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Does the USMNT really matter to American soccer?
68 Plays3 years ago
Richard Farley suddenly has a lot of free time so he and Jeremiah decided to record a podcast about something they were discussing on Twitter. Effectively they argue that the fortunes of the USMNT are largely divorced from the long arc of American soccer at large. It's an interesting discussion that goes in several directions.
We're also really curious what you think of it. Do you want more stuff like this?
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Transcript
Introduction: Meet the Hosts & Podcast Name
00:00:00
Speaker
should have recorded all this, it just had to be edited. Yeah, exactly. So we are trying something new. I'm Jeremiah Shan. Joining me is Richard Farley. And we don't have a name for this.
00:00:17
Speaker
I thought we should call it memory lane, really, because we're really just looking for a reason to talk to each other. Right. We're mainly looking exactly. And I don't know what's going to become of this, but we're going to throw this against the wall and see what sticks.
US Soccer Fan Expectations
00:00:33
Speaker
But I saw Richard having a conversation on Twitter with Mike Goodman.
00:00:39
Speaker
and some other folks about sort of the place that US soccer finds itself in, in the discourse, in the frustration over like fan frustration. But why don't you explain it better? It was your conversation and I just found it interesting and I thought it would be an interesting topic for a podcast. But why don't you explain what your conversation was, Richard?
00:01:01
Speaker
Yeah, I'm having a little bit of trouble contextualizing it because I realized that I entered the conversation with my own expectations. I really don't know what Mike was talking about before I entered it, but I'll tell you, yeah, I'll tell you what I felt I was responding to. So.
00:01:18
Speaker
Jeremiah, you're like me. We kind of became aware of the true online discourse around US men's soccer. Around the same time, Twitter became a thing, right? I don't think you or I were ever big, big soccer users. Were we? Were you? Did you have a big soccer account? No, I didn't. Okay. So, Mike was basically asking- 2010-ish is what we're- 9, 10, somewhere in there, 8, 9, 10.
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, so maybe I'll just go ahead and read Mike's tweet. And he's clearly subtweeting the entirety of US Men's Soccer fandom on Twitter when he said, I do think there's a very specific phylum, boy phylum, that would be a, yeah, it's a good word. Unfortunately, it has six letters, five letters, and it would be right in that wordle sweet spot.
00:02:02
Speaker
I do think there's this very specific phylum of USMT fan whose soccer fandom is first and foremost national and who brings with them beliefs about what dominance looks like from other sports and doesn't bother to learn what that's not possible in international soccer. So I think anybody who's tuning into this
00:02:23
Speaker
is probably Lick It. So hi, Lick It. You're probably the one person I think would just listen to this. But I think anybody else who might come to this would generally agree with what Mike is saying in that the demands or the expectations of the hardcore US men's national team fan base seem to outpace the realities and the diversity of the international soccer world. For me, this touched on something that was a little bit more cultural.
00:02:47
Speaker
And I'll go ahead and read my tweets so people can understand what's out there in the world. I said, whoa, I said,
00:02:55
Speaker
Let me actually find the right tweet. Cause I remember now that I tweeted a couple of different things. Well, I almost read my one tweet, my red bullet Ferrari tweet. I said, I also think we shouldn't dance around the fact that such nationalavistic views are, as they are in other realms tied to nativism and views on race that see it as catastrophic when the U S loses a round of 16 to
00:03:20
Speaker
African country or have trouble against Central American opposition. So I basically poured some gasoline on the whole thing and took a torch to it. Because to me, I guess like my tweet says, I don't want to dance around this. US men's soccer fandom has always been this uncomfortable safe space for people to play out the last of their sports nationalism.
00:03:44
Speaker
they can't really do it in basketball anymore and they can but they just don't they can't do it in football because football is not an international sport baseball to a certain extent to the extent people have nationalistic feelings they're expressing them doesn't really matter soccer however is this space where
Nationalism in Soccer Fandom
00:04:01
Speaker
Nationalism because of the success of the World Cup has always been implicitly allowed to a greater extent than it's allowed in other places. And because of the demographics of soccer, it has actually drawn some nativist feelings over the years. Now, I think that last part is a little bit more debatable, but I do think when you see the inherent expectation that we should never lose to a team like Ghana in the round of 16, or we should never have trouble winning games in places like Costa Rica and Honduras and
00:04:27
Speaker
When we do, you lead to arguments like, we have this population based on this GDP, so we should never lose these games. I think it plays into a lot of tropes that are, to me, very, very uncomfortable about where you see the United States' stature, culture, in relation to the rest of the world.
00:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I will push back a little bit on maybe the direct tie to race in there, but I do think that there's a pretty clear hierarchy that US national team fans see themselves in, whereas
00:05:06
Speaker
It's OK to lose the traditional powers, but anyone who was perceived to have been sort of beneath us in the global power, like soccer power structure prior to, I don't know, 1998, maybe, cannot be allowed to pass us or else we've failed as a as a soccering nation, as a footballing nation.
US Soccer's Competitive Landscape
00:05:27
Speaker
And like you see that. So it's like it's it's it's acceptable to lose to Mexico.
00:05:31
Speaker
It's like maybe even celebrated to tie Mexico in Mexico because we always expect Mexico to be better than us. But it's totally unacceptable to lose to Canada under any circumstances and it's certainly not acceptable to finish below Canada in World Cup qualifying because we all know Canada is not as good as we are. And you can say like,
00:05:54
Speaker
whether it be, you know, I suppose there are some African nations that American fans could live losing to because those African nations were above us at some point in the in the soccer hierarchy, but certainly Ghana was a team that was not acceptable to lose to. And like I remember it like we were thinking about 2010 when I think a lot of this conversation was happening and and you brought up the idea that
00:06:19
Speaker
It wasn't like we were going to go to the semifinals because not only were we going to be Ghana, but then we were going to be Uruguay after that. And if we look back at that Uruguay team, this is an Uruguay team that was absolutely stacked with talent. Like this is a team that had Edison Cavani. It had Luis Suarez, Diego Godin. They had just some special players that no American
00:06:43
Speaker
before certainly or since has even come close to touching. Let me twist this back at you. And this actually, so Uruguay actually has a storage soccer history. It's right with one world cups, right? But it is also a small Latin American country. Do you think that US men's soccer fans would have a problem losing to the Netherlands? No, I think it's a good, that's a fair, that's a fair point.
00:07:05
Speaker
There's just countries that we kind of by identity don't want to think of ourselves as being less than on any level. And if we were to actually list those countries and kind of like say, you know, you would see that basically we are a lot more tolerant of losing to European countries or Western countries. And you mentioned Canada. I don't think men's national teams fans are comfortable losing to Canada, but they certainly seem a lot more comfortable losing to Canada than the times we've gone down to Kingston and struggled against Jamaica.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a lot more like when in the 2010 qualifying cycle, Wilson Palacios from Honduras is playing at Wigan and minor Figaro was at Wigan and there were other like Carlo costly was at Inter Milan. And that team qualified for the World Cup.
00:07:51
Speaker
They certainly were a lot less comfortable going down to Gusa Garba or San Pedro Sula and losing there. Then they've been going up to Hamilton and playing a terrible game against Canada. Like there's this tolerance, there's this tolerance of Canada because we have let ourselves hear the Canadian story. And maybe we let ourselves hear the Canadian story because a lot of those players came up through MLS, whether we're talking about Davies or Laron or even something like Jonathan David, we don't associate him with MLS, but we associate him with Western Europe.
00:08:22
Speaker
Okay, maybe this isn't racial, but it maps on the race pretty closely. Yeah, that's fair. I think
Comparing Soccer Infrastructure
00:08:29
Speaker
that's fair. I also think that, and you're sort of alluding to this too, that there's this perception that, like I think two things can be true. One is that the state of American soccer is improving pretty rapidly over the last 25, 30 years.
00:08:46
Speaker
And that the US national team in a way has benefited from that, but it's not happening in a vacuum and I think that sometimes we forget that like all these other countries are also improving what through one where I mean there are everyone's not improving but like
00:09:02
Speaker
Well, no, in some ways, I think you can argue that almost everyone's infrastructure is better now than it was 30 years ago, like across the board. Like, sure, I'm sure there are some nations that have fallen behind in ways, but it's like, it's relative. And like Honduras right now is in a place where they are struggling really badly at the senior national team level, and yet they constantly are beating us at the youth national team level.
