northern Minnesota. And for all the corporate nonsense that surrounds the big leagues, there is a central, abiding truth in these clichés, a truth no Chevy commercial can touch.
There is one notable omission from this list: soccer. And so the question is, what is American soccer’s equivalent, its sunny, summer diamond, its burning city blacktop? Where does the heart and soul of American soccer reside?
This isn’t a question about whether soccer has “made it” in America. It’s made it enough. It’s a question about what the sport means on a more spiritual level, about the story U.S. soccer tells itself before bedtime. It’s also a question about narratives, about where they come from and the work they do in shaping the way we think about a sport.
Indeed, one might reasonably ask whether I’m not already pulling a fancy narrative trick. Could I not simply have added a story, any story, about American soccer to the list above? As long as I made enough overwrought assertions about the nature of time, would anyone have noticed the difference, really?
That’s an important question, and I guess one you’ll have to answer for yourself.
But the thing about that baseball story is that it was effortless. That I’m not sure what soccer’s equivalent is is partly a product of my own background. I grew up in England, the American son of American parents, and when I arrived in the U.S. six years ago I did so with a set of footballing prejudices that ran deep, and deep in a special, obnoxiously English way.
But it isn’t just me. I spoke to fans from across the country for this story, and they were all more or less agreed: there is no single U.S. soccer culture. America is so big and so diverse and its soccer interests are so divided across so many leagues it’s unclear whether there is any narrative glue strong enough to hold it all together.
This, then, is my project: to find some glue, or at least some tape or something.
That was then, this is now
If the history of world football has proceeded in something roughly resembling a straight line, then the history of soccer in the United States has proceeded in something more closely resembling an Escher staircase, moving somewhere certainly, but certainly not in any obvious direction.
This is a problem, narrative-wise. Sports stories tend to be much more heart than mind. Good sports stories have beginnings and middles and ends, heroes and villains, and the U.S. soccer story has instead a rather larger collection of, well, what, exactly? Wrong turns? Red herrings?
I asked the fans I spoke to what they consider to be the defining moments in U.S. soccer history. The focus, unsurprisingly, was on the past quarter century, the first time in a hundred years the U.S. soccer story has unfurled in any easily traceable narrative arc.
“World Cup ’90 was huge for the development of the sport here,” said Dan Margarit, president of San Jose Earthquakes supporters’ group (SG) San Jose Ultras. “A bunch of mostly amateur players made it there, and put American soccer on the map.”
“Any time our national team does well I think people are happy about that, especially against major rivals like Mexico. The Dos a Cero game was something people will always talk about,” said Roberto Enrique, vice president of The Ruckus, an Orlando City SG.
Ben Glidden of NYCFC SG The Third Rail focused on the Women’s National Team: “ … winning the World Cup was pretty incredible a couple of years ago. To go to bars and see them packed with people watching was really important for the sport.”
“The surprise run in the 2002 World Cup, hosting the World Cup in 1994, our run to the finals in the 2009 Confederations Cup and Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria in 2010,” offered Steve Ferrezza of New York Red Bulls’ Empire Supporters Club. “I feel like each of those moments were turning points for U.S. soccer and they’re memories that are still talked about today.”
Ferrezza’s right about all these moments, but his answer also suggests a special narrative problem. How many turning points can a story plausibly maintain?
The problem appears even bigger when you add in those moments Ferrezza leaves out — Italia ’90, Dos a Cero and, most notably, the women’s World Cup victories in 1991, 1999 — as far as images go, few in U.S. soccer are more iconic than that of Brandi Chastain falling to her knees to celebrate, jersey in clenched fist, after scoring the winning penalty against China — and 2015, when the U.S. beat Japan in a final that was the most watched soccer game in U.S. history.
This all in only 25 years. As far as I can tell, this is a problem unique to the U.S. The desire for soccer to have simply arrived is such that every moment that attracts national attention comes to appear like a, or perhaps the, turning point, the last step on the way to the soccer promised land. Turn enough corners, though, and you end up back where you started.
As Curtis Jenkins, president of Footie Mob, an Atlanta United SG, said, “MLS has been around for 20 plus years. The English FA has been around 100 some odd years. It’s not fair to try to force over a century of culture into 20 years. And it’s not fair to try to invent that culture in 20 plus years. It just has to be what it is right now, which is fine. People have to be okay with that … give it time. Let it happen. It’ll get there, just let it get there on its own.”
Time is an important character in every U.S. soccer story, but its role mostly depends on how far back you’re willing to look. The early years of U.S. soccer coincided with the early years of soccer almost everywhere else in the world, and their truths remain strikingly relevant today.
In the beginning, soccer in the U.S. was dominated by the various immigrant communities entering the country at the turn of the 20th century. The ASL, America’s most successful early attempt at a professional league (it trailed only MLB in popularity among professional sports), was filled with foreign players — in 10 of the first 11 years of its existence, the league’s top scorer came from overseas (Scotland and England were the main sources of talent).
The league eventually collapsed after years spent clashing with its own governing body, the United States Football Association (USFA), that began when ASL owners started to implement a series of new, non-FIFA compliant rules in an attempt to make the game more palatable to a mainstream American audience, and came to a head when Charles Stoneham, owner of the New York Nationals (and MLB’s New York Giants), organized a boycott of the USFA’s prized knockout competition, the U.S. Challenge Cup.
One grievance led to another, and the ASL was all but finished by the early ‘30s, its decline likely accelerated by the onset of The Great Depression, and any hopes of a comeback quashed with the outbreak of World War II. Soccer had fallen almost completely off the radar by the end of the decade, the only groups still interested the immigrant communities that brought it over in the first place. The sport developed a reputation as being dirty, violent, essentially un-American.
When soccer did eventually find a more established place in the fabric of American life in the ‘60s, it was the white, suburban middle classes that fueled its growth — and they did so by reimagining the sport in their more traditionally (read: white) American image.
