It has been a Holy Grail for football-lovers and marketing folks in equal measure: how and when will the world’s game conquer the global superpower.
And to think that it had started so well: the United States were losing semi-finalists in the inaugural World Cup, back in 1930, with one Bert Patenaude becoming the first player to score a hat-trick. At a time when there was little interest Stateside in team sports apart from baseball (which dominated the back pages alongside boxing and horse racing) it could have sparked something.
But it did not. Just as it did not when Joe Gaetjens felled the England of Tom Finney, Billy Wright and Stan Mortensen in 1950. Or in the 1970s when Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff joined the North American Soccer League. Or in 2002, when the US came within a dubious Hugh Dallas decision of reaching the semi-finals. Or even in 2007, when David Beckham, OBE, landed in Major League Soccer (MLS)
Why should this time be any different? So many false dawns litter the past of football across the pond that it will take more than an injury-time winner and Landon Donovan’s tears to change the flow of history.
And yet there are green shoots. Record TV audiences for World Cup matches. World-record rights being paid by US networks, both English and Spanish language. (Markets, of course, are far from infallible, but they’re right more often than not.) A national team which has qualified for the last six World Cups (out of CONCACAF, but still...)
Advertisement
A hardcore of knowledgeable fans, both when it comes to MLS and in the top European leagues. And, around them, a growing base of casual fans who tune in to major events. Witness this tweet by one US fan who got up at the crack of dawn in Los Angeles: “US advances, injury-time goal, Tom Petty’s American Girl playing, everyone singing, soccer has arrived in America.”
Can a World Cup run by this US side light the proverbial fire and provide critical mass? Perhaps that’s the missing link, maybe the 2002 run came at the wrong time, it could be that conditions are optimal now in a way that they weren’t in South Korea and Japan.
Either way, it’s unfair to saddle this US squad with such a responsibility. And the odds are that they don’t particularly care. Because their job description is not that of prophets spreading the word, it’s far simpler than that. They are footballers – American footballers (and not in the way we normally think of the term) – and they are here in South Africa to take their side as far they will possibly go.
In fact, they’re refreshingly ordinary – or as ordinary as millionaire footballers, which most of them are, can be – and that’s a good thing. And when we stop talking about proselytizing the United States – just as they’ve stopped talking about it – and simply treat the US as we would any other mid-tier World Cup participant, it will be even better.