Why We (Still) Suck at Soccer and Always Might

The Real Reason America Can't Catch Europe

Belgium has about 12 million people and the United States has 350 million. This shouldn’t be a fair fight and it wasn’t: The Red Devils slaughtered the United States men’s national soccer team (again), doing the Trump dance to mock our impotent side on their home field. In gaining Balogun for Monday’s match, the USA lost what could have been a failure-obscuring excuse.

So why are we back here, as we always are? I wrote that soccer has arrived in the United States. While that may be so, the United States has not arrived at soccer.

The classic explanations don’t stand up to scrutiny as catch-alls either. You hear the problem is that our best athletes play other sports. That’s part of the issue, sure, but I also reject this as the skeleton key. We’ve got more people playing soccer than Belgium has total population. By some measures, we’ve got three times as many children playing soccer as Belgium has children in total. The U.S. should be able to field competitive teams despite losing athletes to football and basketball.

You hear we lack street ball culture, so our hard knocks kids grow up with hoop dreams rather than ambitions for the pitch. I believe that’s an outdated explanation, for reasons I’ll get into.

And, after looking into the matter, I’ve got some bad news. The reason we now can’t compete has evolved. Even if you magically made the sport 10x more popular here among the youth, we’d have the same obstacle. In this country, it’s the generation gap in soccer avidity that’s killed us and continues to kill us.