The group with perhaps the biggest influence in this shift was the American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO). As David Keyes writes in Making the Mainstream: The Domestication of American Soccer, “The leaders of AYSO sought to redefine the sport so that it would not be seen as a foreign game, but instead the perfect game for the newly ascendant suburbs … The structure that the ethnic leagues like the GLASL had created was, in the eyes of AYSO leaders, a barrier to the growth of soccer. These leaders were explicit in seeing the ethnic nature of soccer as a problem.”
In reshaping soccer’s image in this way, groups like AYSO turned their backs on the sport’s immigrant history, and possibly also closed off its future. American soccer, I suspect, is battling the image it built for itself in the 1960s as much as it is battling a lack of interest.
Indeed, the anti-soccer sentiments MLS has been battling for the past 20 years are a strange combination of anti-immigrant and anti-suburban: soccer players are soft (unlike NFL players, who are merely brain-damaged) but soccer fans are hooligans; soccer is a sport for fragile women and children but soccer is also a sport for dangerous immigrants.
It’s probably a leap to suggest the temptation to label every stirring victory in U.S. soccer a turning point is an inheritance of this history, but there’s no question the need for U.S. soccer fans to defend, and even just to explain, the sport they love has led to a kind of heightened sensitivity, and a susceptibility to reading too much into things. U.S. soccer moments are not just moments; they’re referendums on the sport.
Possibly as a result of this, it’s unclear what work American soccer’s biggest moments do in the day-to-day narrative building surrounding the sport. They don’t really seem to hang over the present. They are not ghosts — not like, for example, England’s 1966 World Cup win, which is always simmering beneath the surface in one way or another, only ever one bland performance against Slovakia away from bubbling over.
It’s a hard thing to explain exactly what function this history serves, and the role it plays in shaping a culture. But about English football I’ll say this: England’s relationship to its national sport can, I think, be pretty accurately reduced to the fact England were once the best team in the world, and now they’re not. These days, England’s ongoing attempt to come to terms with its own mediocrity manifests itself most obviously in a debate about the value of pass-first, possession oriented football (currently best exemplified by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola), as opposed to the more direct, physical style for which the country is known.
This debate has been around for decades in some form or another, and ’66 is ground zero. Almost every recurring conversation in English football — about talent development, about the quality of the Premier League, about the influx of foreign players and owners and managers, about the value of possession, about diving — all of it comes back to the same, almost childishly simple insecurity: England used to be the best and now they’re not, and no one knows what to do about it. When something significant happens in English football, it is absorbed into this conversation, and therefore becomes a historical problem as much as a sporting one.
The same doesn’t seem to be true in the U.S. If there’s a dominant conversation within American soccer it’s about why we need to keep having the same conversation about the state of American soccer.
And so these American stories, whether because of bad timing or a lack of interest or whatever, just sort of hang there in the past — important historical details, but in the end just details.
That was then. This is now.
If there’s one U.S. soccer moment that qualifies for an exception, however, it’s Landon Donovan’s last-minute winner against Algeria in the group stage of the 2010 World Cup.
As David Wegner, board chair of Colorado Rapids SG C38, recounted over the phone: “When Timmy Howard, in the final seconds of the 2010 World Cup, when Timmy Howard chucked that ball down the right side and Donovan dribbled in and passes and Dempsey gets stonewalled by the goalie and Donovan picked up the spilt ball and scored that goal to put us through the group. To not only put us through, but to win the group that England was in, back when we all thought England was a worth a shit team … that was exponential.”
“The goal we’ll tell our kids about,” said Wes Burdine, managing editor of Minnesota soccer blog fiftyfive.one.
Fran Harrington, president of New England Revolution SG Midnight Riders, said, “Everyone has a story about where they were when they were watching that.”
I was at school in London in a room full of my classmates, watching England sputter their way to a 1-0 win against Slovenia in the other game in the group. The England match was over when I heard the news Landon had scored. I don’t think I’ve ever celebrated so much for a goal I didn’t see.
One of the byproducts of dual nationalism, at least for me, has been a sort of watering down of patriotism. And so my soccer loyalty is mostly reserved for the club game, but that goal, which I didn’t even see, though I’ve watched it many times since, was the best international soccer moment of my life. It did what I’ve always thought these sorts of things are supposed to do, which is to turn you into a stupider, screamier version of yourself.
The goal ticks a lot of narrative boxes, too. Donovan as a player has real emotional weight. He means something to U.S. fans beyond simply being good at soccer. His legacy, the drama of that World Cup, hang over the U.S. Men’s National Team even today. The reaction when he was omitted by Jurgen Klinsmann from the 2014 World Cup squad was telling.
It seemed at the time to be about more than just that moment; it was about everything he’d done for U.S. soccer, like the Algeria goal, like the 2002 World Cup, like staying in MLS, and it seemed then to mean something more than the decision itself, more than Donovan or Klinsmann.
That was then. This is still then.
That’s how sports history’s meant to work. Players and coaches are always looking ahead to the next game, but fans only ever see variations of the past. It’s no coincidence that when Klinsmann was fired late last year, the Donovan snub was one of the most popular sticks to beat him with.
Tim Sosar of the Philadelphia Union’s Sons of Ben didn’t mention the Donovan goal, but he made an interesting point that feels appropriate in the context of that game against Algeria: “Based on the reactions of fans from the last couple of World Cups (men and women), I’d say it’s not so much a defining moment, but a defining belief in the idea of us being greater than a set of individuals, but a group that can achieve anything with teamwork, commitment and belief in ourselves.”
Indeed, the most popular stick to beat Klinsmann with after his final games, losses to Mexico and Costa Rica, was that losing’s okay — you can’t win ‘em all — but losing without heart or effort, losing without going down swinging, now that is un-American. That feels like the beginning of a story.
And so the temptation is to repeat Jenkins: “Let it happen. It’ll get there, just let it get there on its own.” If U.S. soccer began its latest march into the mainstream some time between the ’90 and the ’99 World Cups, it took about 15 years to deliver its first defining moment. In the context of sporting myth, that’s nothing. These things take time.
