Soccer Without Borders

By Erik Kirschbaum





THE GLOBAL GAME of soccer has finally begun to catch on in the United States. The remarkably strong showing by the U.S. Men's National Team at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, led by Klinsmann, created a sense of excitement across the country, stirring hopes that the United States might finally be on the verge of a great leap forward in soccer.



An especially encouraging development was the unbridled enthusiasm and the sheer numbers of American supporters in Brazil. The United States had more fans who flew to Brazil for the games than any other country except the hosts. There were 196,838 tickets to World Cup games in 2014 bought in the United States, according to FIFA-more than triple the number sold in the next-highest foreign country, neighboring Argentina, with 61,021, and nearly four times as many as the 58,778 tickets bought in soccer-mad Germany, which went to Brazil as a top favorite and won the monthlong tournament. Many of those U.S.-based fans had ties to and supported other teams in the World Cup, but most were cheering the U.S. team and many traveled to games with the American Outlaws, an enthusiastic fan group that was established by three supporters in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2007 and by 2015 had grown rapidly to more than 30,000 members with 175 official chapters.



The United States managed to break out of the Group of Death, which was the most difficult of the eight groups in the World Cup, with stylish performances against three of the world's best teams: Ghana, Portugal, and Germany. What was arguably the most successful U.S. soccer team ever in the most competitive World Cup ever took second place of four teams in Group G, and advanced along with eventual World Cup winner Germany to the Round of 16. Both Portugal and Ghana were eliminated at the Group Stage.



Coach Jürgen Klinsmann's team played their hearts out as undaunted equals against some of the great powers of the game, earning respect and plaudits from soccer connoisseurs in the United States and around the world. The U.S. team, which many experts and TV pundits had forecast would end up in fourth place in the Group of Death against soccer's great powers and be sent home early, even had chances to win their group after beating Ghana and nearly defeating Portugal before Silvestre Varela headed in a cross, or long pass from the side, from Cristiano Ronaldo just before the final whistle that evened the score. It broke the hearts of American fans seconds before what would have been a major upset. The Americans then had mighty Germany nervously on the ropes in their showdown game that would decide the group winner, giving the team that went on to win the World Cup two weeks later one of its toughest games in the tournament before succumbing 1–0 to a second half goal.



After those strong performances against one of Africa's top teams, Ghana, and two of Europe's best, Portugal and Germany, the Americans were ousted in the Knockout Round in overtime by Belgium-another top-ranked team. The impressive run and surprisingly confident play that enabled the Americans to emerge from such a difficult four-team group alongside Germany to the Round of 16 caught the rest of the world by surprise and lifted the United States to fifteenth place in the FIFA rankings, right behind Italy and ahead of established soccer powers such as England, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and Mexico. It also ignited hopes inside the United States that U.S. soccer could finally be catching up with the rest of the world-and possibly on the threshold of a breakthrough to greater glory. Even President Barack Obama got swept up in the enthusiasm of the 2014 World Cup, saying, "Our team gets better at each World Cup, so watch out in 2018."



There is no reason that the United States can't one day excel at the World Cup, the most important tournament in the world's most important game. It's been a riddle for millions outside the United States why the world's richest and most powerful country, with such a passion for sports, seemingly unlimited resources, knowledge, expertise, and an irrepressible drive to be number one, has nevertheless done so little in soccer on the international stage. It's one of the great sports mysteries of our times. Greater success for the United States in soccer could probably help the country better understand the rest of the world, while at the same time help the rest of the world better understand the United States.



It is a monumental task considering that seven countries-Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, England, and Argentina-have dominated the World Cup for years. They have won the last sixteen times, while the United States hasn't even made it to the Final Four since the inaugural World Cup in 1930, a thirteen-team tournament in Uruguay that most of Europe boycotted. Yet there are explanations-and some possible remedies-for anyone open-minded enough for the kind of honest examination and reforms that Klinsmann is pushing.



