Americans and Soccer

An excellent article on the history of America's relationship with the beautiful game, as well as how that relationship is misunderstood abroad.

Money quote:

Yet the game's secondary status has engendered years of arrogance and disdain in Europe, not to mention wilful ignorance about how much it's played and by whom. Of course, that's less about football on the field than about America's place in the world: a supposed lack of sophistication about football reflects a broader lack of sophistication. And by the way, while the US may dominate the world economically, culturally and militarily, well, at least it sucks at football.
"If Americans are bad at soccer and do not care, they should. And since they don't, this makes matters all the worse," says Andrei Markovits, a political science professor at the University of Michigan currently teaching at the University of Vienna, who writes about football and global culture. "But were Americans to get good at soccer, they would be perceived as a threat, as dominating yet another aspect of modern life, so that would be bad, too."
In other words, we can't win. But I for one like it that way. Even if we Americans are secure in our knowledge of football's history on our shores and realistic about our current station in the global football pecking order – our current No 14 FIFA ranking seems about right – and also believe we understand the psychological roots of European scorn, we still can't let it go. Truth is, we don't want to let it go. We want to stick it to the football snobs of the world instead.