00:09:30
Speaker
but they, you know, they've struggled in some ways, but also like their infrastructure, I would argue, I'm sure their infrastructure is better now than it was before. And it's like, all these improvements aren't, I guess my point is that these improvements aren't happening in a vacuum. And so it's like, you have, it's not as simple as like, well, we got to get better. It's like, you got to get better in specific ways and like nothing's guaranteed. There's this weird, um,
00:09:58
Speaker
there's this weird like switch that seems to go off amongst soccer fans who can watch
00:10:05
Speaker
162 games of Major League Baseball and think that a team that wins 89 games out of, uh, which is only eight games over 500 is meaningfully better than a team that wins 84 games or, um, 78 games. And then they go to a soccer game and they won't recognize the variance there and think that one loss is way more meaningful than it actually is in terms of
Impact of Single Losses in Sports
00:10:25
Speaker
telling the story. Like a loss can be very significant in terms of the opportunities you get. We found this out in 2017 with the U S but.
00:10:32
Speaker
one loss does not tell the tale of your program. One loss does not change, one loss does actually change anything about your program. It's just you play the games and sometimes you lose them. And I think back now to South America, like it's been a long time since Brazil performed to the legend of Brazilian soccer. And that's partly because Argentina is a thing, but it's also because over the last 20 years, Chile was, is going through, went through a moment where they had players like, uh,
00:10:57
Speaker
Alexis Sanchez and Arturo Vidal and they won multiple Copa Americas and then Colombia has had a talent base that has come through that has been really special and none of the success of Chile or Colombia says anything about Brazilian soccer other than the opportunities for Brazil to win and do well in qualifying. Change when you have increased competition so like you're kind of hinting at
00:11:20
Speaker
When the US wins its group wins its group in South Africa and advances to the round of 16 and goes up against Ghana and loses. Well, maybe that says more about Ghana than it does the United States, or maybe it's just the inherent variants of a single result or a cycle of a team success.
00:11:37
Speaker
Or maybe it's just luck. But like the idea that the US, you know, Italy now is not qualified for two straight World Cups, the idea that the US would not qualify for one World Cup, and it meaningfully changes the identity of US soccer is a very difficult, very difficult claim to prove in my mind.
00:11:59
Speaker
Yeah, and I'd say that it's obviously still possible for the US not to qualify for this next World Cup. I suspect the US will qualify. But even if they don't, I've heard this sort of like, man, it would sure be a disaster if the US didn't qualify. In very specific ways, for very specific people, it would be like Greg Berhalter
00:12:23
Speaker
100% would lose his job. There might be some big upheaval at US soccer. There would probably be, you know, a lot of ad campaigns would have to get scrapped. And I'm sure like on the journalism side, it would there would be some people that suffered short term losses, and maybe even decided to get out of the business. Like these are all true. But if you look at the arc of American soccer, like this is a blip.
00:12:47
Speaker
like this doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter if the United States qualifies for this World Cup or not. Just like it didn't like you look at where the state of American soccer and not just the US men's national team is right now compared to where it was in 27 when after the US lost to Cuba. And it's like the I would argue the arc has steepened if not like it's continued on the exact same
00:13:10
Speaker
I would find, maybe we can talk about this, but I'm trying to think of any part of US soccer fandom, not even fandom, but the business itself. That's gotten smaller. That's worse off now than it was in 2017. Right. I think you can maybe argue that the discourse is worse off.
00:13:32
Speaker
Yeah, but at the same time, it's or at best it's static, right? It doesn't realize the irony or not even necessarily irony. It doesn't realize that the hot takes and insight that a lot of people are coming up with in 2022 mirror perfectly onto the same sentiment that existed in 2008.