But there are also compelling reasons to believe time won’t be enough.
Who cares if we eat the icing first?
U.S. soccer is many things, but perhaps above all U.S. soccer is weird.
Take MLS, for example. MLS is weird for many reasons, but it’s especially weird for the reason it exists at all. The league was set up as a bargaining chip, a way for the USSF to convince FIFA to let it host the ’94 World Cup. And so, in the early years, MLS existed as a means to financially justify its own existence.
The same is true of every other major sports league in the U.S., of course, but with this important difference: the other leagues were set up to capitalize on sports that had already proven themselves to be popular at the amateur level. MLS, in contrast, was set up to capitalize on a fanbase it was simultaneously expected to build from scratch. As a result, the league was faced with the unenviable task of creating fans and customers at the same time.
The line between fan and customer is thin (sometimes even non-existent), but several of the fans I spoke to expressed an uneasiness with the way MLS has, at times, blurred that line.
“I think it’s a league-wide issue that we’ve had where they’re again using our culture as a way to advertise and generate profits and revenue but at the same time handing out disciplinary actions for the very same thing that they use to advertise,” Enrique told me.
“Up until about four or five years ago, MLS didn’t know what to do with supporters,” Wegner said. “They saw us as the enemy. They saw us as a problem. They all came up from football organizations, baseball organizations, basketball, hockey. The fan experience, the supporters experience in a game is exponentially different. And you know we’re rowdy, we’re more vocal, we’re on our feet. But we also self police, we keep it together.”
Margarit was more critical: “The league likes the visuals and audio from large groups of people, however, they want to micromanage that, keep it on a leash. Unfortunately there are ‘supporters’ who are totally fine with it. There are groups created by front offices, instead of being created out of passion, love, by fans in an organic way. There are also groups who are totally submissive to the front offices, accept any type of conditions, accept money.”
Tom Conquergood, president of Seattle Sounders SG Gorilla FC, suggested the league, or at least the individual team front offices, was learning from its mistakes. “We literally had a show of hands around the table this weekend [at the Independent Supporters Conference in February] to ask who meets with their front office on a regular basis and almost every hand went up, whereas a few years ago that was not the case,” he said. “Only a smattering of us would ever meet with our front office, because they didn’t have an interest in communicating with us.”
This isn’t to criticize MLS — not that it doesn’t deserve criticism, but the criticism deserves a separate article — but rather to point out the delicate situation it finds itself in. MLS SGs are, no doubt, a valuable marketing tool, but there are risks associated with treating fans like free advertising, not least the possibility they’ll become alienated by such transparent commodification of their own passion. That this evil might be necessary doesn’t make it any less cringeworthy.
This issue, like so many in U.S. soccer, relates to a broader question about authenticity. MLS SGs have, and continue to work hard to establish credibility, but their image as organically grown fan groups is undermined when they become the face of a business that, as history has shown, is quite happy telling them exactly how to behave. They come to seem, in the cynical view, like puppets, tools for a business that cares more about its next TV deal than its biggest fans.
The hyper-corporatism of professional sports is an accepted fact of American life, but it’s tolerated in part because the games have a real significance at the amateur level. The NFL is football at its biggest and brightest, but if you want to understand what the sport means, you’d be better off going to a college or high school game, or that backyard on Thanksgiving morning. That’s where the good stuff is. This isn’t quite true of soccer, which means MLS’ treatment of SGs can’t be dismissed simply as the corporate American way.
This is my concern: there’s an overwhelming sense soccer’s success in America can be determined by how many people watch the sport on television. And while the obsession with TV ratings is, at least, distinctly American, I find it hard to believe the sort of story I’m after is sitting on the couch.
This problem — that is, the ubiquity of the idea soccer’s success can be determined quantitatively — is exacerbated by perhaps the biggest single rift within U.S. soccer culture, that between MLS fans and fans of other leagues around the world, a divide that can only really be measured by TV ratings, because TV’s the only place to watch these foreign leagues.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive — almost all the fans I spoke to said they also watch non-MLS club soccer — but the divide is nonetheless very real. According to the TV ratings, Liga MX is the most popular soccer league in America, and by a pretty wide margin, the Premier League is second and somewhere around last place is MLS.
The fan who refuses to watch MLS, usually because of a perceived lack of quality, is such a notorious figure he has been given his own name: the Eurosnob. You already know where to find him, in a soccer bar on a weekend morning, probably in one of America’s major urban centers, probably being terrible.
Some American fans consider this a special kind of embarrassment, a shameless attempt to be more (usually) English than the English themselves. There are moments when this doesn’t feel unfair.
I remember sitting in a bar in Manhattan a few years ago watching Manchester United play Chelsea. There was a large group of Americans in the middle of the room singing “Glory, Glory Man United,” which — and I fully acknowledge this opinion is a result of my own prejudices — which was just about the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in a bar before noon. But like it or not, this sort of scene is for many people the defining image of American soccer culture. (There are, of course, non-obnoxious Premier League fans, but you rarely hear about them, because, well, that’s how non-obnoxiousness works.)
Almost everyone I spoke to cited the increased accessibility of the foreign leagues as a positive in building soccer’s popularity in the U.S., but at the same time acknowledged the next big step will be for Americans to embrace the domestic game, to follow their local team first and worry about the other leagues later. It’s one of soccer’s many catch-22s. A rising tide raises all boats, seems to be the feeling, until it doesn’t. The difficulty is figuring out exactly where that point arrives.
“It’s a matter of pride,” Margarit said. “If this league wants to become respectable and build a solid tradition of American soccer, the fans need to put their local team on the first place and be proud of them. Our Quakes were mostly in the second bottom of the table for the past few years, but I would not trade them for Barca, Man United or Bayern for anything in the world. I have no connection with those teams. It would make no difference if I supported those teams from thousands of miles away. In SJ, I can make a difference and I am doing my best to help my club directly and American soccer indirectly. Hopefully the new generation will take more pride in the MLS teams and focus less on the teams overseas.”
