There’s a viral video clip that I love to watch whenever the subject of American soccer fandom comes up. Shot on a blurry camera phone in 2016, it features a dandyish man against a cloudy Pacific Northwest backdrop, a scarf twirled around his neck, screaming for his team, the Seattle Sounders, to “Fight and win”—only to be met with silence, coughs, and chuckles from a disinterested crowd.
For years, it was the perfect metaphor for American soccer: well-meaning, polite, subdued and, above all, a pale imitation of football culture in the rest of the world. In England, where I’m from, American soccer fans have been the butt of the joke for years. In the U.S., soccer fanatics are a rounding error in opinion polls, an aberration in a sports landscape dominated by the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Sports pundit Jim Rome declared that he’d rather give his son “ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse” than let him play soccer. This was not a minority opinion.
But the times, they are a-changing. This summer, America has become a soccer country. It began a few weeks ago, when states across the country began welcoming teams from across the globe. In a peculiar turn of events, the Algerian national team ended up in a small Kansas town, 40 miles outside of Kansas City. And what did the good people of Lawrence, Kansas, do? They commissioned artwork to support the team; they learned the national anthem; they swarmed in the thousands to cheer the players on at training camp, learning everything they could about a small country 5,000 miles away. The energy felt different—and it’s only gotten better. For weeks, brands and politicians and Americans of all stripes have followed along as the German fan “Freddy” travels through the country, falling in love with Buc-ee’s and Bass Pro Shops and the vast beauty of the American interior. Meanwhile, U.S. jerseys are sold out everywhere, and bars are packed to the brim. It feels like the USA has dipped its toe in the soccer culture that all of us abroad already know and love.