00:13:53
Speaker
Like the insight you have about this moment that you think has so much urgency to it, that there's this thing about what's going on that US soccer doesn't realize, that the world doesn't realize, it's like, well, maybe you're right, but it's not, that's not a 2022 thing. And to the extent that it matters, it's clear based on the last 14 or 15 years that the perils that you're citing are not
00:14:17
Speaker
derailing the sport, like, you know, not to bring up this trope, when somebody introduces something like that on a soccer podcast, you know where they're going. But you would have thought in 2009 and 2010, if that, if US soccer didn't accept promotion and relegation within the next six years, things are gonna go off the rails. And if anything, the progress of US soccer has proven, well, that was a dumb conclusion to come to, like, hey, maybe promotion and relegation would have worked, but the idea that the whole culture would go off the rails and be irrelevant,
00:14:47
Speaker
clearly isn't the case because the culture is way stronger now than it was back then. So the idea that we still have these other ideas from 2008 that people don't realize are dated ideas, dated perspectives. The idea is that like, well, the US has the biggest economy in the world, plus 350 million people, therefore it should have an amazing soccer team. No, that's not true at all. It's not true at all. And I think that in some ways, like,
00:15:13
Speaker
This is not an original idea. Alexi Lawless has been running around saying this forever. But I think you can even argue that in some ways, all those things work against the United States in some ways because it doesn't allow us to focus on, like if we just had a California national name or a West Coast, like if the Cascadia broke off and became its own nation, you could maybe argue that it would have a superior national team because maybe soccer would be the sport of choice for that region.
00:15:41
Speaker
and you could you could focus all the developmental energy into like one place and you would you could go out to Moses Lake and you could find guys you could go out to Yakima and spend all this time energy scouting in Yakima or in El Segundo or in like these places that get overlooked now but if your whole national apparatus was focused on like just covering everything you can do whereas now
00:16:04
Speaker
Like you can live in a relatively large population center, like an Omaha, and you're nowhere near getting scouted by high-level scouts. Let me take this in a different direction that I don't think you and I have actually talked about. So for me, as a really big basketball fan, the fact that the US cruised to two gold medals at the last Olympics,
00:16:28
Speaker
doesn't affect my life at all as a basketball fan. It doesn't affect my enjoyment of the game. It doesn't affect the likelihood that I'll watch. It doesn't affect the likelihood that I'll randomly bring that up on an otherwise soccer related podcast. The same way that if the US had went to the semi-finals in Russia at the last World Cup, I would still be here today talking to you about soccer, not this topic. How much do we really, really think
00:16:56
Speaker
these things matter. Because people are opting into soccer fandom without any expectations of US men's success now. So to the extent that success is tied to fandom at all, where's the proof of that? What's kind of a natural experiment we can think of short of the US actually winning a World Cup that actually ties US men's national team results to the popularity of soccer in this country?
Popularity vs. Success of US Soccer
00:17:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a perfectly valid question. And I think you're right that you're gonna struggle to find evidence of it. I mean, I think you might be able to argue that the power of US soccer is tied to its success and that a powerful US soccer is able to sort of like lift up, like kind of lift up the boat of American soccer in a broad way. But like,
00:17:53
Speaker
They used to be able to say that directly through an organization like some, where like the US national teams, like television ratings had a direct impact on how much some could sell the rights of their TV package for, but now that those are decoupled, I don't even know if that's true. And along those same lines, like the power of American soccer
00:18:17
Speaker
isn't even just MLS. It's like all these players that are off in Europe that have oftentimes nothing to do with with MLS and it's like they're this these it's just like
00:18:30
Speaker
building a modern soccer infrastructure, which is like, yeah, you have a domestic league. Yeah, you have a national team. And yes, there's a lot of overlap, but like they aren't the same thing. And there's a whole third thing, which is like the general level of interest in the sport. And I think you can argue now that like the sport is more relevant in this country than it's ever been. In part, because you have tons of people watching the Premier League, you have tons of people watching the MKEs, and then you have access to all these other leagues as well as MLS.
00:18:59
Speaker
And there's a lot more eyeballs that are watching soccer and so I think it raises the expectations of what that means and it maybe gets like filtered into like expectations into the into US men's national team. But like all that in a way is like untethered from the six like it's not the exact it's not directly related to the success of US soccer.