Americans want to be first. It's part of our DNA. Yet the country's failure so far to win the world's biggest sporting event-or even come close-is as much a mystery as it is an open wound. It's hard for Americans to fathom why so many much smaller countries with far more limited resources are consistently so much better.

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Soccer is a game without borders. It's an international game on an international stage with an international set of rules and standards. Its developments are cascading forward, advanced through an international network of expertise closely associated with the best leagues in the world in Western Europe and the Champions League, a pan-European tournament for clubs where the world's best soccer is played with tactics and trends that national teams will likely be using in the next World Cup. A big part of the problem for the United States has been that, until recently, its focus was more on the domestic stage, and it tended to follow its own sets of rules and standards without tapping into that international network of the best and the brightest centered in Western Europe.



The United States' isolationist views on soccer reflect, to a certain degree, Americans' belief in their own exceptionalism and inward-looking attitudes in countless other areas. The United States is, of course, one of the few countries that still do not use the metric system. That isolationism is one of the key reasons the United States has lagged agonizingly behind the rest of the world in the global game for so long. And many smaller countries seem to delight in being able to tweak America's nose in soccer, savoring the superpower's prolonged agony in the only sport that matters for so many countries. Where else can Costa Rica, Jamaica, Chile, and Denmark all beat the United States in the same year? But soccer can level the playing field in surprising ways. In that same year--2015--the United States managed to beat the soccer superpowers the Netherlands, Germany, and Mexico. It's seen as poetic justice for many countries--where soccer is far more than just a game-that the United States has been a sleeping giant for so long.



But it doesn't have to stay that way. Soccer is, if nothing else, a game of momentum swings, and there's no reason why the United States can't become a global power-especially with Klinsmann at the helm. The sport is growing by leaps and bounds in the United States, and the U.S. Men's National Team-the focal point of the nation's attention in soccer-could certainly win the World Cup one day, as the U.S. Women's National Team has already done three times. The global situation in the women's game is almost the exact opposite of that of the men's. Women's soccer is more popular and has a longer tradition in the United States than in any other country. Forty percent of the registered youth players in the United States are female, according to FIFA, and girls make up 47 percent of all high school soccer players. At the college level, 53 percent of NCAA soccer players are women, and at the top college level, Division I, the women are even more dominant with 61 percent. Title IX, the 1972 landmark civil rights law that prohibited sex discrimination at colleges and opened the door for equal opportunities for women in sports, played a major role in strengthening women's soccer in the United States while lingering skepticism about the women's game in many other nations has held women's soccer back abroad. In England, women were even barred from playing soccer on fields or facilities that men used from 1921 to 1971, and women's soccer was banned in West Germany from 1955 to 1970.



In the men's game, there are many highly motivated smaller soccer nations that have taken enormous strides forward in recent years. They are tapping into the international network of best practices and soccer knowledge-and are eagerly sending more of their best players to test their mettle in the best domestic leagues in Europe, where frustratingly few American players are competing. They are also benefiting from the expertise of German, Italian, and Dutch coaches who have been spreading their knowledge in countries around the world. From Berti Vogts coaching Azerbaijan to Falko Götz coaching Vietnam, Germans have been out and about around the world helping develop the national teams of countries such as Cameroon, Jamaica, Thailand, Kuwait, Scotland, South Korea, Nigeria, Canada, Switzerland, Greece, Bangladesh, and Australia. There were German coaches leading four of the thirty-two national teams at the 2014 World Cup, more than from any other country: Klinsmann (USA), Joachim Löw (Germany), Ottmar Hitzfeld (Switzerland), and Volker Finke (Cameroon).



A strong showing at the World Cup can turn any player for any country into an instant hero back home-as demonstrated by James Rodríguez, who almost single-handedly helped Colombia reach the quarterfinals at the 2014 World Cup with six goals in five games. With legend status in the offing, it's no surprise that the global competition has been getting more intense-and the gap between the haves and have-nots in soccer has narrowed appreciably. Children and youngsters are playing soccer for six, eight, ten, twelve, or even fourteen hours a day over nearly twelve months a year in some countries. How will the United States fare in the years ahead if Americans aren't able to match that kind of effort?



