Why the US sucks at soccer

As the United States prepares to host the World Cup for the second time, it’s worth grappling with an uncomfortable fact. The Yanks are highly unlikely ever to become a footballing power — at least not playing any version of “football” that doesn’t involve gladiator pads and concussion-inducing helmets. And the reason has almost nothing to do with tactics or a shortage of home-grown talent. Rather, its footballing struggles come basically down to money, and how the beautiful game has been ravaged by those most American of innovations: ruthless capitalists and competitive suburban parents.

Hosting a World Cup normally confers an enormous advantage. The bookmakers shorten the odds on Germany, Spain, Italy, or Brazil the moment they’re handed the world’s most popular sporting tournament. Yet America’s chances currently sit at 60-1, lagging behind both Japan and Morocco — nations that have never lifted the trophy, from continents that haven’t either. Thirty years after America first staged the event, the world’s richest country is still a long shot on its own turf.

For the diehard US soccer fan, it wasn’t supposed to go this way. In the late Eighties, when FIFA first awarded the tournament to the US, the sport was routinely degraded as “un-American” by the country’s sports media. For decades, commentators had mocked it as a “girl’s sport” played by “skinny boys” too timid for the nation’s manly and militaristic alternative. Meanwhile, the rest of the planet remained equally baffled by America’s ultra-violent, heavily padded “hand-egg” offshoot of rugby.

Until recently, indeed, this mutual incomprehension gave soccer a peculiar charge inside the US itself. For Gen Xers and Millennials, the game felt rebellious and punk precisely because mainstream America neither liked nor understood the allure of fútbol . As for the dullards — so the self-flattering story went — they liked helmet-ball for its very ferocity. Before there was MAGA, there were the Nascar fans who voted for George W. Bush and stuck Dallas Cowboys decals on their lift-kit pickup trucks. They listened to Rush Limbaugh and sports-talk radio and mocked the “snowflakes” who played soccer as they planned their next study abroad trip.

As with all stereotypes, there was indeed something to these narratives. In the early 2000s and 2010s, just watching the Premiership in an American bar felt somehow like flipping conservative voters the proverbial bird. We were a different kind of America, the kind that understood the world beyond our borders. Soccer fans were the hip, educated, urban men and women who appreciated craft beers and flew Real Madrid flags in their backyards. Soccer served as a class marker and culture-war indicator long before it became a national pastime for wine moms and heavily tattooed tech bros.

As with most of the 20th century, there was a moment when liberal America imagined all this would resolve itself in their homeland’s favour. Shortly after the US reached the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup — dispatching not only Mexico but also Luís Figo’s Portugal — it became fashionable to call the country the sleeping giant of world football. Reporting on wannabe American soccer hooligans in the mid-2000s, as I did early in my career, the notion that the US would eventually reach the heights of Brazil and Germany was indeed seductive.

Give the West’s largest nation a sport that was rapidly becoming its most popular youth activity, fold in tens of millions of new Central and South American immigrants, then add the presumed superiority of African-American athletes, and the US was thought to command one of the deepest soccer talent pools on Earth. Once the Bo Jacksons and Deion Sanders of the next generation chose soccer over football and baseball or basketball, so the thinking went, American dominance was destined to follow.

Yet despite the fact that it’s easier than ever to watch the big European games on American TV, this just hasn’t happened. Forget the betting odds: only the most delusional members of the “American Outlaws” club, as Team USA fans style themselves, believe their boys can so much as reach another quarterfinal, let alone lift the World Cup trophy on 19 July. Some perspective is owed here. Only eight nations have ever held the World Cup trophy, so it’s not so surprising that America has failed to crash the party. There are other problems too. The Yanks, for all their wealth and new attention to the sport, still increasingly field a squad of questionable provenance: at least five regular starters were born and raised in Europe, hold EU citizenship or dual passports, and learnt the sport at European academies. Major League Soccer, for its part, may have grown from a laughing stock into a genuine business. Yet in sporting terms it remains a fifth- or sixth-tier league — one that attracts the world’s best only as a lucrative retirement home.

Unsurprisingly, as with everything in the States, these problems come down to mone…