00:19:20
Speaker
Absolutely, I mean, I kind of feel like we're erecting this huge straw man, but at the same time, we do remember 2017 when people said it was a disaster the US didn't qualify. We've seen similar sentiments this year about the potential disaster. So I'll just build off of what you just erected. On one half of this scale, these are the old Greek philosophical scales we have here. We have a weight that represents US men's national team.
00:19:46
Speaker
And on the other half of the scale, we have smaller weights that represent every single MLS team.
00:19:52
Speaker
eight weights that represent the truly relevant USL teams that have fan bases that are coming out no matter what. We have every NWSL team. We have all of the European teams that have severe band bases here. We have the 10 to 12 division one soccer programs that can draw five to 10,000 games. And then the weight that is actually bigger than the men's weight, you have the US women's national team on that side of the scale.
00:20:20
Speaker
Within this picture, how much is US soccer success really tied? US soccer is a culture, not a federation. How much is US soccer's health really tied to anything the men do?
00:20:32
Speaker
Right. And then, and that's, and I would say that's, and that's not even, that's ignoring the single biggest, like, or the two biggest draws of American soccer fandom, Mexican national team. And that was, that was the big driver out of the bag that was going to do at the end. And I decided to make it the women's national team. It's like, no, it's the it's L tree coming up here and selling out any stadium at any time when the men's national team not as successful. And then.
00:20:59
Speaker
Mexican League television ratings that continue to show that US soccer as a culture is not an extension of nationalism, it's an extension of choice, rational choices that people are making. And, you know, we've seen this in the debate.
00:21:15
Speaker
this week that sparked up because somebody in Atlanta that's associated with AO took huge offense to the fact that I think it's out loud and United was having a watch party for footy mob which is a okay which is like I think this is what I was able to figure out is like footy mob which is a
00:21:31
Speaker
supporters group of Atlanta United. It's like they have a bunch of different supporters group. It's like they're more like hip hop oriented. You know so much about Atlanta United. I know. I know. But then I guess they were hosting a watch party, which I think it's relevant in this conversation because it was they were hosting like they're they represent a portion of the fan base that is oftentimes not represented at the AO
American Outlaws and Fandom
00:21:54
Speaker
level. And they wanted to have a watch party for
00:21:59
Speaker
Like, people that would be normally in there and their supporters group, who can like, why is a concerning themselves with this like, great, everyone should be having watch parties, like, shouldn't we, shouldn't you all be happy that they're supporting the US national team at all. Yeah, I mean,
00:22:14
Speaker
AO is such a complicated subject because I think people rightfully note that a lot of the people who are running that organization, not only at the Omaha headquarters, but at the grassroots levels are doing it just for pure reasons that are right. But they actually, they end up attracting a lot of people that go towards soccer for that nativist feeling, right? There's no denying the demographics that have drawn themselves to AO through
00:22:38
Speaker
whatever means AO has done to attract them or in recent years, not even recent years, like a bulk of years recently, to actually get them to leave that sentiment out the door.
00:22:51
Speaker
I would just maybe somebody can post a poll about this but like are you pro or are you pro or con AO? And as a US national team fan, are you pro or con AO? Do you derive any of your identity as a soccer fan for the national teams based on AO affiliation?
00:23:11
Speaker
And I would venture to say that it's probably a very reasonably low number, because if you got 10,000 people to answer that poll, and it turned out 24% of the people said, yes, AO is a part of my life. That's a pretty high number. That's great. But you would still have to recognize 76% of that has a fandom that's independent of anything that is overtly, or at least not, yeah, anything that is nationalism first. Because if you're going to be nationalist first, if you're going to be nativist first, you're probably going to gravitate towards AO.