The national teams of many smaller countries have raised their game enormously in the last decade, catching up to and sometimes even beating the established superpowers such as Germany, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Argentina. Just ask the distraught fans of former European champions the Netherlands (1988) and Greece (2004) how it felt when their teams failed to qualify for the quadrennial European Championship tournament in 2016 in France while onetime minnows such as Iceland, Wales, and Albania all made it to the twenty-four-team finals of the tournament from a pack of fifty-three teams competing to qualify.



The way the game is advancing globally means that-truth be told-the U.S. soccer team will have to keep improving just to maintain its level compared to other nations. The United States has been seen as one of the top regional powers alongside Mexico since the 1990s, ranked on average in nineteenth place since 1993 by FIFA, but often enough somewhere near the bottom of the world's top thirty. The United States has reached the thirty-two-team World Cup for the last seven tournaments, reaching the Round of 16 three times and quarterfinals once. But will the United States really be content to be a top-thirty nation in soccer? Even to become a top-ten team, which is one of Jürgen Klinsmann's primary aims, is a monumental challenge.



In part because the United States plays in what has been one of the weaker of the world's six continental federations, a region called CONCACAF (the Confederation of North, Central American, and Caribbean Association Football), American teams have made it to seven straight World Cup finals-a more consistent record than more established global soccer powers such as England or even Mexico, which failed to qualify in 1994 and 1990, respectively. But since 1930 the United States hasn't made it to the semifinals, a position Germany, with only a quarter as many inhabitants, has reached in eleven of the last fourteen World Cups. Why is that?



The United States has made it through the Group Stage to the final Round of 16 in three of the last four tournaments after qualifying for the World Cup only once, in 1950, during six decades in the wilderness between its appearance in 1934 to its next in 1990. Yet it will take a major leap forward to make it to a top-ten ranking-which last happened briefly in 2005--and to become a regular contender for the quarterfinals, semifinals, or finals.



To put the challenge in perspective, it is worth noting how strong the lock is that Western European nations have on the game at the World Cup. Not only have they won the last three World Cups and five of the last seven, but at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, teams from the core countries of Western Europe that are at the heart of the most vibrant network of soccer ideas and advancements won every match against teams from other regions except for one: Switzerland's loss in a penalty shootout to Ukraine in the Round of 16. Kuper and Szymanski argue in Soccernomics that it is the networking and intense exchange of ideas in Western Europe that make those nations so powerful.



"The region has only about 400 million inhabitants, or 6 percent of the world's population, yet only once in that entire tournament did a western European team lose to a team from another region," they write. "In 2006, even Brazil couldn't match Western Europe. Argentina continued its run of failing to beat a Western European team in open play at a World Cup since the final against West Germany in 1986 ... Big countries outside the region, like Mexico, Japan, the U.S., and Poland, could not match little Western European countries like Portugal, Holland, or Sweden. If you understood the geographical rule of that World Cup, you could sit in the stands for almost every match before the quarterfinals confident of knowing the outcome." The top four teams were from Western Europe: Italy, France, Germany, and Portugal. The four core countries of the European Union-Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands-won a total of twelve World Cups and European Championships between 1968 and 2014. If Spain, which joined the trade bloc in 1986, is included and the dates are expanded from 1964 to 2014, the domination is even more complete: Those five countries have won seven of the last eleven World Cups and ten of the last thirteen European Championships.



At the 2010 World Cup, Western European countries were still dominant but not as invincible and lost six of their twenty-nine games against teams from other regions "in part ... because other regions have begun to copy Western European methods," Kuper and Szymanski write. "Yet, even in 2010, first, second, and third place all went to Western European nations." Spain beat the Netherlands in the 2010 final and Germany beat Uruguay in the game for third place. "Western Europe excels at soccer for the same fundamental reason it had the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was for centuries the world's richest region ... Geography has always helped them exchange ideas, inside their continent and beyond. In short, they are networked." At the 2014 World Cup, two of the top three teams were from Western Europe: Germany (first), and the Netherlands (third).



