A New American Soccer Culture Is Emerging
The World Cup doubles as a beauty pageant for each country’s fans, who strut around, sing their anthems, and try their best to look hot, happy, and, above all, passionate. Regional—and, if we’re being honest, racial—categories play into how these contestants are judged: the Brits and the Scots will be drunken, weepy singers; the Ivorians, the Ghanaians, and the Congolese will wear bright colors and dance in the stands; the Koreans will drink, rage, and try to overthrow the government when their team inevitably loses; the Dutch will light flares and do their cute little hoppy dance. All of them, of course, are doing a crude sort of propaganda for their respective countries, or, more generously, acting as a travelling tourism board. Come to England if you want to drink and sing. Come to Korea if you want to drink and get mad. Come to the Netherlands if you want to drink and hop.
Now that America’s run in the tournament has come to an end, thanks to last night’s dispiriting and arguably karmic 4–1 loss to Belgium, it’s worth asking how they did in the World Cup’s secondary contest. First, the bad news: Any hope of an apolitical, or, at least, only mildly political, World Cup was lost when President Donald Trump announced that he had pushed FIFA to review the mandatory one-game suspension of our striker, Folarin Balogun, a birthright citizen whose parents are from Nigeria and raised their son in England. (Trump also said that he had nothing to do with the decision.) The resulting scandal, which feels like a matryoshka doll of comical corruption, has probably ended any hopes that we might win over hearts and minds with our aggressive, positive, if sometimes naïve style of play—but nothing is forever when it comes to world soccer, and especially when it comes to a little bit of self-serving rule-bending. Such shenanigans are more or less expected, and certainly haven’t forever sullied the American soccer fan base, at least here at home. The scandal has, however, reinforced the abiding dynamic of men’s soccer in this country: We are underdogs whom nobody pities. When we win, the world rolls its eyes and says something dismissive and condescending. When we lose, as we did last night, the world laughs in our face.
The good news is that America, as a nation, is quite good at building traditions in defiance of the rest of the world. Last Wednesday, I drove with a few friends and three fourth graders down to what’s known for the moment as the San Francisco Bay Area Stadium, to see the United States play their round-of-thirty-two knockout game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jubilant, urban scenes such as those in Mexico City which have been circulating online for the past two weeks were nowhere to be found, for the simple reason that the game wasn’t being played in the middle of a city but in what amounts to a nice office park. Levi’s Stadium—as it’s known when it’s not being commandeered by FIFA and its blanket ban on brands that aren’t official sponsors—is surrounded by well-paved but sterile streets that were filled with people wearing the same red-and-white-striped U.S. jersey as us, which, as many passersby noted, made us all look like we were in a “Where’s Waldo?” book in which everyone is Waldo. The mood was excited but a bit anxious. Some people tried starting up “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants but were generally met with smiles rather than more chanting. The most aggressive people on the walk were the various religious groups—Scientologists, Christians—handing out literature, including a million-dollar bill that promised the path to heaven.
Outside the Coca-Cola Fan Zone, the crowd started to thicken, and the Waldo army was joined by the blue and yellow of the Bosnian flag. A crowd of tall Bosnian men gathered behind a stage used for the pre-game TV broadcast with Carli Lloyd, Clint Dempsey, and Alexi Lalas (who was roundly booed every time his name was mentioned). The Bosnians sang their songs, chanted, jumped up and down. They were, it must be said, objectively better fans than the Americans, who mostly just chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” This is understandable enough. If you travel to the United States to go to a soccer game to support a country that took its current form three decades ago out of the horrors of war and ethnic cleansing, I assume you’re going to show some fervor for your team. Plus, America is one of the host countries, and that means that a lot of the crowd are just locals like me, trying to create memories with their kids but not too deeply invested in supporting the players on the pitch.
And I don’t think the impressive choreography of the Bosnians necessarily meant that they cared more than the Americans; it meant only that they were more focussed. It felt like the frenzied Americans wanted to do something cool and coördinated, but they just didn’t have the order of worship or the hymnbook. (At one point in the second half, with the U.S. up by a single goal, a group of fans in my section tried to start the wave.) All we had, really, was “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” And so we kept at it, and, honestly, it was good enough for now. Maybe we don’t have the endlessly looping songs of the Japanese, or the thundering chants of the Moroccans, or the fatalist charm of the Mexicans, but I don’t think anyone who went to the game and saw that crowd would say that great things were not possible. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” almost feels like a placeholder; it’s what we say while we try to figure out how to build a culture.
