from Massimo Lopes Pegna
To explain the growth of soccer in the United States – even if today the US will lose to the Netherlands in the round of 16 – we need to rewind the tape over thirty years. There isn’t a precise moment, rather a historical period that falls between the 80s and 90s and a reference to a somewhat romantic figure: the ‘soccer mom’.
The mother, indeed the ‘football mothers’ who in those years sacrificed office hours to fill family cars and transport sons and daughters to the playing field. No longer just football (the American one), basketball and baseball – because if you’re not tall and big you can’t even dream of becoming a champion one day – but soccer, in fact. Team sport, denigrated in different eras as stuff for emigrants or for “sissy” (ladies, but with an inelegant meaning), was now being appreciated by an army of parents, white and middle-class, from the great American province: a new gateway to university scholarships. Suddenly, in the commercials on TV for detergents and plasters, the child got his shirt dirty and scraped his knee playing with a leather ball, no longer with an oval or wedged one. The first and unequivocal sign of change.
The qualification in 1990 for the first World Cup after an absence of 40 years was fundamental. And the idea of Fifa, which was already thinking about the dollars of that gigantic user base of 300 million customers still unexplored, of assigning the 1994 World Cup to the USA two years earlier. From there it was an escalation: five qualifiers consecutive, with the apotheosis of the quarter-finals in 2002 unfairly defeated by Germany for 1-0.
After the crash of not participating in Russia 2018, in Qatar, with the second youngest team in the tournament, the USA are gathering consideration and compliments. And for the match against England, a record TV audience of 19.9 million viewers. They won’t win this World Cup, but growth is there for all to see. The best explanation for what is happening was summed up in a single sentence by the coach of Iran, Carlos Queiroz, on the eve of the match against the USA: “The United States no longer plays soccer, but football”.
But what does it mean?
It means that the Yankee players who are part of today’s national team now occupy important roles in the European leagues. They have been promoted. They no longer have to just play their way through Major League Soccer. Be careful, however, it is not an insult to the American Pro League, because the MLS kicked a ball for the first time in 1996, that is just 26 years ago: a newborn compared to our century-old championships dripping with history (Premier, Liga , Serie A, Bundes, Ligue 1…).
On the contrary. The MLS has been instrumental in giving space to young people who are trained in colleges, the great sports reservoir of the USA. Furthermore, having started amidst a thousand difficulties and mistrust, over time she has done much more: she has created the Academies. Canteras affiliated with the various teams of the League to cultivate new talent on the European model. That’s how she trained her best youth, then shipped them across the Atlantic. To understand, Christian Pulisic is one of those guys who packed his suitcase at 16. As well as Giò Reyna or Tim Weah. All of them cut their teeth to become the new posters of the generations to follow.
As in all things, timing mattered. When Landon Donovan attempted the move to Germany a handful of years before Pulisic, the experiment failed. Donovan was then (early 2000s) the strongest American footballer, but he was unable to overcome the difficulties of leaving the ‘comfort zone’: he was the best in Mls, at his home, but only one of many in Germany.
The man who brought about this progress was Jurgen Klinsmann. When in 2011 he was called to fill the role of coach of the Stars and Stripes national team and to give the shoulder to soccer, he who was German but American by adoption because he had a Californian wife and lived on those beaches, possessed the right sensitivity to understand that he was The time has come to raise the bar. When I interviewed him on the eve of the 2014 World Cup, he told me that the only way his players had to progress was to go and learn from the masters. That is us, understood as Europeans. He told me that someone like Michael Bradley couldn’t be satisfied with staying at Chievo – with all due respect – but he had to improve. It meant going to Roma, and then trying to play in the Champions League and so on. Only with high-level experiences could the movement grow.
The movement has grown. As Queiroz perfectly summarized, who in 1996 had coached Roberto Donadoni’s New York MetroStars and then obtained a role as consultant to the Yankee football federation: “Football, no more soccer”.
And here we are in Qatar 2022. The US is still unbeaten, like only three other guests at the ‘Sweet Sixteen’ ball. They drew 1-1 against Wales a game they could win; stopped the English at 0-0 by not taking advantage of a couple of favorable opportunities; and beat Iran 1-0. Now there’s Holland: a tough but not impossible match.
Of the eleven who have taken the field against Iran, six play in the Premier League, two in Serie A, one in Ligue 1, one in La Liga and one in Scotland. Here is the growth! And the Mls, apart from a few cases, is no longer a league for old retirees: now it takes care of young budding champions and helps them land in the Old World. Today Tyler Adams at the age of just 23 is the captain of this crew of young corsairs: he plays for Leeds and is a delicious morsel to be quickly included in the starred menu of the big clubs. As well as Pulisic who is already at Chelsea. Or Sergino Dest who as Milan’s reserve could soon mortgage the Rossoneri’s right wing. Or Weah and Reyna, who from Lille and Dortmund could fly to more famous clubs.
This is the growth that Klinsmann prophesied.
This is the revolution that in just over a quarter of a century has shaped a new generation: from performances on provincial stages to those on the Broadway of Europe.
Qatar 2022, Iran – United States, victory for the United States
