The breathless hype and hoopla around the USA soccer team was a problem from the moment they kicked off the tournament with a stunning victory over Paraguay. Everything they did after that was, fairly or unfairly, magnified until the game against Belgium last Monday night was routinely – and incorrectly – billed as “the biggest in the country’s soccer history”.
Everybody conveniently forgot the quarter-final against Germany back in 2002 when only a post prevented the best American XI of the modern era from taking the eventual finalists to extra-time.
Recency bias and the fact the USA was one of the hosts this time can perhaps explain why all perspective was sacrificed in trying to get non-soccer people to buy in. On that score, this side achieved something real. With an estimated audience for games of 33 million, it attracted record numbers of eyeballs to television sets, and garnered huge coverage in outlets such as the New York Post, an organ more usually concerned with the more traditional national sports.
Yet, towards the end of the defeat by the Belgians, Fox commentator John Strong issued a rather pathetic plea to viewers to not give up on watching soccer after this result. Aside from sounding like something being whispered into his earpiece by worried suits back in the studio, that request is likely to fall on deaf ears. While the bandwagon jumpers and the day-trippers will disappear from view for the next four years, the real problem here is that the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) and those involved here need to acknowledge that on the field no real progress was actually made. The USA reached the last 16 and were dispatched routinely by a superior outfit. As is their level. As has been their wont.
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See the losses to the Netherlands four years ago, the Belgians again back in 2014, and Ghana in 2010. For all the over-reaction to putting Bosnia-Herzegovina to the sword in the ridiculous, unwanted and hopefully never-seen-again round of 32, this team, like its predecessors, bumped its head against the same glass ceiling as always. Any investigation into the reasons why this is the case needs to, but won’t, centre on the fact the sport excludes millions of American kids because, in most places, there remain prohibitive financial barriers to entry.
When Lukaku scored Belgium’s fourth in Seattle, the USA had three players on the field whose fathers are multimillionaires and two whose dads have worked extensively for the USSF. Good for them but hardly the stuff of the people’s game, and there can’t be many other nations that could boast such a statistic.
Even more concerning should be the fact that Malik Tillman and Folarin Balogun, the standout American players at the tournament, learned the sport in Germany and England. See also Sergiño Dest and Antonee Robinson, growing up in the Netherlands and Liverpool respectively.
Every country exploits the diaspora eligibility rules but the USSF should but won’t ask itself how come nearly half the outfield players were trained by other governing bodies. Given the staggering amount of money pumped into the game here and the 17 million who play it, the supply lines should surely be better. Like his predecessor Gregg Berhalter back in Qatar, USA head coach Mauricio Pochettino picked more players who attended private high schools than he did Mexican-Americans.
At the last census, it was estimated there are 40 million Americans of Mexican heritage. Their communities are hotbeds of soccer yet Ricardo Pepi (who came off the bench on Monday night) and Alejandro Zendejas were the only two squad members of that lineage. A demographic that plays soccer in huge numbers and at a high level all over this country (nine million of the watching television audience were tuned into Spanish-language channel Telemundo), yet very few of them seem to make it through the pipeline to the national team. Why? Is it the ridiculous cost of elite sport here or is it something else?
The sheer sums invested in the team and the coaching staff (Pochettino on $6 million a year) ensures that the US will nearly always be good enough to get out of the group stages at a World Cup. Achieving anything beyond that would require a root-and-branch examination of the sport at grassroots levels, something that is very unlikely to happen.
Too many stakeholders are making too much money out of kids as young as three years old to ever want to remove the pay-for-play model that is holding the country back. Worse, you have people like Alexi Lalas, the ruddy-cheeked American face of Fox’s coverage of the tournament, defending what he lovingly calls the “capitalist” system and mocking those who call for it to change.
Soccer in the US is in rude good health if you consider the numbers playing and how many make a living from it. But talk that this team’s winning of the group will lead to hordes of kids joining their local teams is fanciful nonsense, mostly written by those who don’t live here.
Boys and girls from middle-class households with parents who have deep enough pockets to fork over thousands will kick off their soccer careers across the 50 states over the coming weeks. As they would have regardless of the performances of Balogun and the rest. The USSF will continue to make money for all who sail in her, Major League Soccer will still refuse to entertain promotion and relegation like the rest of the world, and we’ll be right back here in four years.