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that, you know, and I think there's a place for US soccer and like I'm, as a fan, I'm rooting for US soccer, US men's national team to do well. But I just think that we have to get, we have to like get rid of this idea that somehow the US national team is representative of the direction of American soccer. And, you know, like as an aside,
Influence of Mexican Soccer
00:24:07
Speaker
Man, after watching the crowd at Estadio Azteca last night, I can't help but wonder how far we are from Mexico wanting to host some of their games against the U.S. in the United States. Like, I actually don't think this is the craziest idea. Like, if the U.S. and Mexico could just come to an agreement, like, we're not gonna play, we're not gonna
00:24:31
Speaker
travel you out to Columbus, we won't travel you out to Estadio Azteca, we'll only play games in the Southwest, where you're gonna be playing in Texas or in Phoenix or in LA, like just have all the US Mexico games there, I guarantee,
00:24:47
Speaker
those would have bigger crowds. And I think that, and yes, there would be on some level, they probably be more pro-Mexican than maybe it was last night where you have understandably disaffected Mexicans who were starting to jeer their team and call for the firing of their coach.
00:25:07
Speaker
but I don't know, it's gonna be interesting. And I do think it's relevant to this conversation because I think it does get at what is American soccer. And American soccer isn't just, it's not just the US national team. It's like, these are fans of, these are Americans who are fans of soccer. And it's like, why shouldn't we be serving them? Why shouldn't we?
00:25:31
Speaker
And why is it not a better product? Is it not a more exciting atmosphere? I mean, from a cynical point of view, is there not more money to be made doing it this way? That's why I actually take, I don't want to say take offense, but I strongly disagree with this idea that every qualifying cycle, the game against Mexico needs to be in Columbus or some other cold weather, low altitude city that is just basically, let's find the antithesis of Mexico City because
Venue Choices for US-Mexico Games
00:25:58
Speaker
while you always want to give your players the best chance to win, one, that's a really kind of patronizing thing to kind of say like, hey, we don't think you can be on even footing and have, like, I have like Stu Holden's voice in my head saying like, no, you just, you always want to give your team the best chance, but to the extent that you can still give your team a good chance to win and serve the entire fan base that US soccer as a Federation, as a corporation, as an entity is supposed to serve,
00:26:27
Speaker
How do you serve it by going to these places that are not as diverse as some of the places you could be hosting these games? Don't have the population bases. Don't have facilities that are as large. Like, why can't we have US versus Mexico at the Rose Bowl?
00:26:43
Speaker
or SoFi Stadium, which is my, like SoFi Stadium might be- Oh my God. I flew over that for the first time. That looks like something from 2055. Right. Exactly. Like, like, I don't, like after the Super Bowl, I have to admit I was not super aware of what SoFi Stadium was before the Super Bowl. Like,
00:26:59
Speaker
You're going to have a hard time convincing me that there's not a nicer stadium in the world. It looks like something Tony Stark built. Like Tony, I see like the Avengers flying into it. It looks, it's actually sad actually because, well, not sad. This is just me being like, you know, a little bit of an activist, but I, having lived in LA, I know what Eaglewood is like. It's not a terrible place.
00:27:23
Speaker
I miss when the forum was relevant. I have like huge memories of driving down with my parents to games at the forum, driving up from San Diego for LA Kings games at the forum. And to see this multi-billion dollar facility in the middle of Inglewood, I just look at all the other neighborhoods around and just go, oh my God, what are we doing with our money? Like as a society. In the meantime, we should be having really high level soccer games there.
00:27:47
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I, I guess, I don't know. I guess I do completely get like the, you know, the bobblehead Stu holding the bobblehead Alexi Lawless in my head kind of going, This is crazy you always give yourself the best chance to win they need to play this game in these places.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, but I guess I just have more faith in our players and that we could actually have this in another place. Like, we could have it in Seattle. We could have, I mean, I know people are scared of turf, but we could have it in these other places. We could have it in, you know, who knows, maybe in three or four years, Charlotte ends up being a place that ends up being a super viable place for these type of things. I just don't see how...
00:28:23
Speaker
We aren't making the decision about what best serves American soccer with these things. There's no bigger game that is played on this continent than, yeah, I think that's right. I think that's correct. Yeah, I think that's fair. There's no bigger game played on this continent than when the US and Mexico play.