Bailey Brown, president of Dallas FC SG Dallas Beer Guardians made a similar point: “The best way to grow soccer in the United States is to realize that we need to support our teams that are here and not just the teams overseas that we love. So often I will meet people who say they love the sport, watch World Cup, wake up on the weekends to watch whatever foreign league they love, but then treat their closest team like they are trash. How are we supposed to give value to our own domestic leagues if we don’t support them?”
“It’s the local teams, the local sport that is really going to persist over time and that’s what’s really going to attract a long, steady, undying support,” Enrique said.
This idea is worth dwelling on. It’s true: you simply can’t develop the same connection to a team that’s 3000 miles away as you can to the one down the road. And MLS is certainly, despite what some of the naysayers insist, a high enough quality to be entertaining, especially when you go to games in person. The problem is huge swathes of the country currently have no access to an MLS team. And if you’re watching a match on TV, what’s the difference between 3000 miles and 300? Given the choice, the quality of soccer will likely win out.
MLS plans to keep expanding, but unless it gets to 500 teams (which it won’t, obviously), there’s still going to be huge chunks of the country without access. Even if there weren’t, the European leagues wouldn’t stop marketing to a U.S. audience (there’s too much money to be made), they would still control the morning time slot and they’ve already established a relationship with millions of American fans. For better or worse, the Eurosnob is here to stay.
But the Eurosnob isn’t the only U.S. soccer type to have to grapple with the authenticity question, arguably the defining question in U.S. soccer.
(I think one reason the Latino community is often overlooked in discussions about American soccer is that it doesn’t, or at least is not perceived to, have to grapple with this question. The feeling seems to be that Latino fans [often equated with Mexican fans] aren’t faking anything by watching Liga MX, which makes them uninteresting, and maybe a little intimidating for non-Latino fans. But more on that later.)
The majority, if not all, of the supporters’ groups in MLS have been inspired in some way or other by supporter cultures from around the world. The global nature of the sport is exactly what attracted some American fans in the first place. As Mike Coleman, vice president of the Portland Timbers SG Timbers Army, told me, “I think the thing that I like about it more than any other sport I follow, and I’ve been a sports fan my entire life, is just the global community around it, and unifying aspect around the sport. More so probably than any other sport in the world.”
And so SGs, too, are often criticized as inauthentic, a lame caricature of the more established soccer cultures they so revere.
This has always seemed to me a strange criticism, even if I have laughed (oh, and how I have laughed) at some of the more embarrassing mimicry of, in particular, English football culture. Those that criticize MLS supporters for adapting traditionally English chants for their teams should note, for example, Euro 2016, where seemingly every set of fans in the tournament copied the Icelandic clap. This sort of exchange is common everywhere, as much as individual fanbases like to consider themselves unique.
There are (whisper it) only so many ways to make lots of noise in a stadium, and they almost all involve lots of people shouting at the same time. That isn’t to say some fans don’t create better atmospheres than others — they clearly do — just that the difference in the substance of those noises is often overstated. There’s nothing wrong with American fan groups taking cues from supporter cultures overseas, as long as the borrowed songs and chants don’t prevent the evolution of something new.
As Wegner said, “I think where we’ve come, like how is this an American thing now is that yeah … most of the culture started with its roots in borrowing from South American or European or English soccer culture. That used to be what it was … just mimic the other countries. But then from doing that, these whole communities would grow up, just like anybody else’s, and you’re mimicking, but you can only take the mimic so far. Eventually your own cultural surroundings are going to impact that and put your own spin on it.”
Whoever misquoted Miles Davis was right: it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself. MLS is in a strange position in that the rest of the world (and a lot of America) is watching, and judging, as it experiences these growing pains. As a result, soccer fandom in the U.S. has at times come to seem little more than a sort of authenticity dick-swinging contest. (It’s not the size of the tifo, but the content of its character, or something.)
But an important point seems to have been lost in all this insecurity. What’s missing is the acknowledgement that, in no other country in the world, is the substance of a culture built in the stadium, or at a bar. The anger and self-deprecating irony that define English football crowds, for example, is merely a symptom of the English football disease. Matchgoing fans express themselves in the stadium in accordance with a culture that’s already deep in their bones, and this culture is closely related to what might be termed a national English character (pick your cliché: dry humor, emotional suppression, excessive swearing, etc.)
There is a problem with an approach to culture building that values above all the spectacle fans are able to make in a stadium, or even at a bar on a Saturday morning. This is a story with characters, but no character. We’re talking here about the icing on a cake no one has baked yet, the cherry on top of nothing. To figure out where to put that cherry, it’s necessary to look beyond MLS.
America may or may not be the greatest country on earth, but when it comes to making children play sports they have no interest in, there’s no contest. The modern United States is history’s greatest practitioner of gym class, and it’s not even close.
The level of organization in amateur sports, at the high school level and even below, is staggering. To use only one, anecdotal example, almost every single guy I played college soccer with in the U.S. trained five or six times a week during high school, and some of them were training multiple times a week for organized teams below the age of 10. That’s true more or less across the board in the U.S.
In contrast, from the age of 11 to 18, I played for two teams, my school team and a Sunday league team. Never, in that entire time, did I train more than once a week. There was a several-year period when I didn’t train at all for my school team. The teacher in charge simply asked us a day or two before a match if we were available to play.
That isn’t to say I wasn’t playing. It just wasn’t organized — in the playground or the park or the street or even the classroom. If there was a ball and a ground beneath our feet, chances are we’d be kicking it. My college teammates played maybe once or twice a month in the absence of a coach. (The only two exceptions among the teammates I spoke to: one is Mexican, from Mexico City, and the other is a dual Mexican American citizen from El Paso, TX.)
