| Andrés Martinez
But how does America really see soccer, and could the novelty of being the underdog at home be what finally brings the country together around the sport? Andrés Martinez looks at America’s other football.
There are days when I’m still amazed we’ve actually become a land of two footballs, poised to co-host a men’s FIFA World Cup in 11 stadiums that are normally venues for the other, homegrown, varietal of football.
My 12-year-old self would be both surprised and elated by this turn of events. Within days of watching the conclusion of the exhilarating 1978 FIFA World Cup final in Buenos Aires in our home in northern Mexico, when Argentina vanquished the Dutch in extra time under the constant bombardment of albiceleste streamers and confetti, that boy was exiled to the wilds of northern Wisconsin for the remainder of the summer. My beloved American mother was always looking for inventive ways for her sons to get to know their other country, and she figured a summer camp nearer to Canada than Chicago ought to do the trick.
I was confused upon arriving at Camp Algonquin to find no one debating the relative merits of the heroics of Zico, Resenbrink, or Mario Kempes in the tournament that had just captivated much of the world. Instead, my cabinmates couldn’t stop talking about the dancing in Greece. I worried I had landed in a freakishly erudite community of classicists, until I was clued into the fact that they were discussing the dancing of Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta in Grease, not any toga dancing in ancient Greece. The movie had yet to be released in Mexico; hence my confusion. The 1978 World Cup would apparently never be released in the United States; hence my cabinmates’ confusion.
Worse, there were no cascaritas, or pick-up games, to be had at camp. How could these kids go a day, weeks even, without kicking a ball around? Our days were structured around a dizzying array of sports and fun outdoor activities, with some reading time sprinkled in, but over time I came to view the entire schedule as one giant conspiracy to keep us from doing the one obvious thing kids everywhere should spend the bulk of their time doing: kicking a soccer ball. Frisbees, that infuriatingly inadequate substitute for a proper ball, would be proffered during any downtime, as if to troll me.
Then one day, near the middle of the summer, something magical happened. Our normal schedule was suspended and out of who-knows-where, a bunch of soccer balls were produced for what turned out to be an utterly chaotic and delightful camp-wide match on the expansive front lawn. Two loosely defined teams of dozens of kids faced off against each other, playing with numerous balls simultaneously, aiming for some indeterminate goal on the other side of the lawn. If you’d zoomed out enough, we must have looked like one of those striking Pieter Brueghel the Younger tableaux of an entire Middle Ages village in the Low Countries turning out for some harvest festival debauchery.
The next day, the balls were locked away again, and regular programming resumed, as if one afternoon’s taste of such a foreign indulgence should suffice. Soon, it was as if the game had never happened.
Three years later, at the age of 15, I moved to the United States and ever since, like much of the rest of the world, I’ve been asking for those soccer balls to be brought out of the proverbial closet, and for Americans to join in the world’s game for good. American football is great, too, but it’s sad we don’t have anyone to play against. Think about it: Tom Brady never got to wear a Team USA uniform because internationally, that game remains a form of solitaire.
As at Camp Algonquin, Americans’ relationship with soccer has been intermittent for quite some time. I mean, we beat England in the 1950 World Cup, only to then take a four-decade breather from even qualifying for the tournament. The only reason a few of my little buddies in Wisconsin had some vague notion of what to do with the unleashed soccer balls was because visionaries like Lamar Hunt had invested a fortune to bring the likes of Pelé and Beckenbauer to their fledgling North American Soccer League. That league didn’t make it into the second half of the eighties, but it had provided one of those periodic sparks to the youth game.
It was only in the 1990s that everything seemingly started to change all at once, assisted by long-simmering forces across our communities. Both grassroots and top-down influences were closing the gap between the world’s pop culture superpower and its most popular sport. English historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote that American culture and global football were the only two “universalizing” agents in the world, binding people together across borders, and perhaps the two were bound to hook up, sooner or later.
At the grassroots level, immigrants were most often the protagonists growing the sport across our metropolises. Mexicans, arrivals from elsewhere in Latin America, ethnic clubs from central and eastern Europe, everyone wanted to have their own teams and leagues. If in earlier times newly arrived immigrants embraced America’s homegrown sports to assert their new identity, they would also come to feel it important to preserve their legacy, and their ties to the outside world, through the global game. The list of winners of what eventually came to be named the Lamar Hunt US Open Cup, the longest-running continuous soccer tournament in the country, is a tribute to these aspirations. They include Maccabee Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Ukrainians, Brooklyn Hispano, Greek-American A.C., NY Hungaria, S.C. Eintracht, and Brooklyn Italian, among others.