00:28:41
Speaker
one of those games is apparently reserved for a 25,000 seat stadium in the Midwest. And the other one is reserved for a an aging facility in Mexico City. And we have all these world-class facilities, like frankly between like and not just in the United States. I mean, why can't we why aren't they playing these games in Monterey or in
00:29:07
Speaker
What's the Guadalajara Stadium these days called? Oh, I don't know. Herbalife Stadium? Okay, I don't know. But I mean, like, there's all these stadiums, like, why are we, why are we, like, I just feel like there's, there's an opportunity here that it's like,
00:29:25
Speaker
I mean, it would be a better event. I think it would be a more interesting spectacle to move it. And it's like, and to not have it at one place all the time. And like we have, we have all these resources, like, and I do think that's maybe one thing that will be very interesting. And again, like I will go back to this idea that in like, if the US misses out on the 2022 World Cup, that it's going to be some kind of disaster as if,
00:29:51
Speaker
the build-up to the 2026 World Cup is non-existent. Like, we can't get away from... Like, we can't get... Like, that's a thing that's happening. It's going to be here. And it doesn't... And frankly, we could win the World Cup, and I don't think it will change the... Like, all those games are still going to sell out. The sponsors are still going to be there, everything. Exactly. Like, it's...
00:30:14
Speaker
The stakes could not possibly be lower, I actually think, like, in terms of the trajectory of American soccer.
World Cup Qualification & Growth Debate
00:30:21
Speaker
Now, again, I want the US to qualify. I don't doubt that people will lose their jobs and it will be very sad for some specific people, maybe myself, I don't know.
00:30:33
Speaker
But the idea that the arc of American soccer is going to be affected by whether the US qualifies or not is laughable. And again, I think that this next cycle where the US and Mexico presumably won't have to qualify,
00:30:49
Speaker
We're going to probably get to see a lot of these games. I got to imagine they're going to figure out a way to have US and Mexico playing at least a couple of times between now and 2026. And they're probably going to play in the Southwest. And they'll probably play at some of these world-class facilities. And it will probably be a spectacle that is frankly quite unlike anything else. I thought the Nation League final was absolutely fascinating.
00:31:13
Speaker
Really cool. The same thing with the Gold Cup final. Those were great events. Super fun. They were so fun. Well, I think you laid out just a really compelling case there as to why people shouldn't think it's that big. Why people should realize it's not going to change the course of US soccer or world soccer if the US doesn't make this World Cup. They are probably or highly likely to make this World Cup. So if we reframe the question, what
00:31:38
Speaker
What incentives do people have to accept that view? What kind of perspective do you have if you are coming to that conclusion? To me, you're likely a person that has tied part of your sporting identity or your personal identity to you as success. And in that sense,
00:31:56
Speaker
it's not necessarily a sporting endeavor at that point. It's a nationalist endeavor. And usually, and like, this is where I start to get unfair a little bit. So push back on me. If I get too unfair, usually a lot of the people that do do that, we see from interacting with them, aren't putting the same pride into the women's national team. Because you know why? Because if they were putting the same pride into it, they were to realize missing one world cup, when you've won four, isn't that big a deal.
00:32:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's absolutely like it like we've chosen we've chosen to wrap ourselves in the US men's national team in a way that we're not wrapping ourselves in the women's national team. And there's different and there's no like there's no way around that.
00:32:36
Speaker
In addition, like we've talked about with the Uruguay versus Uruguay example, with the reaction in 2010 to Ghana, with how people perceive losing to Honduras before, there's also this perception that when the US loses to a particular nation or a particular type of nation, it reflects especially poorly on them. You lose to the Netherlands, a small country in Northern, a small Western European country in Northern Europe. Hey, no big deal. This country has a certain level of success in the world. They have a lore to them.
00:33:16
Speaker
there's certain people you're allowed to lose to. Why? Because my, in this scenario, this person that we've narrowed down, not only is my personal sporting identity tied to US success, it's tied to US men's success and it's tied to US men's success over certain kinds of countries that I see is on a certain cultural pecking order in the world. And that's where this continues to echo of the initial
00:33:29
Speaker
Uruguay actually has more international success than the Netherlands has. They have more of a history.
00:33:41
Speaker
conversations we were seeing in 2008, 2009, 2010, where a small portion of nationalist, nativist people were at the forefront of the conversation, those tones are still there. And I think at some point, people really, really have to ask themselves, why is the US doing good at sports important to you at all? Because it doesn't change your life.
