Nathan Schiller

During a 2022 World Cup match early in the knockout round, a player was fouled and fell to the ground. The announcer John Strong asked his partner, the analyst Stu Holden, a former USMNT player with 25 caps, to explain the situation. Why the call, when the replay couldn’t confirm a bludgeoning? Did it really hurt? Holden was, as they say, at a loss for words. The guy’s ankle had been raked by cleats.

Maybe it was a bit gone wrong. Unlike many (not all) U.S. announcers, John Strong knows and likes soccer. Maybe beforehand he and Holden agreed to use a seemingly questionable foul to explain to the American audience why world-class athletes playing a ball sport with their feet in bursts of non-linear acceleration end up on the ground in pain when their calves collide and toes get trampled. But Stu Holden sounded genuinely surprised (amused?). Weren’t we done with this?

The contemporary narrative is that, in the United States, soccer is no longer laughable. After three decades of thrilling men’s World Cup performances (including a 2002 quarterfinal 1-0 loss to eventual runner-up Germany) and prolific women’s teams (World Cup wins in 1991, 1999, 2015, and 2019), of the ascendancy of Major League Soccer (now with 29 teams) and the legitimate careers of USMNT players in top European teams (Clint Dempsey for Fulham, Christian Pulisic on Chelsea, etc.), our country understands, respects, enjoys the game. 

It’s true, relatively. In pockets, Americans play soccer and follow clubs obsessively, mostly European ones. Eventually, we wonder when our stars will get to participate. I remember hearing about Project 2010, the decade-plus agenda to thrust the USMNT into an important World Cup game, when I was a high school player. It was, for me, spoken of in hushed tones, conjuring an image of the best of our best training for world domination in an undisclosed facility. I didn’t know the plan had made USA Today.

Project 2010 was practical, not secretive. From the perspective of long-term organizational strategic planning, it made sense—aim high, stick to a schedule, don’t be delusional. No adult in American soccer thought we would win the 2010 World Cup. But invest in the development of an internationally competitive talent pipeline? The time had come.

Americans like things big and simple. For centuries some of us have been conditioned to believe that hard work produces results. The average American sports fan, i.e., not one who truly knows soccer, thus is reflexively perplexed that the USMNT struggles to move beyond World Cup group play. And not qualify, like in 2018? A disgrace. Against these injustices, the fan lashes out: once we finally “get serious” about soccer, once our “best athletes” play, those preening, complaining, colonizing Europeans will crumble. 

Little slows the rampage. Soccer and basketball (and hockey, too, for that matter) as conceptually and strategically identical games, with the differences in rules, parameters, and goals requiring different skills and kinesthetics? Obviously not. One is exciting and evolved, the primitive and boring. Football, for its part, occupies this familiar thinking: its brutality confers its merits, its negligible interest globally testifies to its exceptionalism. What John Strong might as well have been saying was that it’s not a foul until a linebacker paralyzes a receiver across the middle. It’s hard to argue with anger.

(No one tries anymore with baseball.)

Professional athletics is an elite-of-the-elite sphere of understanding and respect; only doofuses think they could win a point off Serena. Kobe Bryant spent decades vouching for soccer and crediting the game for helping his vision and footwork; Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, leveraged their soccer youths in Nigeria and Jamaica, respectively, into dominant fakes and footwork on the court. Chad Johnson, the American football standout, got sucked in as a kid during gym class in Miami and never lost that love of speed, agility, touch, and tactic. 

It’s a strawman, but to win the World Cup the USMNT will need far more than occasional celebrity callouts. Accessibility is always cited as an obstacle, and though it’s a real burden on regular people, it rarely leaves behind raw world-class talent, at least not any more than any other sport. Supposing you could even find those kids, you couldn’t delay too many of them; teens who’ve never have a meaningful touch on the ball are probably too old to develop one. This isn’t the fault of the costly academy. It is, at its core, about culture. 

At parks across the United States, when you see soccer, you see external structure: camps and leagues supported by families with the means to travel to tournaments, hire coaches, get the gear, reserve and preserve pitches. You rarely see kids playing serious, intense, joyful, skilled pick-up. When you do, and you get a glimpse of creativity, imagination, and invention, athleticism and trash-talking and endless one-upsmanship, you’ve seen the limit. You can’t just take the train from Coney Island to West Fourth Street to Harlem in search of the next level. The fun stuff here happens on the basketball court.

To field a world-class team in the world’s most popular sport, one capable of winning four straight knockout games against nations where soccer means more than can be explained, we need a couple generations of grassroots cultural revolution. We don’t need LeBron James at keeper, Pat Mahomes at center back, Trae Young at center mid, and Saquon Barkley at center forward. We need a critical mass of people seeing soccer as an art of strategic possibility, a space to dominate a body and humiliate an opponent in good fun or more. Kick and run hasn’t worked. If we can get there—Project 2150?—then the trillions we’ll pump into shuttling these kids around the world while holding hostage their USMNT commitment may pay off. Late to the party with capital to burn? A very familiar story.