This uber-organization exists in every other sport in the U.S., too, but it rarely ends there. Go to any playground in the country and, if the weather’s warm enough, you can find a pickup basketball game. Perhaps baseball’s greatest single cliché is the image of father and son playing catch in the backyard. And then there’s those Thanksgiving football games. Soccer, certainly among the white middle class that dominates the sport at the club and college level, has no real equivalent. Kids are too busy practicing ever to play.
That isn’t to say the infrastructure shouldn’t exist — indeed, the level of organization in amateur sports in the U.S. is, along with the size of the population, the biggest reason it’s realistic to imagine the men’s national team winning a World Cup in the not too distant future. It’s a big reason (along with the Title IX education amendments passed in 1972) the Women’s National Team is the most dominant in the world. But there are problems with all this infrastructure.
The first is a narrative problem: infrastructure isn’t sexy. It’s not inspiring. Kids don’t dream of entering a talent development system through which they will be slowly and methodically funneled until, depending on their skill level, they’ll end up in the pros, or at college, or nowhere at all. Dreams need endings; infrastructure offers only methods, and badly marketed methods at that.
The second problem, which exacerbates the first, is that U.S. soccer infrastructure lacks any clear soccer identity. The U.S. playing style, to the extent one exists at all, is more closely identified with the sort of never-say-die mentality Sosar described than it is with any actual playing philosophy. Work hard, run fast. This is in contrast to Europe’s great academies, which are founded on specific ideas about how to play the game.
The defining feature of U.S. soccer coaching is that there’s a lot of it. If you can pay, anyway, otherwise there’s none of it. U.S. Soccer’s solution to this latter problem has been more infrastructure, because of course it has: there’s no American problem more paper work can’t solve.
MLS teams have slowly begun to embrace a European-style academy system that offers more scholarships (good) and a greater level of professionalization at a younger age (possibly not good). The occasionally, sheepishly stated aim of all this is for the men to win a World Cup. Nice though that would be, I can’t help but feel it’s somewhat beside the point. The women won three, and it hasn’t seemed to make a difference (and it’s not like no one was watching).
But, I submit, if the entire structure of American soccer is directed toward winning a men’s World Cup, much of what is wonderful about the game will be lost, or never realized in the first place. I have always thought soccer’s beauty lies in the fact coaches (try as they might) have so little control over it, that when a player has the ball at his feet, he is, in the end, free. There’s no shot clock, no play call, no nothing. Just the ball, and his imagination.
But the U.S. soccer story isn’t about freedom, or imagination, because too many young players, if they can afford it, are led to believe soccer is what soccer practice is: rigid, organized, goal-oriented. Where is the game in all this? My greatest fear for American soccer is not that it lacks the money or the will or the fanbase to get where it wants to go, but that it lacks the imagination.
Again, I must acknowledge my own prejudices here. I am a soccer romantic, and I have a natural urge to bundle U.S. soccer’s many oddities into a nice, neat package that I can sell myself for a small fee of nostalgia. That, as much as anything, is English football’s enduring hold on me, the feeling a whole big messy problem like this can be solved by thinking hard enough about some stylized vision of the past.
Indeed, it’s not a huge exaggeration to suggest that if you go to London’s Hackney Marshes, among many other places around the country, on a Sunday morning, you’ll learn everything you ever needed to know about English football. The anger, the swearing, the two-footed tackles, the tough-guyery, the crude tactical conversations, the mud, the rain, the ref (that poor bastard), the uneven goal posts, the loosely hung net, the broken corner flag, the post-match pint — it’s all right there, the founding of the FA in 1863, the World Cup in 1966, Gazza’s tears, Butcher’s blood, Rooney’s stamp — all of it, all rolled up into a freezing, wet, muddy Sunday morning. There’s English football for you — put that in your pipe and smoke it.
That’s such an easy thing for me to say, both because it exists and because I lived it. I don’t even know where to start with U.S. soccer, though I have lived that to, at least in part. Part of that is that America is big, and big in a way it is sometimes hard to appreciate unless you’ve also lived somewhere small, like England, somewhere the first person plural feels like it might actually be capable of doing its job. But another part of it is simply that I was raised, mostly without knowing it, to believe soccer must look and feel and sound a certain way.
And so perhaps the solution is to embrace U.S. soccer’s essential weirdness, its insecurity. Different, not inferior, as Alexi Lalas would surely say. Besides, weird is a badge of honor, something to rally around. Who cares if we eat the icing first? This is America; icing’s like 50 percent of the diet.
Two American soccers
One of the things about the great baseball and football and and basketball stories is that they shrink America, they distill into a single, homogeneous image. Part of the reason Jackie Robinson is so celebrated, for example, is that he allowed the world of baseball to convince itself it was, ultimately, an inclusive world. Baseball is America’s pastime, but the image of baseball is a white image. Then again, racism is America’s other pastime, so maybe it fits.
This reduction is less obvious in the case of basketball, but the NBA’s treatment of, to use probably the most famous example, Allen Iverson is a sign of the gulf between the blacktop and the hardwood. And one need only look at the New England Patriots’ pending trip to Donald Trump’s White House to learn a good deal about the fraught racial dynamics in the NFL, and the extent to which the league is willing to discuss them (hint: it isn’t).
The question is whether this sort of reduction is necessary. That is, would a narrative that truly encompasses the diversity and complexity of an entire sport, especially in a country as big as this one, be simple and compelling enough to do the work I want it to? In general, simple stories are better stories. The fear is that by simplifying or reducing soccer to something easy, we will eliminate everything that makes the game unique in this country.
Because soccer is in a position to tell a uniquely inclusive story. In 2013, 34 percent of MLS’ audience identified as Hispanic, 65 percent identified as white and eight percent as black, per Nielsen. That’s the most even demographic split of any major sports league in the U.S. other than the NBA (45 percent black, 40 percent white, 12 percent Hispanic). When you factor in the popularity of other major soccer leagues, soccer might outdo the NBA. A 2015 YouGov poll found that 56 percent of soccer fans who report to following the sport outside of World Cup years identify as black or Hispanic (why it grouped these two demographics together is a question for another time).