There was also a top-town corporate imperative pushing Americans and the world’s game closer together. Multinational corporations couldn’t market themselves solely through the sports that Americans played – not if they wanted to have global reach. So, Coca-Cola became FIFA’s first global sponsor in the 1970s, not because but despite the fact that few people in its “home” market cared for the game. Then there is the intriguing case of Electronic Arts, the video game maker. Its John Madden Football was a huge success when it was first released in the 1980s, but if it was ever going to have a truly EA Sports global hit it was going to have to release its subsequent FIFA game (now called EA Sports FC). And that game in turn did wonders in educating a generation of American kids about the geography of the sport. Newer media, too, needs a sport with global reach to maximize the new opportunities offered by the erosion of old territorial broadcasting boundaries. It’s no accident that AppleTV’s first global streaming hit was a show set in the world of English football.
So, immigrants and corporate America conspired together to pull the United States onto the global football field. Clear enough. The third category of protagonists, or conspirators in this generational caper, were girls and women, who took to the game with enthusiasm and aplomb in the half-century since the passage of Title IX, the federal civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education.
One of soccer’s most wonderful and equally maddening aspects as a game is its sheer unpredictability; hard to know what course a match might take in the long, fluid stretches of continuous play that are beyond the direct managerial oversight or scientific control that are the hallmarks of America’s more episodic, homegrown sports. And so, it’s appropriate that the story of how women made soccer an integral part of mainstream American culture feels like one of those equally unpredictable passages of play that define history.
Talk about unintended consequences. Title IX was a law addressing gender equality in education, which made no mention of sport. But its stipulation that no person “on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity” prompted school administrators at everything from neighborhood elementary schools to public universities to rush out to buy soccer nets and balls, and maybe a few of those orange cones, to offer girls their own football. Sport is clearly an integral “educational program or activity” in most American schools, and new girl’s soccer programs offered educational institutions the easiest way to begin balancing out historically lopsided male-leaning sporting investments.
Culture here played a big role. FIFA couldn’t have dreamt back then that the way to (finally) inject their football into the American consciousness was through the women’s game, because in the 1970s FIFA’s top brass weren’t keen on the idea of girls playing the sport. Anywhere.
In much of the world, soccer was the incumbent, macho football, the contact sport reserved for boys. Things have fortunately changed, but when I was growing up in Chihuahua, the idea of girls playing soccer was akin to the prospect of girls playing tackle American football in the United States. Girls were encouraged instead to play basketball or volleyball.
Women’s soccer faced no such headwinds or cultural resistance in the United States, where the other football was firmly ensconced as the incumbent all-male contact sport. If soccer had any cultural connotations, it was as something suspiciously foreign – like the metric system, certain extreme political “isms,” and Esperanto. But if girls wanted to take it up, so be it.
And did they ever. By the 1990s, collegiate U.S. women’s soccer, fueled by all that Title IX investment, provided the highest level of play to be found anywhere in the world. Over that decade, the NCAA all-stars from schools like the University of North Carolina and Stanford turned the US into the women’s game's first superpower, and a cultural phenomenon across the country. Mia Hamm became the first household name in all US soccer, male or female.
Julie Foudy, another legend from that generation, once told me about how, as a Stanford student, she felt a bit sheepish asking her professors to excuse her absence in the fall of 1991, as she was heading off for the first FIFA women’s World Cup in China. She worried it all sounded a bit dodgy, given that no one knew what she was talking about. Of course by the time Foudy’s generation of stars closed out their triumphant decade by clinching the World Cup title for a second time at the Rose Bowl in 1999, everyone knew about the US women's national team. They were that summer’s sensation; their win over China in the final witnessed by a domestic TV audience of 18 million.
The “’99ers,” as they are remembered, naturalized the game American once and for all. By the time of Brandi Chastain’s iconic celebration upon scoring the winning penalty against the Chinese, the term “soccer mom” had entered the lexicon of political demographics as shorthand for the most mainstream, white, suburban middle-class voter. The opposite of foreign. Nowhere else on earth had soccer become part of a nation’s prevailing sports culture via the women’s game. And not only had America’s women Americanized the global game; they’d also globalized the notion that women’s sports could be commercially viable at scale.
But what about the men?