What will that culture look like? Ten years ago, I wrote a piece for the Times Magazine titled “The Dark Side of American Soccer Culture.” I attended a Seattle Sounders game, talked to some M.L.S. fans, and ultimately argued that Americans needed to create their own rituals and stop cosplaying with European ultra-traditions, some of which are xenophobic and racist in a way that felt out of line with what was mostly a nerdy, middle-class, liberal fan base. The response to the article from American soccer fans was immediate and furious—it even prompted Don Garber, the then commissioner of M.L.S, to call my column “irresponsible” and something that never should have seen “the light of day.”
I think enough time has passed for both parties in this dispute to evaluate whether they were right or wrong. I’ll go first: I drew too strong a connection between right-wing ultras in Europe, who are oftentimes bigoted and violent, and what I was watching in Seattle. The performances of those groups might have resembled one another in some superficial way, but the individual politics of each do matter and shouldn’t be lumped together on account of aesthetics. That doesn’t mean I think Garber was entirely right; I also pointed out then that the culture around M.L.S. and the U.S. men’s national team didn’t really look like the soccer-playing population of this country, a fact that is incontrovertible and basically conventional wisdom at this point. But I certainly understand why he was mad and felt the need to say something. I was far too glib, too broad in my categorizations, and too quick to mistake a bit of geeky Europhilia for malice.
But I also think I was right in the main in saying that American soccer-fan culture was too derivative of European traditions. References only work when they’re legible, and most Americans don’t know what the fan marches look like in St. Pauli, or how the tifo unfurls in the Allianz, or the songs they sing at Anfield. What they do know are American traditions, the most compelling of which can be found in college football, a parochial and intergenerational fandom that’s mostly sustained through hatred, petty corruption, and unseemly amounts of money. (In that way, it is the American sport most similar to European soccer.) I also think I was correct in saying that soccer in this country has always been an immigrant affair, and that if you cannot create a fan culture that brings in Colombians from Queens, Haitians from Boston, Koreans from Los Angeles, and Mexicans from Texas, you’ve pushed the sport back into its most stereotypical bubble: something rich kids from the suburbs do when they can’t make it in football or basketball.
But, as I watched the game with my daughter, who held up a flag she had drawn with a marker in the hopes on getting on TV, it became clear that change for the better was coming, which is something I wouldn’t have said ten years ago. The scale of this World Cup, the limitless supply of clips of exuberant fans, and the degree of passion might not shake up the pecking order of American sports. But, if each World Cup pushes the sport two steps forward before it, unavoidably, takes one step back, the 2026 tournament and the spirit of the men’s national team will have teleported American soccer fandom to a new place. It might be hard to see after the humiliation in Seattle, but the sheer number of people who are now excited about the team will flood out anything old, for the simple reason that most of the newcomers won’t even be aware that a U.S.M.N.T. culture already existed. (I imagine that the diehards, for the most part, will welcome this change.) Last week, when people on social media noticed a lacklustre American fan chant and dance that clearly was modelled on a similar Dutch one, a handful of posters went viral with the suggestion that we bring in college marching bands to play “Neck,” the infamous Louisiana State University chant that goes, “Ay, oh, oh, suck that tiger dick, bitch” (which, in my opinion, is exactly the type of American chant we should share with the world). A few days later, before the United States played its game against Türkiye, a brass ensemble was out in the streets playing “Neck.” And some more widely acceptable traditions have already started to take hold. After the final whistle against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the players walked over to thank the fans and led the crowd through a rousing rendition of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” If my daughter remembers anything from the World Cup game she attended when she was nine, I hope it’s Denver’s sonorous chorus ringing through the stadium.
This current team, which features Balogun, a handful of military kids raised in the Netherlands and Germany, and a left back who speaks with a slight Scouse accent, will certainly help to expand the fan base. Nearly everyone wants an American squad and fan base that wins—and most people are comfortable with the fact that you can’t win in soccer without immigrants. What this means is that a successful U.S.M.N.T. will, by default, reflect the vision of the country that the World Cup has revived: one that juxtaposes immigrants from different countries, soaks them in beer and fast-food grease, and asks them to compete with intensity. Perhaps we cannot always, or even usually, live up to that vision; the World Cup often acts as a shiny, irresistible distraction from the corruption and violence of a political regime, and America in 2026 cannot escape those charges, nor do we deserve such grace. But I don’t think we are all just being sportswashed. The national team has restored what now almost feels like an anachronistic and dusty patriotism, built on the promise of a country for anyone who loves it. Who better to carry this underdog spirit than our birthright-citizen striker, or Weston McKennie, a military brat born in Texas who learned to play the game while his father was stationed abroad, in Germany? And how stark a contrast they cut to Donald Trump, his sad and mostly ignored America 250 celebrations, his limitless corruption, and the revanchists and nativists who want to turn every instance of national joy into the same tedious referendum on who gets to be an American and who does not. American soccer has a spirit now. A culture will inevitably follow. ♦