Furthermore, because of soccer’s historical status as a fringe sport, it has often attracted a non-typical sports crowds. Soccer fans are, as Burdine referred to the Dark Clouds supporters’ group in the days before MLS arrived in Minnesota, “a disparate band of weirdos.” This has led to an embrace of the importance of diversity and inclusivity within the American soccer community. Almost every person I spoke to talked about this.
“ESC membership is diverse on many levels. We have members from every walk of life.” (Ferrezza) … “The make up of fans in DBG is incredibly diverse. We have people of different races, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc. It’s hard to say, ‘These are the type of people we have.’ In general, we like to say everyone is welcome … and everyone will be treated with respect by our group.” (Brown) … “This city is a melting pot of people from all different walks of life, cultures, creeds, etc. and that really comes out in the supporters section.” (Glidden) … “Gorilla FC is really all about promoting an inclusive atmosphere within the stadium for anyone, you know, really promoting that soccer is for all.” (Conquergood) … “The beauty of U.S. soccer culture is that it is very diverse, so many different support styles.” (Rodolfo Moreno, a member of Chicago Fire SG Sector Latino).
This may simply be good PR. And there have certainly been some disturbing stories about the treatment of women and minorities by U.S. soccer fans, the most publicized of which have involved members of the American Outlaws. But the numbers are promising, as is the fact (even in a low bar kind of way) almost all the supporters I spoke to acknowledged, without any prompting, the importance of inclusivity.
Perhaps the most encouraging fact of all is that soccer fans are structured in SGs, and can therefore implement regulations to ensure their commitment to diversity is carried through. In the NBA and NFL and MLB, fans aren’t organized to the same degree, which makes it much harder to drive these sorts of conversations, and to hold the leagues to account when they fail to meet certain standards. The publicly stated goodwill of these groups does not make them immune to systemic racism, but the conditions exist for soccer to become the inclusive sport its fans say they want it to be.
And so it’s tempting here to make the American soccer narrative big: America is an immigrant nation, a patchwork of different cultures living side-by-side, together, so it makes sense that American soccer is its own patchwork of cultures and influences. In a way, soccer is the perfect sporting fit for this nation. It is the only sport, because of its global origin story, that can mirror the American experience, the immigrant experience. Its diversity is its strength. That it is fractured is an indication of how American it really is. That it is fractured is precisely the point.
But it’s important also to consider the real differences between soccer’s primary bases of support: the Latino community and the white middle class (and, indeed, the fact soccer generates relatively little interest outside these two groups).
Some of the differences are fairly trivial. For example, all the Latino supporters I spoke to grew up with sport. It has always been part of their lives. As Moreno said, “There’s really no ‘first’ moment when it comes to soccer. I’ve been a fan of the sport my whole life. It’s sort of a family tradition.” Or, as Edward Rodriguez, president of La Galaxy’s LA Riot Squad, put it, “I come from a Hispanic background, so you know that’s kind of ingrained in the blood.”
The white fans I spoke to, in contrast, almost all came to the game in the same way: early at first, and then very late. They played when they were little kids, stopped, and then returned to the game with either the arrival of an MLS team in their city or the increased availability of the European leagues on TV and the internet.
That’s not even close to a representative survey, but the idea makes intuitive sense — sports are an heirloom. “You want to cheer for your dad’s team because when you’re young you look up to your dad,” said Steve Alfaro, founder of the Facebook group Latinos for Team USA. It really is that simple.
But this poses problems for Latino fans in a way it doesn’t for most white fans. There comes a point where two cultures begin to tug you, even if only very gently, in different directions. Rodriguez, who has a Mexican father and a white American mother, told me about his experiences watching USA-El Tri games with his Mexico-supporting family:
“I’m definitely U.S. first. Going over to an uncle’s house and having everybody wearing their green shirts and I’m there with my USA red white and blue. It’s interesting. You know … we’ll talk smack to each other, but other than that, I think it’s definitely growing within the Hispanic community, especially with the younger generations where they’re growing up American and growing up watching U.S. soccer. I think you’re seeing a little bit of a shift. It’s very interesting because you’re in a split household where you want to root for your country but then you also grow up rooting for a country that is your heritage and I think it’s definitely difficult, especially for Hispanic kids.”
Alfaro, whose parents are from Guatemala, had a similar story: “People are going to get mad at me for this, but at least for me, like I was sharing with you, growing up and being one of the few American Latinos that supported U.S. Soccer … when we took out Mexico out of the World Cup [in 2002], that was pretty fun … you know you’re the one that’s always getting picked on for supporting the other team and then here we come and take you out at the world stage. That was a lot of fun.”
But he was also quick to note some of the misconceptions surrounding the choice facing Latinos between supporting the U.S. or the country of their family’s origin: “All my Mexican American friends back home … that was the team that their family supported … you know they, they wanted to feel they were a part of that. So for people just to ask them to switch teams, it’s not … it kind of like doesn’t make sense. It has nothing to do with this idea that they dislike this country.
“There is always conversations over like, ‘why don’t you support your team, you’re not American, blah blah blah.’ There’s always that conversation, but I like to do it as like, ‘hey, you’re welcome to join our group and support our team, support team USA whenever you want. If you don’t want to support them when they play the Mexican national team, that’s fine.’ At least for me, I would prefer if you did support team USA, but that’s your own thing. I don’t like to get into the politics of that because I feel like people don’t really understand it.”
These are only two stories, but they offer a nice glimpse at the delicate do-see-do that often accompanies cultural assimilation. It’s rarely as dramatic as those in charge of our government have taken to suggesting over the past 18 months. More often than not, it’s a private experience. The problem is: to feel American is very often not to be recognized as American.
Alfaro was persuaded to start Latinos for Team USA for just this reason: “I feel like it was also just kind of important to show that like ‘hey, we are American too and we do support this team and … we do exist out there’ … That’s the only thing, I think it just makes a statement: we are here and we are large numbers.”
