Back in the 1980s, around when I first moved to the U.S., Republican Congressman Jack Kemp, then one of conservatism’s brightest stars who’d quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills before going into politics, gave a speech in which he said America’s brand of football stood for democracy and capitalism, unlike that dodgy foreign football, which was a European socialist plot to undermine our ways. Much like socialism and the metric system, folks like Kemp fervently believed soccer should be resisted to preserve America.
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And Americans were doing an excellent job resisting. To move to the U.S. as a teenager in those years was like moving behind some sporting Iron Curtain. I found myself suddenly cut off from the shared global culture of the world’s default sport, in a country that insisted on playing its own games to reinforce its exceptionalism and then proclaimed their domestic league winners “world champions.” To this day, we are the only country where the biggest stars in our most followed professional sport never get to represent their country in international competition. There was no soccer to be watched on American TV, efforts to establish a vibrant domestic league had failed, and I had no schoolmates with whom to talk to about Bayern Munich and Barcelona. Worse, when we had any downtime, they’d pull out a frisbee, instead of a soccer ball.
How times have changed. Rec soccer is now a staple of American youth, we have vibrant men and women’s professional soccer leagues in the U.S., I can readily watch practically any other league on earth (English on NBC, Italian on Paramount, Spanish and German on ESPN, Mexican on TUDN, and so on), and more American TV viewers watched the final of the 2022 FIFA men’s World Cup played in Qatar than that year’s NBA Finals or World Series. This despite the fact that there were no Americans involved in that epic match pitting Leo Messi’s Argentina against Kylian Mbappé’s France. And many of the same interests that control U.S. sports franchises are now acquiring international soccer clubs. This season, for the first time, a majority of English Premier League clubs are U.S.-owned.
But perhaps the single most potent illustration of America’s budding love affair with soccer is President Donald Trump’s embrace of the 2026 men’s World Cup, which the U.S. will co-host with Mexico and Canada next summer. Whereas American political leaders on the right disdained FIFA and the game the Swiss-based organization governed, you’d think Trump has given its current president Gianni Infantino keys to the White House, as he’s so frequently there. Infantino has also accompanied Trump on his Middle East travels, and Trump was center stage during Infantino’s inaugural Club World Cup last summer.
Trump will on Friday preside over the ceremonial World Cup draw that determines which nations play in which groups next summer. The draw was originally expected to take place in Las Vegas (as it was for the 1994 World Cup FIFA organized in the U.S. in an earlier attempt to jumpstart the sport here) but was moved to Washington’s Kennedy Center, as if to reinforce that this is now a matter of state. Among the intriguing plotlines going into Friday are whether the U.S. men will have to face Erling Haaland’s Norway or Mohamed Salah’s Egypt in their opening game, and whether Trump will be awarded FIFA’s first peace prize, improvised by Infantino for the occasion.
I can recall going to some of the 1994 World Cup matches but may not be able to afford tickets for next summer’s (progress!). That ’94 tournament was a big catalyst for the game in America, helping to launch Major League Soccer in its aftermath. But the vibe then was of an externally imposed affair, a plot between immigrant diasporas embedded in this country and big corporate sponsors to see if they couldn’t pull the game they were both invested in into the mainstream.
Indeed, three protagonists deserve credit for boosting the sport in America: the women’s game, immigrants, and the global imperative of major U.S. corporations needing to brand themselves through the one sport with truly global reach.
The story of how girls and women picked up soccer in the aftermath of Title IX, and turned the U.S. into the global superpower of the women’s game, is well known. Less appreciated is the extent to which the 1990s cultural phenomenons that are USWNT’s Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Brandi Chastain naturalized the sport as American. We went from Kemp’s disdain in the 1980s to demographers soon coining the term “soccer mom” to describe the most mainstream, suburban, and middle class of white voters. Meanwhile, across America’s cities, immigrants and changing demographics also played an obvious role in spreading the game.
And in an era of accelerating globalization, American multinationals were always going to need to align themselves with the global sport. Coca-Cola was one of FIFA’s first corporate sponsor in the 1970s, and not because people in its home market cared much about the game. Electronic Arts had a huge hit on its hands when it created Madden, its NFL video game, but that was only ever going to be a huge hit stateside. For a truly global hit, it would need to create its FIFA game (since renamed EA Sports FC). Media giants with global ambitions also understand they need to be married to the global game. The case studies go on and on.
The coming together of America’s and international soccer’s formidable soft power will reshape global sporting culture for decades to come. So, enjoy the show at the Kennedy Center on Friday, and next summer’s World Cup. Think of how far this relationship has come and imagine what might come next if the U.S. men actually do well in the tournament.
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