USA Loses To Ghana, And Out Come The Obituaries For Soccer

As dispiriting losses go, it’s hard to top the USA going out yesterday to Ghana. Rather than the US simply being outclassed by a superior team, they simply only showed up for 45 minutes of the 120 played. Ghana deserved to win the game, of course, but the USMNT were not bumping up against their potential’s ceiling. And yet they’re out all the same.

This has prompted the usual chorus of “this is why Americans will never care about soccer” or other similar arguments. They’re not exactly hard to find, but they have precisely two things in common: they only come out when USA loses, and they’re never “because we just lost and I am mad about that.”

Clearly, this loss is a disappointment for American fans, not only because the USMNT has been eliminated, but because their foursome in the group of 16 included Uruguay, Ghana, and South Korea. One of those four squads was going to make it to the quarterfinals, and in the FIFA world rankings, the Americans were the highest rated--14th--of the four (the others, respectively, were 16th, 32nd, and 47th). So even though a 14th-rated squad losing in the field of 16 seems, on its face, to be “correct,” one certainly couldn’t have faulted any forward-looking optimism.

But without fail, the complaints about soccer aren’t merely that USA isn’t good enough (yet). It’s that soccer can and will never be popular in the United States for stylistic reasons: diving, rolling around, low scores, the whole “we call it football” thing, and other sundry details.

These complaints, by themselves, aren’t entirely invalid. But they’re also don’t prove anything about soccer’s viability in the United States. In fact, soccer is steadily becoming more popular stateside, and the USMNT’s loss to Ghana is hardly a deathblow to the sport’s efforts.

The ratings are up substantially from four years ago, culminating in USA-Ghana putting up the best soccer numbers in American history. MLS has a foothold out west, especially with the Seattle Sounders and Los Angeles Galaxy. ESPN is showing early-morning EPL and UEFA games so fans can watch high-level soccer when international tournaments aren’t going on. These are the incremental improvements that success is built on.

Soccer’s probably not going to become the most popular sport in the United States--not while any of us are alive, at the very least. It’s still, as Jurgen Klinsmann put it today, an upper-class sport in the USA while universal in the rest of the world. So for American athletes who would have excelled on a pitch in their prime--think like Michael Vick, Barry Sanders, Roy Williams, Allen Iverson, etc.--soccer wasn’t even a practical option in their youth, much less a valid outlet once they started to realize the levels of their athleticism. That’s still the case today, and that’s soccer’s challenge in front of it.

But that’s the entire point: the “how” in soccer’s success has an answer now, and the sport knows it. To pretend otherwise and dismiss its future in America on the grounds that there’s too much diving (while overlooking Derek Fisher’s entire defensive repertoire, for example) or that there’s not enough scoring (baseball) or that it’s too foreign (hockey) or that the equipment’s too expensive/inaccessible for inner-city youth (football) carries the intellectual heft of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and screaming “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.” Soccer is growing in popularity here, and it will continue to do so over the coming years and decades. The only unknown left is the height of its popularity at its peak--this will likely correspond with the USMNT’s concurrent performance. Get ready, and get used to it