Europe, and especially Western Europe, is where the world's best soccer is played-the organization, tactics, discipline, and savvy of most European countries where soccer is by far the most important game are superior. The United States has played European teams seventeen times at the World Cup since 1990 and won only once, a 3-2 victory in 2002 with the help of Portugal scoring an own goal, while losing eleven times and playing five ties. In World Cup games against non-European teams, the United States has a better record, winning four of nine games, with four losses and one tie-1–1 against hosts South Korea in 2002.



The United States certainly has a wealth of assets when it comes to sports in general and soccer in particular. It has world-class training facilities; some of the best coaches, fitness experts, and scientific research; and more than enough money and infrastructure to be one of the world's top soccer nations. There is also an enormous and fast-growing pool of Americans playing soccer nowadays compared to the 1970s: Thirteen million Americans play some form of recreational team soccer, according to the Census Bureau, and even though the number of players registered on teams is lower than that, with 4.1 million, according to FIFA, surveys have found that soccer has become the third most popular team sport, behind basketball and baseball/softball.



The United States also has the world's largest economy and is one of the most populous nations, two key factors for long-term success at the World Cup, as convincingly argued by Kuper and Szymanski in Soccernomics: "Given the country's fabulous wealth and enormous population," it should have been performing better than it has, they write. The United States has nevertheless made enormous progress in the last fifty years. "We think the Americans, Chinese and Japanese will keep improving," they predict. "The U.S. has the most young soccer players of any country, and Major League Soccer is expanding fast ... [They] are fast closing the experience gap. They have overtaken the Africans en route to the top."



There is indeed surging interest in the game of soccer in the United States, partly due to the increased television exposure as well as greater accessibility of the global game on the Internet. Major League Soccer (MLS), the domestic league, estimates there are seventy million soccer fans. Enormous crowds cheer from the stands whenever there is a game with top teams playing: 109,318 spectators filled Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor in 2014 for an exhibition match between two of Europe's top clubs, Manchester United and Real Madrid, while more than 93,226 people were at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, for a 2015 game between Spain's FC Barcelona and the Los Angeles Galaxy. There were 81,944 spectators watching a "friendly," or exhibition game, played between two foreign teams, Brazil and Argentina, at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, in 2012. There were also 93,723 people watching the CONCACAF Cup play-off match on October 10, 2015, in Pasadena between the United States and Mexico-even though about two-thirds of the crowd, mostly Mexican Americans, was cheering for Mexico.



Watching some of the world's best soccer teams in Europe on television has also become a popular pastime for growing numbers of Americans. "After years of being greeted as the 'Next Big Thing' that wasn't, the sport (particularly England's Premier League, with its enhanced presence on American television), has become a conversation topic you can no longer ignore," wrote Alex Williams in an article "Soccer Growing in Popularity in New York Creative Circles" in The New York Times in 2014. "There was a time not long ago when Americans-even worldly New Yorkers-could float along in a happy bubble of ignorance, pretending for all practical purposes that the world's favorite sport, soccer, did not exist. That time appears to be fading quickly ... This is particularly evident in New York creative circles, where the game's aesthetics, Europhilic allure and fashionable otherness have made soccer the new baseball-the go-to sport of the thinking class."



Despite all that, the United States hasn't even come close to winning the World Cup-a game that is watched on television by about one billion people, or about ten times as many as the one hundred million who watch the Super Bowl.

 





Copyright © 2016 by Erik Kirschbaum

Foreword copyright © Jürgen Klinsmann









Erik Kirschbaum is a foreign correspondent based in Germany. Kirschbaum has worked for Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers from Europe since 1989. A native of New York City, he grew up in Connecticut and studied history and German at the University of Wisconsin. He has covered World Cups and Olympics, and is the author of Burning Beethoven: The Eradication of German Culture in the United States during World War I, Rocking the Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Berlin Concert That Changed the World, and Swim and Bike and Run: Triathlon-The Sporting Trinity.

 

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