Ten thoughts — and a bonus extra, too — about the 2022 men’s World Cup, now that the United States team is headed home.
1. The U.S. team made it through to the round of 16. So what?
This does not, looking toward 2026, when the World Cup will be (largely) played in the United States, herald some crazy breakthrough for soccer in this country.
If you’re a soccer geek, you’re already a soccer geek. The rest of America mostly cares about world-class soccer only when it’s a big event, like the World Cup. Americans like big events. This is why the Olympics draws big ratings, too.
What America really cares about is football. American football.
The MLS is minor-league soccer. Repeat: minor-league soccer. Don’t even.
Deandre Yedlin and Josh Sargent of United States embrace Iran’s Saeid Ezatolahi after the 1-0 U.S. victory at Al Thumama Stadium on Nov. 29 // photo by Claudio Villa/Getty Images
2. Irrefutable evidence for the proposition that this is a football, not soccer nation:
Of the top 100 most-watched television programs in 2021, according to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, 75 were NFL games.
The top five: Super Bowl, NFC Championship, AFC championship, Raiders-Cowboys Thanksgiving game and Buccaneers-Saints NFC divisional game.
Out of the top 100, beyond the 75 that were NFL games, 11 were from the Tokyo Olympics, seven were college football games and two were NCAA basketball games. The NBA, MLB and NHL? Nothing. MLS? Please.
In 2020, the NFL accounted for 72 of the top 100, and 78 of the top 100 in 2019.
3. My 2-year-old golden retriever justifiably demands a walk every morning, and there was a big crowd outside the self-proclaimed soccer HQ, a beachside bar, the morning the Americans played the Netherlands. The next morning, as France demolished Poland? Literally no one there.
This is not a soccer nation. It’s a big-event nation. People like to dress up in red, white and blue and chant, U-S-A! That’s cool. But let’s acknowledge that for what it is. Not love of soccer.
4. More, because the soccer people can be militant.
A total of 16.5 million people watched that USA-Holland knockout game across FOX Sports and Telemundo, per worldsoccertalk.com.
To break this down:
— 12.966 million watched on over-the-air FOX and its streaming services combined
— of that number, 596,850 watched on FOX streaming services
— Another 3.58 million watched on Telemundo Deportes and its streaming services
So, again, 16.5 million.
That was the second-most watched game this World Cup. No. 1? USA-England, with 19.9 million viewers, again per worldsoccertalk.com.
To reiterate: 19.9 million.
That’s an NFL game. In September and October. When it’s hardly playoff time.
The Sept. 12, 2021, game between the Browns and Chiefs drew 19.54 million viewers. A Thursday night — Thursday night! — game on Oct. 28, 2021, between the Packers and Cardinals drew 20.26 million.
So let’s get real, people.
5. This has got to stop — the British-ization in the U.S. press of American English in service of soccer.
Under what theory does a U.S. team score “on” 76 minutes? Wearing “kit”? And end up “gutted” at the loss? What?!
Haji Wright scored “in” the 76th minute. Was he “disappointed” afterward? Sure.
Worse, way worse — my dear, sweet but appropriately severe high school English teacher, Mrs. Eloise Rosser, would be rolling over in her grave to hear purportedly educated people writing that the United States “have” done something. As in, the United States have won the draw. Or, similarly, Germany (or whatever other country) have pressed the advantage.
No. Just no.
Did the United States win? It have not. See?
What a clown show it would be if you referred to Tom Brady wearing Tampa Bay kit. Not for nothing, of those 75 NFL games, Brady and the Bucs accounted for 11, including five of the top 15.
In these 50 states, we don’t leave our vehicles at the car park. Our cars don’t have boots. We don’t buy petrol. And on and on.
Enough. Here, the game is called soccer. If you want it to be a thing in this country, be authentic. Be authentically American, not faux English.
Paul Revere did not ride into the night so that we could, you know, be affected and weird.
6. Sportswriting rule No. 1: no cheering in the press box. Imagine you are a journalism school professor — oh, that would be me at the University of Southern California — trying to instruct young minds that our job is to be skeptical of everything and everyone, and these young minds coming to you and saying, why is so much of what I’m reading from Doha so gushy?
Christian Pulisic is not “heroic” for scoring a goal. It’s a soccer game.
7. The U.S. team was demonstrably better in 2022 than years before. But it still has a long way to go before it can compete with the world’s best.
The point of a soccer game — just as in American football — is to score more than the other team. Here is where the Americans are lacking. They don’t have a world-class striker.
Odds of the United States developing such a striker between now and 2026? Slim to none.
Why?
The United States has the world’s greatest talent development system. It’s called the NCAA. The world sends its best here in sports such as swimming, volleyball, track and field and more.
For teen boys in the United States, the system that drives them toward college and the NCAA is hugely incentivized toward football and basketball.
In Division 1 alone, there are 131 universities offering 85 scholarships for football.
For basketball, there are 358 schools offering 13 full-ride Division 1 basketball scholarships.
Soccer? Soccer is an “equivalency” sport. There are 9.9 scholarships available for men — typically spread across 29 players.
Who is likely to become a world-class soccer star? A unicorn, that’s who. This is why the United States is, and forever will be, behind the power curve in world soccer.
7. As the Statue of Liberty makes plain, this is a land of immigrants. The plain way to get a striker is to import one. Or two. Or several.
8. It was said many times while the Americans were in Qatar that 2022 was a prelude to 2026. But how, exactly, is the U.S. supposed to get that much better over the next four years? To get better, you have to test yourself. Where are those tests?
There’s the Gold Cup in 2023. But that typically ends up being all of a two-team tournament, the U.S and Mexico.
As co-hosts, the Americans don’t have to qualify for 2026. That means no accompanying CONCACAF rigor.
9. Imagine if the Iranian soccer federation had messed with the American flag. People in the USA! USA! USA! crowd would have gone berserk.
This is why — just as at the Olympics amid the controversy before the Tokyo Games over Rule 50 — the rule is no political speech. That rule is grounded in reason and logic.
10. The flag incident belies an underlying American moral superiority when looking out at the rest of the world, and particularly the Middle East.
That would-be superiority underscores, yet again, a dangerous American myopia and accompanying hypocrisy.
If it’s not super-obvious, let’s be:
The United States spent 20 years trying to export our “values” to Iraq and Afghanistan. This cost thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
One of my best grad students this year was, way back when, a U.S. Army infantryman who was in the first wave into Iraq. You could ask him whether the people he was “liberating” in Iraq wanted us there. Obviously, not. It took until a year ago last week for the U.S. combat mission to formally draw to a close.
Did the United States Soccer Federation — purportedly in support of women in Iran — pause for even a moment to consider that we were in Afghanistan for 20 years? That it was just 15 months ago when U.S. troops withdrew from Kabul, condemning millions of Afghan girls and women to life under the Taliban?
And that, as the international sports federation AIPS reported, as the World Cup was going on, 14 people, including three women, were lashed inside a provincial Afghan soccer stadium — convicted of theft, adultery and “running away from home” — in front of a huge crowd. Those punished were dealt 21 to 39 lashes apiece.
The AIPS story also noted this: as of Nov. 10, the Taliban announced a ban on women going to sports clubs or gyms.
11. Bonus for all those complaining about Qatar playing host to the World Cup.
Just wait until foreign visitors try to get a visa to get into the United States in 2026.