00:34:04
Speaker
When the U.S. wins golden basketball, I don't care. When the U.S. wins golden anything, like I think it's interesting just the same way Finland winning golden hockey is interesting. I care much more about watching Ricardo Pepe play, period. I care much more about watching Asia Wilson play basketball. But as far as the U.S. having to be a titan of any sport,
Soccer's Rising Popularity in the US
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just not there. Never been there. Yeah, I mean, I think that's totally fair. I do think that this isn't going to be a very interesting next four years that, frankly, sits independent of whether or not the US does anything in this World Cup, makes this World Cup. I think it's like there's going to be
00:34:52
Speaker
interest in this sport that is almost completely decoupled from the U.S. national team's success. And I think that that's, you know, like I was just looking at the other day, like the ratings for the CONCACAF Champions League, and there was something like 350,000 people watched, which isn't a huge number, but watched the U.S. Leon match, or the Sounders Leon match, but it was like- U.S., Seattle, St. Big.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, that was more than watched any MLS match that week. And it's like almost like two or three times more. Right. Right. Exactly. It's a much bigger number than anyone than what. And it's like and I think that that's sort of where we're going, which is like we have to find the audiences where they want to be like we can't just presume that like
00:35:40
Speaker
US men's national team success is important to the popularity of the sport in the country. And it's like there's some relationship, but it's not. I think we've just completely overvalued it. And I think we also have to get over the idea that a 1-0 loss is meaningfully different than a 1-0 win.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, and I think also we come out of not only every World Cup anymore because it used to be everybody would just focus on World Cups like European Championship games are now on ABC stuff like this. There are always stories to come out of this like out of the last World Cup everybody hated Paul Pogba at the beginning of the tournament and by the time Francis is marching through he's seen as one of the top five or six best players in the world and now people hate him again like
00:36:25
Speaker
there are always going to be things that we have people interested in, right? Like in South Africa, which was like this weird tournament where like you think back on it, it's like no major star came out of it. It's like people became obsessed with Wesley Schneider for two weeks. I mean, like we always find something in things that we care about to drive our interests. So if the US is there,
00:36:48
Speaker
there are going to be a lot of people who are experts on whether somebody, whether Kelen Acosta or Tyler Adams should be starting in midfield. A lot of people are going to have strong opinions on that, but people are going to have an opinion about something regardless because they're going to want to be invested. And whether that's invested in the US or everybody becomes Canada fans for the tournament and everybody starts to think that Alfonso Davies is the best player concaf has ever produced.
00:37:13
Speaker
These will all be things that will get people an option to love something that is just like what fuels all of this is the fact that soccer is just kind of cool to watch at this level. Yeah, highest level. It's just amazing to watch and it doesn't get any less or more amazing for the US being there. Right. And I think it's more accessible now and it's like it's going to be on. I don't know.
00:37:34
Speaker
I don't know what the point of any of this was, but it was an interesting conversation, I think. And if nothing else, I think we've established that we've vastly overstated as a soccer culture, the importance of the US national team
Conclusion & Future Discussions
00:37:47
Speaker
to. Oh, you think we've established that you think this undeniably established it. Yes, absolutely. Well, we could get Kataji Brown Jackson to rule on this and in our favor, undoubtedly, and that'll settle it. This is going towards the new Supreme Court in the next session. And then everybody else will have to just anybody who disagrees will have to delete their accounts.
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah, sorry. That's the way it goes. That's the way it goes. Richard, this is a fun experiment.
00:38:09
Speaker
I'd like to think we'll do it again and maybe we will, but if nothing else, I enjoyed this conversation. I hope people enjoyed listening to it. I think we've shown that there's something here and whether it's like a regular thing or we just anytime agree that something I've tweeted is worth talking about more, I am more than willing to come out here and show my defensive liberalism to the world.
00:38:36
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, with that, we'll wrap this up. I don't know. I don't have any pithy's way of signing off, but if you made it this far, I appreciate you giving us your time. Love you, Lickit.