These issues gained some extra attention during Klinsmann’s reign as USMNT manager. His policy of picking foreign-born Americans led some U.S. players (most notably Abby Wambach and Tim Howard) to question the commitment of these dual nationals. As a dual national myself, it’s been strange to watch.
It’s a very bizarre thing to be told where you’re from, to have a whole entire part of yourself routinely plucked away from you, and placed beyond your reach. Anyone who has ever wondered why a first or second or third generation Latino American might support the country of their family’s origin instead of the U.S., or watch Liga MX instead of MLS, would do well to think, for literally any time at all, what it must be like to constantly be told you’re from somewhere else. To treat someone like an outsider, and then to get angry when they feel like one, is not only malicious; it’s stupid.
Besides, how do you become American without abandoning your heritage? More to the point, to what extent does becoming American simply mean becoming white?
These questions take on another level of urgency when you recall American soccer’s explicitly racist past, and its more subtly racist present. While SGs have made a concerted effort toward inclusivity — for which they deserve credit, even if it hasn’t always been successful — the fact remains that U.S. soccer is divided, and the divide is at least partly a consequence of the way groups like AYSO rebuilt the sport’s image in the ‘60s. Soccer the immigrant sport was separated from soccer the American sport, first culturally, and over the years, financially.
This split is now most obvious in a pay-to-play talent development system that has closed off the world of elite soccer to many kids from poor backgrounds, kids who are significantly more likely to be Latino or black than they are to be white.
I don’t think this is a deliberately malicious thing, just another of the many ways in which a system driven entirely by profit will overlook those who don’t already have a seat at the table. In other words, a cowardly thing. There are of course flaws with this view, like that it’s hard to overestimate the long-term benefits, financial and otherwise, of an American talent development system that actually uses the country’s massive, diverse population to its advantage — but there are real short-term incentives not to worry too much about any of it.
All of this — the Liga MX viewing figures, the fact so many Mexican Americans support El Tri, the casual racism — has given rise to the idea, often unspoken but evident in the way the Latino community is ignored in conversations about U.S. soccer culture, there are really two American soccers: one is white and suburban and middle class and the other is Latino and, more than likely, working class. There are some strange narrative consequences to this divide, whether it’s real or imagined. Because if there are two American soccers, then there must be two American soccer stories to tell.
One is about a poor Mexican kid, let’s call him Jose, who grows up playing in the street or the park or a local Sunday league, and who eventually gets spotted by an MLS scout, makes it big, maybe goes on to score an important goal for the U.S. and we all learn how wonderful the melting pot of America really is. The plot of Goal, basically, without the unauthorized immigration.
The other is about a white, upper middle class suburban kid, let’s call him Cody, whose parents (comfortably) pay $4000 a year so that he can play club soccer and receive the best coaching and play in the best facilities available and he works hard and he gets a college scholarship he doesn’t really need and he makes it big and he maybe goes on to score an important goal for the U.S. and there’s no lesson at all, except maybe that if you’re white and your parents can afford to pay $4000 a year for you to play soccer, things will probably work out for you in the long run.
Jose’s story is much more interesting and dramatic and it provides a much more satisfying moment of catharsis. In a word, Jose’s story is better. Except not for Jose.
The fear, then, is if we get where we (presumably) want to go, which is essentially for the entire soccer playing population to follow the same path as Cody, then we’re telling a worse story. Not only that, but American soccer loses something important, something potentially unifying and powerful, a story around which a culture might form. Besides, the American story is the underdog story, isn’t it, Jose’s story? Work hard enough and you will succeed.
Thinking through these contradictions, the white-Latino divide comes to represent the ultimate gap in the American soccer narrative. One half of the divide is exemplified by a sort of disguised racism — it’s a great story only until (and possibly even after, which might be the bigger problem) you accept the oppressive conditions that make it possible. The other half is just simply boring — soccer moms and orange slices and minivans and suburbia.
How, then, to reconcile these two Americas? It is, I suspect, to do what America typically does in these moments, which is to ignore the details. It is to talk instead about some ideal American future, and to paint the more disturbing American present as only one precarious step in the right direction. That particular story is almost 250 years old and still going strong.
Then again, everybody still hates each other.
Like music, I suppose
It is a bright cold morning in April, and I am standing at the back post waiting for a throw-in. This is a Chicago April, which means it’s windy and probably also that no one really wants to be here. But nonetheless I look diligently back and forth between the man taking the throw and the man I’m supposed to be marking.
I know where the ball is coming from, so I’m mostly looking at the man I’m supposed to be marking. But as the thrower starts his run up, I notice something strange: when he’s still a couple of yards away from the touchline his whole upper body swings forward, head (and arms and ball) over heels, he flips, bounces once and slingshots the ball toward the back post, where I remain standing, am now also bemusedly trying to process what I have just seen and will shortly begin to look for the man I’m supposed to be marking.
The flip throw, of course. The flip throw. Welcome to America.
What an astonishingly stupid thing. That was one of my first practices as a college player. These fucking Americans, I thought. Can’t even take a throw-in properly.
I used to have conversations with a Mexican teammate of mine where we’d make fun of the various Americanisms of NCAA soccer. His favorite was the countdown clock. Americans love a buzzer beater, he said. I prefer the substitution rules, which in typical, stupid NCAA fashion, transform the most straightforward concept in sports into a complex math problem.
I fouled someone during a game once. The referee approached me, put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a pink card. Pink being much closer to red than yellow, I thought I’d been sent off. The tackle being relatively tame, I argued. It was a yellow, he told me. The pink was for breast cancer awareness. I’ve always found that to be a nice illustration of American soccer’s essential silliness. Why would they pick the one piece of equipment that needs to be a specific color? It’s called a yellow card for fuck’s sake.
I love those memories, just as I love most of my other memories playing soccer in the U.S. But nothing about them ever felt, I don’t know, profound. This has had its affect on me. I think of U.S. soccer and I think of a sort of endearing, occasionally maddening, lawlessness — there is no sense of tradition powerful enough to keep these lingering idiocies in check.
