I have bad news for everyone else: the United States will win the World Cup. Maybe not this year, but the triumph is closer than the rest of the world thinks. We are becoming a soccer-playing and, to a lesser extent, soccer-loving country. We may not convert others to our vocabulary–our soccer is their “football”–but we’re going to beat them at their own game.
This will be shocking. It is one thing for us to flaunt our military and economic power, to spread McDonald’s and Madonna around the world. It’s quite another to trespass on everyone else’s special preserve. After religion–or before it–soccer is the world’s passion and obsession. In 1998, about 1 billion people watched the World Cup final. For all 64 games, viewership was reckoned at 33 billion.
Here Americans are (supposedly) indifferent and incompetent. The trouble is that we’re already defying stereotypes. From 1954 to 1986, the United States didn’t qualify for the World Cup. Since 1990, we’ve consistently qualified. On the eve of this Cup, the United States was ranked 13th in the world, just after Germany and England.
Better is to come. I recall exactly when I knew the United States would win the World Cup. It was a clear fall morning in the mid-1990s. We were taking our younger son, then 6, to join the local league. We drove to a nearby middle school and there on the school’s grounds were several dozen small soccer fields (20 yards by 40 yards). Teams played four vs. four. They came and went all day. It was kickball without bases–chaotic and charming.
Not much skill. But there were lots of bodies. At the school, I realized that arithmetic favored American soccer power. Six-year-olds were starting soccer by the thousands. Soccer is now the second most popular team sport among 6- to 17-year-olds. In 2001, there were 7.7 million players, says a survey by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. Only basketball at 11.3 million was higher. Three decades ago, soccer was so far outside the mainstream that it wasn’t even a trickle. “I came here in 1967 from England as a 21-year old,” says Graham Ramsay, now director of education and training for the Maryland State Youth Soccer Association. “The game here was then very much an ethnic game–you’d meet Germans, Italians, the whole bit.”
No more. Soccer is now so American that “soccer moms” are pop sociology. Before long, Americans will forget that there ever was a time without soccer and claim to have invented the game. And it’s more than numbers. Our younger son long ago ditched soccer for hockey. But the older, 15, remains an avid player. When he was 10, I asked him to name his favorite sport. I thought I knew the answer: basketball. “Soccer,” he said.
Ditto for many of his teammates. They love the game. These are athletic kids. Some are big, muscular and speedy. I have long expected a couple of football coaches to interrupt one of our games, handcuff the biggest players and read them their rights:
“Son, this is the United States of America. At your weight and speed, you may not play soccer. The Constitution requires you to play football.”
Until that happens, American soccer must improve. It’s being fed by more players, more talent and more commitment–as well as more immigrants who mix their soccer traditions with ours.
To think the United States can win the World Cup is widely viewed as a lunatic notion. The soccer expert in our family–the 15-year-old–says: “Dad, you don’t know what you’re talking about. … In most countries, they take [promising] boys when they’re 12 or 13 and breed them for [professional] soccer like thoroughbreds.” They’re put under contract and trained.
Ramsay is more diplomatic. Despite gains, America isn’t yet a soccer culture, he says. In Brazil and elsewhere, pickup games are common; here, they’re rare. Soccer elsewhere is a “passion”; here, it’s more a “hobby.”
I am undaunted. It’s true that the U.S. team sometimes looks bleak; it finished last in the 1998 Cup. It’s also true that most Americans aren’t fans. In 2001, attendance at Major League Soccer games averaged 14,638–down 16 percent from 1996.
But games aren’t won or lost in the bleachers. Regardless of whether the United States does well or poorly this year, we’ve attained a critical mass in players and enthusiasm. We will intrude increasingly on everyone else’s game and, sooner or later, take the Cup. Just wait.
