My fellow Americans, this is a call to reason, not a plea of insanity: Give up on soccer promptly.
Winning the World Cup is a pipe dream, a fool’s errand, a fairy tale with a reality-show ending. That’s the only feasible conclusion that we can draw after the U.S.’ on-the-wrong-side-of-history loss to Panama on Saturday during the group stage of the Gold Cup.
No fewer than 36 minutes into the match, the Americans found themselves down 2-nil thanks to Gabriel Gomez, who converted a penalty kick to give Panama a sizeable lead. The loss marked the U.S.’ first group-stage setback in any Gold Cup.
“Sometimes you just come out flat for whatever reason. At this level, and against a good team, you can’t do that,” Landon Donovan said about the U.S.’ better-late-than-never showing.
“Some nights you come out flat and you don’t get punished, but other nights you do. We learned a valuable lesson.”
The lesson: The United States will never hoist the World Cup.
Ever. Winning the World Cup is a national project, requiring more commitment and dedication than the Manhattan Project.
And that is something America just doesn’t have. Soccer isn’t imbued into our cultural identity. To Brazilians, it’s a beautiful game. To Americans, there’s nothing beautiful about a 2-0 contest. It’s geometric, as black and white as the pentagons on a soccer ball. Short attention spans and long, languid 90-minute matches don’t mix.
Soccer is the ultimate team sport, which explains why American children dabble in the game in youth leagues but soon after lose interest. Babe Ruth, Emmitt Smith and Michael Jordan — definitive American athletes — revolutionized baseball, football and basketball, and in one broad stroke underlined the main reason we prefer those sports above soccer: as much as they are team-based sports, there are built-in platforms for individual success, and Americans are born and socialized to become attention whores.
Soccer runs contrary to the American capitalist ethos, one that says, “Stand out or be stood on.” And sorry to say it, but it doesn’t matter that the U.S. women have twice won the international gauntlet. Forgive me if that sounds sexist. It’s not meant to be. Bear in mind that the take-home point in saying such a thing is this: when I started writing this column, I asked a friend, rather sheepishly, even though I was almost positive of the answer, “Has the women’s national team won the World Cup?” He answered rather sure of himself. “The American women? No. There’s no way.”
Ah, the legacy of unconscious chauvinism, the machismo of misogyny. It’s unconscionable how, even today, women’s athletic achievements take a backseat to men’s — that they get lost and collect dust in the American sporting conscious. Forgive the digression.
The point is that individualism in sports is tied to masculinity. Economic success is a measuring stick for male self-worth. In that respect, there is a spot for Marketplace Man, but not Marketplace Woman.
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To be sure, unlike other American sports, soccer doesn’t promote such a doctrine, either stylistically or economically. Take Major League Soccer for example. It pays its players minor league salaries. Per the Denver Post, MLS player salaries have risen 12 percent from 2010. The median income, though, plummeted from about $88,000 to $80,000.
What, then, accounts for the rise in salaries but fall in median income? Well, its boils down to this: The MLS poaches out-of-their-prime players from prestigious European leagues and pays them handsomely to legitimize our bastardized knock-off imitator. David Beckham, Thierry Henry and Rafael Marquez, to name a few.
But our players? By all accounts, they make a high-middle-class wage that pales in comparison to our naturalized sports. Sporting and economic-wise, they are second-class citizens in their own country. No one wants to play soccer. It’s a thankless profession.
Before 2010, when the league negotiated a new labor pact, the league minimum was about $32,000. It’s now $40,000, compared to the low $300,000s in the NFL, to the mid and low $400,000s in the MLB and NBA.
There’s a reason all the best soccer players flock overseas to compete. Simply put, it’s not worth their time to stay in America. Not only that, but the MLS has spurred an outgrowth of expectations.
Delusional Americans believe that because we have a pro soccer league, we are on the cusp of bringing the cup to the nation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Judging by MLS salaries (which are a reflection of the nation’s interest in the sport, because where there’s demand, there’s an influx of cash flow), the U.S. has not invested enough in soccer to realistically expect international results.
Getting to the quarterfinals in the 2010 World Cup was not progress; that was the U.S. reaching its glass ceiling. Painful? Yes. But even truer.
The U.S.’ most recent setback is like foreshadowing in a novel. This narrative is doomed. Maybe it’s not a predictor of what’s to come in the Gold Cup. It’s true the U.S. can still salvage its Gold Cup finals bid. The World Cup? There comes a point in all our lives when we must let go of our dreams.
Please, my fellow Americans, let go of the nationalism. Let go of the pride. Let go of the sense of American exceptionalism.
For those who can’t bring themselves to reject such a self-serving attitude, take shelter in this: Americans might not be the best at everything, but there’s little doubt that we are the best at thinking we are the best at everything.