I am not a good soccer player, in the grand scheme of things, but if by some horrible twist of fate I was forced to decide between playing and watching, I would, without a single moment of hesitation, choose to play.
But this isn’t true of a lot of people, especially in the U.S., and that’s something, in my blinkered way, I find difficult to understand. I asked Burdine what it was like learning to love soccer without ever really having played it. “I suppose it’s like music,” he said. “Most of us don’t play an instrument well, but music still affects us in different ways.”
This is true, and its truth hit me in the way the truth can only hit a liar, like fear.
Could I not simply have added a story, any story, about American soccer to the list above? As long as I made enough overwrought assertions about the nature of time, would anyone have noticed the difference, really?
Some stories, then.
“I grew up in a small town in rural Maine. There are lots of American football fans there but soccer fans were few and far between. I loved watching U.S. soccer but I never discussed with friends at risk of being ridiculed for liking the sport. But then I took my first trip to New York City and I was lucky enough to sneak into a U.S. Soccer viewing party … The passion from the other fans was incredible. I learned all the songs and by the end was standing on my chair singing along with a really passionate group of fans. That’s what’s so beautiful about the game here, the passion.” (Glidden)
“ … our [Orlando City] season opener in our second season in MLS against RSL … late in the 93rd minute we got one back. And then, in the last seconds of the game, with a long ball from our defensive third, our forwards got in behind the back line and broke toward the goal and in the dying moment of the match pulled out the equalizing goal. Sixty thousand fans went nuts … Those are games you spend a lifetime hoping to see.” (Enrique)
“Quakes-Galaxy playoff game in 2003. Our first season as a group. 2-0 down in the first leg, and 2-0 down in SJ after half an hour, the Quakes scored four times to take the game to overtime and win it with a fifth goal. I remember us singing our hearts out when they were down 0-4 overall. It was the mentality I wanted this group to have, and 14 years and many terrible seasons later, it is still the same.” (Margarit)
“I think my favorite story is the snow game in 2013 when the U.S. beat Costa Rica. I wasn’t there, but it was a great example of American perseverance, with a bit of luck and cleverness, that helped carry the day and get a badly-needed win. The Americans have found ways to win games like these, and it was a humorous, yet inspiring chapter in U.S. soccer history.” (Sosar)
“I’d probably say the U.S.-Mexico match at the Rose Bowl October 2015 comes to mind first and foremost. Several U.S. soccer friends from Denver met up in Pasadena/LA for the match. It was a heat wave at the time as the temp in Pasadena on match day was 100 degrees … The energy was the greatest I have ever seen at a sporting event. Supporters for both teams really filled the place as a single organism as opposed to 100,000 individuals. Just constant singing and chanting for 120 minutes in the excessive heat. Being able to share that day with close friends really emphasized the community nature that the soccer world is for me. The result wasn’t what I wanted, but the experience transcended winning or losing or just sport for that matter.” (Wegner)
“I mean winning the MLS Cup final will always stick in our minds. I think it’s been such a long road for Sounders personally themselves to get there. And we had lost a lot of faith. I’d say we weren’t out of hope, but we’ve obviously managed to make it back, but that was the roughest season Sounders had ever encountered, and then to turn it around under the guidance of coach Schmidt. It couldn’t have happened to a better team, a better guy. And it was absolutely, probably the thing I’ll treasure most.” (Conquergood)
“I think one of my favorite moments as a young kid, my dad waking me up in the middle of the night to watch the World Cup at like two in the morning because it was in Korea. I can’t specifically remember the games we were watching, but just to be up when you’re a kid past your bed time or whatever and you’re dad wakes you up ‘let’s watch this game real quick.’ that’s one of my fondest memories.” (Rodriguez)
“My great moments are … I have to go back to the Timbers. I don’t think it’s necessarily a moment that every soccer fan has to remember, but I think if you go back and you watch a highlight of the double post goal … if you can as a sports fan appreciate that moment … not saying it’s a great moment in U.S. soccer history … but that moment is indicative of a bunch of other moments. That’s a moment that matters to a group of small fans in the Pacific Northwest, but the feeling that we had is the feeling you get at any great moment at any great sporting event, whether it is a walk off home run or a hail Mary into the end zone or a buzzer beater from behind the three point line to win. Whatever that is, that feeling is the feeling we get in those moments.” (Coleman)
These stories tempt me in one of two directions. The first is a kind of universalization. It’s all soccer in the end, and soccer, as the cliché goes, is a universal language. Or, as Moreno put it, “Soccer doesn’t connect you to any culture because it is a culture itself. Soccer … allows you to disconnect from everything.”
And indeed it’s striking how similar some of these stories are: a game, a goal, a moment, a feeling that can be replicated in no other area of life. So much so that even listening to them feels a little ridiculous — you just had to be there. Perhaps I’m overthinking it (he says, 10,000 words later, without a hint of remorse). Perhaps the U.S. soccer story I’m after was in front of me the whole time, if only I’d zoomed out a littler further, allowed myself to see the forest for the trees. Perhaps.
The second direction I’m tempted in is toward difference. These stories don’t come from vastly different worlds, but they do impress on you the size of this country, the distance from Maine to New York, from Portland to Seattle.
And anyway soccer isn’t a universal language, is it, really? For some people the word soccer itself is a provocation, a sign of some irredeemable difference, or inferiority. And when you think of the real, often damaging divisions that exist within U.S. soccer — the various ways in which it has failed so far to live up to its great promise of inclusivity — when you think about all that, it feels almost phony to insist we’re all equals in the beautiful game.
There is a third way, I guess, a sort of chaos theory. To try and hold it all in your mind at once. The American soccer story is the sum total of its own contradictions. Work hard, run fast, believe in square circles. To examine any story in enough detail is to drain it of its power, to watch it die. But then American soccer was pronounced dead long ago, and has been again many times since. Which doesn’t prove there is no American soccer.