A different story, for sure, although an equally compelling one, though rougher around the edges. If the USWNT emerged from National Collegiate Athletic Association squads as the sport’s pedigreed royalty, the USMNT that emerged from their own NCAA squads to represent their country at Italia ’90 were seen as uncouth, unpedigreed party crashers.
This was every scrappy-streetsmart-underdogs-go-up-against-the-snooty-favorites movie rolled up into one. Well, except the part about the US losing all three of its games. Never mind that, our boys were back, after their four-decade absence, and ready to host the next one, in ’94. Maybe some of them would even land professional contracts (which many lacked) by acquitting themselves with honor under the spotlight. What stands out in retrospect about that generation of players – the likes of Caligiui, Balboa, Vermes, and Ramos – was their grit and determination. Some teams might out-finesse them – OK, a lot of teams out-finessed them – but no one would out-hustle them.
That’s been the story ever since of the USMNT, prodded on in the stands by the proud “Outlaws,” as the most vocal group of supporters call themselves, although it feels that with each cycle a touch of additional class and élan is added to the grit. A dash of Cobi Jones and Claudio Reyna to go along with your Lalas and Meola? Who could ever forget those guys upsetting Colombia at the Rose Bowl in 1994 and then going on to keeping it close against Brazil at Stanford on July 4? Do you believe in grassy miracles?
If it’s our men on the field, we get to truly embrace underdog status, a delightful rarity for Americans in international competition. In what other contest can US fans fret worriedly about the prospect of having to face a Belgium, or an Uruguay? Winning in sport is everything, but it’s even more so if you win as an underdog. That’s why Hollywood depicts American GIs as the underdogs in every war movie ever made, even though the last war the United States was truly the underdog in was the war of 1812.
It's only a matter of time before America’s men reach that satisfying plateau of being consistent winners while still clinging to their outlaw-ish, underdog identity. Fans in Italy are already clear on the prodigious talent of Christian “Captain America” Pulisic and Weston McKennie, much like fans in England appreciate the stalwart solidity of Tyler Adams and our “Jedi” Antonee Robinson. But overall, even at home this summer, Team USA will likely be underestimated by opponents, as it often is.
The MLS is a legacy of the last World Cup held in the United States, a proof of concept of this nation’s unique, still evolving, capacity to synthesize Latin American and European styles and talents. MLS is now home to Leo Messi and Thomas Müller, sure, but equally important is its track record of producing such talents as Diego Luna, Alejandro Zendejas, and Ricardo Pepi. And of course, before them, the legendary Landon Donovan, a pivotal transitional character in this tale, who took the USMNT from its era of provisional promise to one of established prominence. Grit and élan, all in one. If some observers around the world might have found it amusing or adorable that Americans were trying to join the global game when Landon was getting started back in the late 1990s, he got them to change their tune soon enough. To something more like “Shit, they’re coming for us.”
Not that progress has always been inevitable and consistent – let’s not even mention what happened on a certain Caribbean island in October of 2017 – in this unpredictable game that so often succumbs to fatalism’s whims.
The USMNT seem destined to make their next journey from prominence to preeminence soon, but will that be this summer at our own World Cup? How far must our boys go to pull in the still soccer-agnostic, those bandwagon fans who only like backing a winner? Will we still be alive in the tournament past our 250th birthday on July 4?
Like so many Americans, I feel pulled in different directions. I’m as gringo as can be, but still feel some residual rooting interest for Mexico when it comes to soccer. No doubt you, my fellow countrymen of Irish, Italian, Korean, Nigerian, German, Polish, Argentine, Costa Rican, your-country-here descent can relate; except your ancestral land didn’t become the archrival in the sport to the US, as Mexico did.
Mexicans always thought Americans were a bit odd because they didn’t care for the global game, and always thought it would be a good thing for the neighborhood if they’d join in, play with others, be a part of the community. So did people elsewhere, by and large; we all hoped my counselors at Camp Algonquin stopped hiding the soccer balls away somewhere, and ditched the silly frisbees.
But many of those outside encouraging voices didn’t mean for the US, which already dominates plenty if we’re honest, to become so good at this sport. If this continues, they might even come to regret their encouragement in the first place.
And be more careful what they wish for in the future.
Not me. I am fully cheering on Team USA, hoping they achieve new glory in this historic summer. Except, full disclosure, if they play Mexico. Then I might have to watch from behind the couch, in a terrified crouch.