Soccer's uphill battle in the U.S. is acknowledged by almost every observer, both by those who support, play, or watch the sport, and by those who have no desire to see it succeed in the American sports landscape. That uphill battle seems all the more daunting when we step back and take a look at that which has conspired to make up our American sports identity.

The sport Americans call "soccer" is the world's most ubiquitous game. It's played in every corner of the globe, by kids from countries that are economic super powers on pristine pitches under the watchful eye of highly paid coaches, as well as by kids from third-world nations suffering through disease and civil war on dirt streets with makeshift balls made from garbage. The sport's reach is unlike that of any other singular creation of man, thanks to British colonialism and the relative simplicity of the game. Americans, however, seem immune to the obsession that so clearly infects the rest of the world. We set ourselves apart, not only because of our influence and power, but because of our "independence", born from two centuries of cultivating an innate desire to "lead" rather than to "follow".

Americans see soccer as an intruder, a foreign game played by foreigners with foreign names in countries we see as "inferior" to our own. While this superior feeling has had political ramifications through the decades, its shadow has also been cast across our efforts to play the world's game. Early efforts to play soccer on a widespread professional level in the U.S. was met with some early success, but ultimately failed due to competition from "native" sports. That shadow remains to this day, strengthened by generations of Americans passing their sporting passions from parent to child, the makeup of which rarely includes soccer.

Football and baseball benefit from a deep-seated root system which can be traced through the years back to the beginnings of what is viewed as the ideal American upbringing. While the world went mad over FA Cups, Scudettos, and World Cups, we focused inward on home-grown sports like football, where schoolboy participation became the essence of American adolescence. The quarterback, not the striker, sits at the top of our social food chain, and a whole subset of American life was created through the high school version of the game. Male and female ideals came to be embodied by that most visible of football players and the girls that rooted them on, the cheerleaders. Baseball retains its place as "America's Pastime" through an almost mystical connection the followers of the game seem to have with it. The romance that the English transferred to soccer went in this country instead to baseball. These long histories are the backbone of each sport's prominence in the cultural lives of their followers. Soccer in America is faced with the daunting task of overcoming or adding to this history, while attempting to place itself alongside those passions already so deeply entrenched.

Basic xenophobia seems almost too obvious a reason for the reluctance of Americans to embrace soccer, but it is certainly the essence of that resistance. The common stated reasons for ignoring soccer, like "not enough scoring" or "it's boring" are just masks, behind which we hide our xenophobia. As a people, Americans are hard-pressed to admit that something from another part of the world could be worthwhile, unless it is presented in a palatable package that minimizes its foreignness and makes it seem almost American. Even then, we might resist that which we see as forced upon us, either because those doing the forcing we deem less-American than ourselves, or because our mistrust of that which is foreign clouds our ability to see the benefits of acceptance.

In a world where political-correctness and acceptance of others is now so highly prized, it would seem there should be an opening in the closed American sports culture, a narrow gap through which soccer could make inroads. As of now, this opening has yet to appear. The American sports media continues to make only cursory efforts to recognize the game (both domestically and internationally), while some elements of said media continue to voice an outright disdain for the sport. These actions embolden those for whom soccer is a whipping boy, and validates those who choose to ignore it.

With a spotty history that was never able to significantly impact the American consciousness, soccer continues to remain on the periphery, rejected by those who see it as either a threat or an annoyance. It seems some choose to reject soccer simply as a way to reassert their "American-ness" by declaring its inferiority to a more established sport (be it football, baseball, basketball, etc.), or by dismissing it as the pastime of bland suburban youth whose participation is seen as evidence of soccer's irrelevance. While decidedly irrational, the general attitude of the American sports fan (often embodied by the American sports writer) is a reality that soccer-loving Americans and those from abroad who wish the see the sport succeed must face. Without a concerted and wholly united effort to smash through xenophobic barriers backed up by a soccer-less history, the sport will always remain on the edge, a funny foreign sport played by men in shorts on fields most American see as more suited to American football.


Soccer's place in the pecking order of American sports is never more clear than when discussing the U.S. defeat of England in the 1950 World Cup. Despite occurring thirty years before Lake Placid, the U.S. upset of England is given a name derivative of the U.S. hockey team's shocking win: "The Miracle on Grass". That annoys me to no end.