Category Archives: us soccer

Great expectations

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Here’s proof that expectations—and, therefore, potential criticism—of any sports team are based on the degree of interest among the populace. Exhibit A: The American soccer community is beside itself with the U.S. men’s national team’s lackluster performance in a fourth-place finish at last week’s four-team Nation’s League mini-tournament.

The Yanks were beaten by Panama and Canada—there’s some political irony there, in terms of who owns whom, no?—and are being lambasted by pundits and fans. For the fourth-place match against Canada, L.A.’s 70,000-seat SoFi Stadium was virtually empty at kickoff.

And it’s one thing for self-proclaimed experts—commentators and that lot—to be throwing brickbats. But retired national team players from recent years, fellows who had something to do with America’s overdue arrival to top-level international soccer competition—have been among the most prominent disparagers.

Landon Donovan: “I’m so sick of hearing how ‘talented’ this group of players is and all the amazing clubs they play for. If you aren’t going to show up and actually give a [deleted] about playing for your national team, decline the invite. Talent is great, pride is better.”

Clint Dempsey: “You would hope that they would get up for [these games], that there would be more pride to try to get things back on track and try to get this fanbase behind them…”

Tab Ramos: “….all of the important guys are saying ‘We need to … work harder.’ Well yeah, of course. But you need to stop talking about it. You need to start doing it.”

Alexi Lalas: “Does this team even care?”

The going up—our lads won the previous three Nation’s League titles—certainly didn’t make the coming down any easier.

Exhibit B: This is what being labeled the “golden generation” of U.S. men’s soccer talent will get you in dropping two of three matches last fall while hosting Copa America and now going 0-2 at home. It pretty much wipes out the fact that it hasn’t been that long—a mere generation or so—since the Yanks could have suffered such setbacks and no one on these shores would have noticed.

The angst over recent failures, with next summer’s World Cup returning to the United States (as co-host with Mexico and Canada) is a reminder of how dramatically (and how quickly) soccer has progressed on these shores.

When the World Cup was last here, in 1994, the U.S. soccer federation was still trying to scrape together a national team with a jury-rigged collection of recent college players. There was no U.S. professional league because there was no demand for one. The rag-tag team that had qualified for the Italy-based 1990 World Cup—the Yanks’ first World Cup appearance in 40 years—did so, in large part, because the region’s perennial power, Mexico, had been banned for using ineligible players.

Even so, the Yanks barely squeezed into that championship tournament and were promptly destroyed by Czechoslovakia, 5-1. The most skilled player on that U.S. team was Ramos. And, after that 5-1 thrashing in Florence, Italy, in 1990, Ramos was one of only a few U.S. players brave enough to face reporters’ post-game interrogations: If he somehow could have known beforehand how disappointing his World Cup debut would be, might he have preferred to take a pass?

“This,” he said then, “is the greatest experience of my life. If I had to go through it again, just the same way, I would.”

It was, after all, 1990. Frontier days. “It’s not something to be ashamed of. If we lived in another country and lost, 5-1, we couldn’t go home. But we’ll go home and walk through Kennedy Airport and no one will recognize us, anyway.”

Ramos, born in Uruguay and settled with his family in New Jersey when he was 7, knew very well the pecking order of American sports at the time, when soccer was “a way of life everywhere but in the U.S. Everywhere else, your team loses, you cry and stay home from work the next day because you’re so upset. Your team wins, you don’t go to work because you’re so happy.”

There was no need to feel sorry about having been an “American soccer player,” because that was an oxymoron—like “living dead” or “definite maybe”—in those days.

Now, the reality is markedly different. Major League Soccer, the U.S. professional league, is in its 29th season, with 30 teams. American players regularly star for top European club teams. Soccer, as a spectator sport in the States, now is on the order of ice hockey, just behind the big three of football, baseball and basketball.

A run of seven consecutive World Cup qualifications—interrupted in 2018—has caused enough Americans to care enough that the national team has gone through five coaches since then, expecting bigger things. Mauricio Pochettino is the sixth and, after just six months and eight matches, already is hearing grumbles, much of it questioning his ability to generate more player effort.

Now, U.S soccer’s problem not only is qualifying but also making some impact in the 2026 World Cup. Because, it the Yanks don’t, a lot of people will notice. (And they will recognize the players walking through any airport.)

But about the laundry…

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It was inevitable. Pundits and spectators who rarely pay attention to soccer—but apparently were lured into taking notice of the significant World Cup match between the potential insurrectionist Americans taking on imperial England—rushed to label the resulting 0-0 tie as “boring.” At least when long-ago sports columnist Jim Murray wanted to make that sort of personal observation about the sport, back when most Yanks still dismissed soccer as a foreign enterprise, he did so with some snarky humor: “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”

Fine. I will not work myself into a high dudgeon in defense of what I found to be a tense and dramatic duel in the globe’s most-followed athletic event. The argument over soccer’s relative appeal remains a truly dull one. You like soccer or you don’t. Like poetry or gardening.

What obviously was boring were the American uniforms. “Kits,” in the soccer vernacular. A humdrum monochromatic blue? Blue shirts, blue shorts, blue socks? (With black splotches upon really close examination.)

There are teams running around loose at the World Cup nattily and appropriately attired: Argentines in their classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatians in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germans with a wide vertical black stripe on white; Brazilians in their traditional yellow shirts; Mexicans in inventive alternate jerseys of white covered with red doodles representing the country’s pre-Hispanic memory and current cultural touchstones.

In ranking the top uniforms in this World Cup, a cbssports.com post previewed “which teams will look the most stylish in Qatar and why the USMNT [U.S. Men’s National Team] won’t be among them.” (The English outfits aren’t much better—white with pale-blue touches, hardly summoning England’s white flag with red St. George’s cross—though England’s alternate uniforms, all red, save the day.)

