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US soccer

Urban Outfitters

Portland has arrogated to itself the title “Soccer City USA” — an overreach, but it points up that football in the United States has become a game of cities, a confederation of weird Austins and sweet home Chicagos that is the true Red State. “Football, the most global sport, has ironically become the vessel for the most fervent and eccentric localist impulses. In a world of unacknowledged city-states, our clubs allow us to rally to the flags that matter.” (Zach Dundas/The Run of Play)

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

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Read of the Day: The End of the Affair

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)

Give Us Klinsmann…But Not Yet

Jürgen Klinsmann will be a great USMNT coach — but U.S. soccer won’t be ready to take full advantage of him until after the next World Cup cycle. There aren’t yet enough technically adept players (or players in the MLS to Euro-second-tier-league pipeline) to take advantage of Klinsmann’s abilities to mold a “technically cunning squad” — four more years would improve both those situations, and put him in a better position to gut and remold the USSF. With an eye toward forming a title contender by 2022, hire Klinsmann…but not until 2014. (Jason Kuenle/Match Fit USA)

Stop Defending Tony Meola’s Haircut

On the one hand, Americans are still faced with the “Soccer is Gay and Foreign and Makes My Shriveling Mind Hurt” genre of xenophobic sports journalism — which hasn’t evolved in two decades. But the counter-genre — “Will Soccer Now Make It in America?” as exemplified by Hendrik Hertzberg’s recent piece in The New Yorker — has grown equally tiresome and obsolete. The argument is over, and the TV ratings for the World Cup prove it. “It’s not 1990 any more; we don’t have to defend Tony Meola’s haircut.” (Zach Dundas/True/Slant)

‘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)

The Bradley Foundation

The hash tag #FireBobBradley shot up Twitter’s top 10 list 20 minutes before the game with Ghana ended on Saturday — even though his stated Objective Knockout Phase was accomplished. Aquarium Drinker says Bradley’s four-year plan for 2010 was masterly, but there’s no one coaching on American soil right now who can take the team further. SoccerAmerica’s Paul Gardner tells Sunil Gulati to keep Bradley, but realize the team is stuck in the rut of “the properties and the mentality of suburban youth soccer and college soccer” and needs to diversify. And Franklin Foer at The Goal Post simply mourns how the USMNT missed capitalizing on the sport’s “Barack Obama moment.”

USMNT: It Tastes Like Fondue

The knock on U.S. soccer is by now beyond cliché: too white, too upper-middle-class, too burnished by minivan regimentation and helicopter parenting to draw on more than a fraction of the country’s potential talent. Look at the USMNT, though, and you see a group that includes all social classes. But does that mean progress — or is it just an index of soccer’s marginalization in U.S. culture and a “random pattern of access” fed by colleges and children of immigrants? In the end, “we still don’t have enough players like Clint Dempsey. Whatever that means.” (Andrew Guest/Pitch Invasion)

The Curiously Celebrated Bob Bradley

Bob Bradley, U.S. National Coach of the Year? The U.S. Olympic Committee thinks so…but it’s hard to see why: Despite the thrills against Spain and Brazil in South Africa, the USMNT had a pretty mediocre year. And the award just sets Americans up for another World Cup disappointment. (Mark Zeigler/San Diego Union-Tribune; HT du Nord)

Read of the Day: Imagine That

The United States thinks developing top soccer pros takes money, training, equipment, access, more money…OK, but why do thousands of kids who lack those things in other places develop into amazing professionals? Because they have something just as important as tactics — they dream the game. Maybe MLS needs an Imagination Project… (Miriti Murungi/Nutmeg Radio)