The New Jersey way: US soccer’s recovery from the Cold War mindset

by Nick Lichtenberg, writing from New York City

“… the last century has been the era of both American global dominance and soccer’s rise as overwhelmingly the most popular sport in the world. And surprisingly, those things haven’t really overlapped. America is a sports-mad country with an overwhelming influence on global popular culture, and yet the most popular sport on earth is something that we’ve never had all that much to do with. So I think soccer can serve as a really intriguing metaphor for America’s relation to the rest of the world … the game once had a stronger footing here and is more rooted in American history than most people assume…”
The Run of Play’s Brian Phillips, interviewed by Graydon Gordian

In 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Bolton as his ambassador to the United Nations. It was a gesture befitting Bush’s contempt for the institution, given the Iraq War’s ambiguous legal status (it was launched without a U.N. mandate) and the fact that Mr. Mustache was on record as saying it shouldn’t even exist.

Now, the World Cup can’t be negotiated in nearly the bad faith with which Americans have treated the United Nations, given that every country actually has to try and qualify for the tournament (well, except for France and Portugal this time around). But the American commentary towards it is strikingly similar to rhetoric in opposition to the UN, it being a longtime Yankee sportswriter tradition to libel soccer as a “boring” or “useless” game. Soccer-haters even have their own John Bolton figure in goateed talk radio loudmouth Jim Rome, who actually has good taste in music, if not always sports. Just what is it that drives men with facial hair to treat the beautiful game with the kind of disdain reserved for bureaucratic multinational institutions? I’m still not sure, but I think it has something to do with residual Cold War hostility and, somehow, the state of New Jersey.