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US soccer fan

Of all the intimacies of life, the intimacy of fanhood is perhaps the falsest, exposed for USMNT fans during this past World Cup by a single scene of authentic tenderness: Bob Bradley embracing Ricardo Clark after taking him out of the game that might define his career. “I allowed this game to be pressed to my face for a month, and this hug is finally something true and personal, the sweetest and realest glimpse into the lives of two people on my team. All those magazine interviews and Twitter feeds, the piles of second- and third-hand information, become suddenly foolish.” (Casey Wiley/This is American Soccer)

(Image credit: g55/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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‘An American Story, Not a Soccer One’

The debate about whether the World Cup turned Americans on to soccer completely misses how U.S. culture transmogrifies everything into something it can easily digest — “Team USA…was appropriated and fed back to us not as soccer, but as Americans kicking ass.” It was a simplification, a mistranslation, the difference between “an adolescent crush…and the rhythms of foreplay…Maybe we didn’t learn a damn thing about soccer. We did learn, though, that under the right circumstances, we could pretend that didn’t matter in the least.” (Bethlehem Shoals/The Atlantic)

USMNT 1-0 Life

USMNT 1-0 Life: Tweetie blackouts, your family a blur, the heel of your hand fixed across your mouth, butterfliessuch is the agonized life of a U.S. men’s national team fan during World Cup season. And that’s just for friendlies… (Dave Connell/Aquarium Drinker)