Yet, the moment America showed a glimmer of success, the debate wasn’t about the game. It was about who counts as American.;
The bossman asked if I had watched any World Cup soccer. Before I could answer, he proudly announced that he had watched about three seconds of it. I told him that was three seconds more than I had.
We laughed, but it was the truth.
My interest in soccer has always hovered somewhere between mild curiosity and complete indifference.
However, in many places soccer is a strict religious construct.
In Qatar, if their national team does not win, heads might roll.
Literally.
For many Americans, this might actually make the game more interesting. High stakes do wonders for a sport that often feels like 90 minutes of running back and forth with a goal tossed in for good measure.
The American breakthrough arrived with an unexpected 2-0 victory over Australia that did not just secure a win, it ended a 96-year drought giving the United States its first back-to-back World Cup wins in nearly a century.
Suddenly, most of the country perked up.
Maybe we really do have top tier soccer players. Maybe the sport isn’t just for suburban kids and Europeans anymore. And, as one of my fellow sports’ scribes jested, maybe Joe Biden’s open border policy was finally paying dividends.
That political jab opened the floodgates.
Here we are in a world where even three seconds of soccer can drag you into a macro discussion about immigration, nationalism, birthright citizenship and the meaning of America itself.
A recent Wall Street Journal editorial informed how a quarter of the U.S. team was born outside the country. Others were first generation Americans. One player, Folarin Balogun, was born in Brooklyn to a Nigerian mother visiting from London.
Under a proposed change to birthright citizenship, Balogun would not be an American.
This is where the conversation stopped being about soccer.
Some insist that legal immigration is good, illegal immigration is bad and the two should never be merged. Others argue that birthright citizenship is being abused by “birth tourism,” while still others counter that America has always thrived because it welcomed strivers from everywhere.
Ironically, folks who could not name two American soccer players had strong opinions about who should be allowed to play for the U.S. Those who never watched a game were now experts on citizenship law. The World Cup became a proxy battlefield for every cultural anxiety in America.
And all of it started with a simple question at work: “Did you watch any World Cup soccer?”
I didn’t.
What I did watch was the country’s reaction to it and that was far more revealing. Soccer, for all its global popularity, is still a fringe sport in the U.S. despite nearly every kid who is five years old is seemingly enrolled in a soccer league as if it is a birthright.
Yet, the moment America showed a glimmer of success, the debate wasn’t about the game. It was about who counts as American.
Maybe that is the real story.
The U.S. team reflects the country itself as a diverse, complex place that is impossible to fit into a neat ideological box.
Some players were born here, some were not. Some have immigrant parents, while some have American parents living abroad. Some came from privilege, others from struggle. Together, they form a team that looks like the United States--a patchwork of origins, languages and stories stitched together under one flag.
The boss watched for three seconds.
I watched none.
But I did see something worth noticing: a reminder that America’s strength has always come from the people who assimilate whether by birth or by legal immigration.
Best of all you don’t have to be a soccer fan to appreciate that.
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