In the spring of 1994, I picked up a free glossy magazine that was ostensibly promoting the upcoming World Cup, but it was really an attempt to justify soccer’s existence.
The tournament organizers rounded up a bunch of luminaries from other sports — I remembered Tom Landry and Cal Ripken Jr., but Dikembe Mutombo and Jackie Joyner-Kersee also apparently Got a Kick Out of Soccer — and had them serve as character witnesses for soccer. Landry, in particular, was a solid get, a counter to the popular sentiment that soccer was not simply boring, but that it was deeply un-American, and certainly incompatible with Landry’s chosen field.
Another pro football luminary, former quarterback and future GOP vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, became the poster child for this movement after saying, “Football is democratic capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.” Kemp later noted that the comment was largely tongue in cheek and that he ultimately warmed (a bit) to the sport.
Not everyone got the joke. For years, you could read bizarre takes linking American exceptionalism to a preference for using one’s hands, watching high-scoring sports, and celebrating the flashy superstar instead of the collective. Even well into this century, actual professional writers kept throwing all sorts of shit against the wall. Many of those folks did it out of political spite; others claimed not to, but still sort of did. The one time I opened a Chuck Klosterman book, I read his anti-soccer diatribe and immediately dismissed him as a hack. After rehashing the usual stuff about hooliganism abroad, he focused on how his brief, ill-fated stint as a results-obsessed youth baseball coach somehow reflected badly on soccer, the latter of which was “a game where (parents’) perfect little angels could not fuck up” since soccer was all about “enforced equality” as opposed to “the value of competition and the capacity of the human spirit.”
Yeah, I don’t get it either.
Eventually, though, the era of the soccer troll faded. The men’s and women’s World Cups are undeniably a big deal here, American pro soccer enjoys great support in the stands (if not on TV or streaming), while Mexico’s Liga MX, the English Premier League, and the UEFA Champions League have sizable, devoted followings on all sorts of screens. Even Hank Hill is watching.
Pockets of resistance might remain, but the left-wing codification of American soccer is no longer a thing — and it was always absurd to begin with. Superfan Henry Kissinger was a key ambassador in the ‘94 World Cup bid. Major League Soccer wouldn’t have been born without the Hunt family, nor would it have survived its first decade without the lifelines that Philip Anschutz (and to a lesser extent, Robert Kraft) threw it. Not a socialist in the lot.
TNow, as the men’s World Cup returns to the United States for the first time in 32 years, it might not be as right-wing coded as the UFC bouts on the White House lawn, but it feels pretty damn close. This Republican administration has repeatedly injected itself into the proceedings, attacking or threatening multiple participating nations, severely restricting entry to one delegation, and refusing to let a referee into the U.S. (presumably because he hails from what the president has deemed a “low IQ” country).
FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, who would have been entirely justified if he’d yanked the tournament out of the U.S. following the decapitation strike on Venezuela (or the decapitation strike on Iran, or the threat of a decapitation strike on Cuba), has been kissing Donald Trump’s ass for years, bestowing on him a nonsensical “peace prize,” renting space in Trump Tower, and keeping quiet as the federal government terrorizes immigrant communities, scares off foreign tourists, and conveniently drops cases related to FIFA’s massive bribery scandal of the 2010s.
And most Americans will experience World Cup ‘26 through the filter of the Murdochs’ Fox Sports division, the corporate sibling of a Fox News media machine that has convinced much of the country that up is, in fact, down. Yes, Fox will provide blanket coverage, but based on past performance, it’ll be a thin blanket, with minimal effort made to dig into a) the geopolitical or cultural complexities that make any World Cup compelling, or b) the issues that make so many people around the globe wary about this World Cup, in this country, in this moment.
Little wonder, then, that the buzz around this tournament is so muted. The local CVS and Walgreens have big displays of World Cup merch; I’ve yet to see anyone wearing the stuff. Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, and other sponsors are clearly all in, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the population is. Yes, the exorbitant ticket prices and the prospect of transportation chaos have driven people away from attending in person, but this administration’s increasing contempt for (and menace toward) perceived outsiders is surely tamping down the passion among the general public, too. Impromptu watch parties and postgame celebrations in ethnic neighborhoods used to be one of the best parts of a World Cup in a nation built on immigration. Is it even worth gathering now, if everyone’s on edge, waiting for a whistle to warn of an approaching ICE van? And more than a few of us who once hung on every cross, shot, and save in a U.S. World Cup match will watch these games with a cold detachment, if we watch at all.
Maybe once the matches start, things will change. Maybe the athletes will salvage the show, as they usually do. Even the 2022 World Cup, built on outrageous human rights violations in Qatar, penned an irrepressible final act, rightly considered among the greatest games ever, in any sport.
But maybe there comes a point where they take it all too far — the greed, the corruption, the bigotry, the surveillance — and neither the spectacle nor the sport itself can sufficiently compensate.