The Americans’ present sartorial tedium recalls 1990, when the United States qualified for its first World Cup appearance in 40 years and showed up in unremarkable white duds with some blue trim. It was fellow journalist John Powers of the Boston Globe, exposed to that drab kit, who argued that the Yanks should have come “looking like Apollo Creed, all stars and stripes.” (Creed, kiddies, was the fictional boxer, sort of a pugilist Uncle Sam, played by Carl Weathers in the series of 1970s and ‘80s “Rocky” movies.)

Then, voila! For the U.S.-based World Cup in 1994, the athletic outfitter adidas tailored a pair of bespoke outfits for the home team that indeed broadcast stars and stripes in national colors. One uniform featured a faded blue shirt of imitation denim—very American—with huge stretched-out white stars and red trim and red shorts; the other consisted of a white shirt with wavy red stripes and blue shorts—very flaggish. (Photo above)

Of course, the whole uniform project—then as now—always is based on marketing, and most of the U.S. players were startled, and not particularly thrilled, upon being introduced to the ’94 outfits, which they found a bit gaudy. “I opened the box and said, ‘There must be some mistake,’” John Harkes said at the time. “But,” he added with a shrug, “it kind of grows on you, actually.” Alexi Lalas—now a World Cup commentator with the standard middle-aged businessman’s appearance but then a lanky goateed, flowing-locks redheaded defender—was said by a couple of teammates to “look like Raggedy Ann” in the red-striped shirt.

Now, with the ’22 World Cup in progress, and really not much to say about the Americans’ attire—impossible to describe it as chic or snappy or dapper or modish—it was interesting to come across an exhaustive report on The Athletic website resurrecting the then-shocking departure from the norm with those 1994 outfits: How most of the players initially were appalled by the kits, which were unlike anything soccer had ever seen, yet over time have embraced them, partly based on fond memories of having made a surprise run to the Cup’s knockout round that year.

Honestly, fellow World Cup observers—whatever you think of soccer—is there anything about the current U.S. kits that fits Nike’s claim that they “inspire unity, symbolize diversity and celebrate [a] commitment to expanding the game for the next generation on and off the pitch…”? Is there anything interesting about them at all?

Sorry. Boring.

Love for the underdog

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Americans are a fortunate lot, born to moon landings and miracles on ice on other unprecedented successes. We assume a degree of superiority in comparison to other peoples, an over-the-top arrogance based on a history of industrial and technological advances. We invented the airplane, chemotherapy, chocolate chip cookies. Baseball.

But we ain’t perfect, and the start of another World Cup tournament is a reminder to have some humility. As Will Leitch noted in a New York magazine essay, “In no other context outside international soccer are Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and Denmark global powers and the U.S. a plucky upstart.”

So, no, there is no expectation that the Yanks will bring home the Cup from the month-long event being staged out of season and out of the sport’s normal zone of influence—in the tiny oil-rich, culturally restrictive Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Of the Cup’s 32 participating countries, the United States is ranked roughly in the middle, with—according to FiveThirtyEight website predictions—a 1 percent chance of going all the way. FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. only a 53 percent hope of surviving the three-game opening round.

The Leitch article accurately headlines the World Cup “the only real American underdog story,” even as Leitch posits that this situation “makes the team considerably more fun to cheer for.” The lovable underdog. And, while there is plenty of evidence that the 2022 Yank team has a number of handicaps—the second-youngest roster in the tournament, a disappointing run-up to the tournament in terms of victories, perfect health and firepower—it ought not to be forgotten how far American soccer (and American soccer fandom) has come in the last 40 years.

1983. Caracas, Venezuela. Pan American Games. There was a first-round U.S. soccer match against Guatemala, a country with roughly 1/20th the population of the United States, in which the Yanks had their rather large heads handed to them. 3-0, I think it was.

The Latino fans in attendance were kind, not averse to showing appreciation for the Americans’ efforts but fully aware of the chasm of competence and how foreign the sport was to the 1980s American scene. One could imagine a thought bubble over the fans’ heads, with the words: Gringos, this is a football. It is round. Are we going too fast?

It was another seven years before a collection of U.S. college lads, lining up against hardened pros from around the globe, barely sneaked into their first World Cup in 40 years only to remind that “American soccer player” was widely regarded as an oxymoron. Like “jumbo shrimp.”

Then again, how much adventure is there in rooting for a team always assured of victory? How real is that? When the Yanks trampolined into the second round of the 2002 World Cup with shocking wins over Portugal, then fifth in the world, and longtime rival Mexico, U.S. soccer spokesman Bryan Chenault summed up the giddy reaction—and sudden interest from the opinion-shaping media—saying, “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re all welcome. There’s plenty of room.”

Something clearly was afoot. That year, as the Americans came within a referee’s failure to penalize a German’s illegal touch of surviving a 1-0 quarterfinal loss, talk-radio and sports-column pundits began to unreasonably fret over the possibility that soccer somehow could shoulder aside the place of football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of U.S. sports. As if that were the point.

The truth is that a large portion of the American citizenry has come to acquire a taste for soccer, and their national team—not a world-beater but clearly competitive—has added to the appeal of the World Cup’s top-notch sporting theatre.

Old friend George Vecsey, among my sports journalism heroes, who has written a book about the eight World Cups he covered for the New York Times, has just posted thoughts on the Yanks’ present football situation, including this (to me, surprising) observation: “The accumulation of injuries and benchings and transfers lead to my conclusion that the best days of American soccer just might be—I hate to say this—in the past.”

Whoa. But we still have chocolate chip cookies.