The World Cup Could Not Be Americanized
The Atlantic · LC · trust 36/100
Spain’s 1–0 win over Argentina demonstrated all of the ways that this sport is still foreign in the United States.
Nick Potts / PA Images / Getty July 20, 2026, 10:33 AM ET Share Save Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 7:40 A World Cup on North American soil ended with the most thoroughly imported, overseas-style final match possible. The foreign tourists who tried to smuggle ranch dressing through TSA; the Norwegians who scarfed down Texas brisket while doing the Viking row at Dallas barbecue joints; the garish, out-of-place halftime show in a New Jersey football stadium—all of that Americanness was overcome in the end by the classic continental display of footwork and defense in Spain’s 1–0 victory over Argentina. This event just could not be Americanized, hard as Donald Trump, the Fox network, and the Muppets tried. Men’s soccer did not become American at this World Cup—and America still does not really play men’s soccer.
Real soccer looked like this: one tap, two taps, and then flights of red Spanish jerseys surging toward the goal. La Roja played such elegant, staccato, soft-shoed ball that they seemed to have 20 men on the field instead of 11. With their quick-step precision, they completed a dazzling 789 passes. Sorry, but Americans just don’t kick it like that—not yet, anyway. Fully 89 percent of Spain’s touches, whether nosing the ball along or lashing it, went right where they intended.
But the game, almost incomprehensibly, also looked like this: Despite Spain’s brilliance, it was a scoreless tie right up until the 105th minute of extra time, when Ferran Torres laced a goal with a left-footer to the high back net. All of that nullity was thanks to the record-breaking heroics of Argentina’s goalie Damian Emiliano “Dibu” Martínez, who had 11 saves, the most recorded in a final since the World Cup began keeping stats. He launched himself sideways, again and again, to get his gloves on Spain’s ballistic leg whips. Spain completely dominated—they took 20 shots overall compared with just two for Argentina—and yet they could have lost. That’s “the football” for you. It’s a game of low scores, which can mean rough justice. A team can be clearly superior and not get a bit of what it deserves. As Argentina’s captain, Lionel Messi, reflected a couple of years ago in a TV interview , “In football you can be 10 times better than your opponent and still lose.” He added, “These things in football are difficult to explain no matter how much you analyze and study it.”
This game was likely the final World Cup appearance for Messi, the greatest player of his generation if not all time, whom Spain limited to just one shot, which was blocked. Argentina had trouble even getting the ball in Spain’s half of the field, unable to make connections against a quicker-toed, fast-closing defense that gave up just a single goal in its eight World Cup matches. Yet Messi still managed to create a sense of late drama with his hooking passes across the face of Spain’s net, conjuring sudden opportunities out of nothing.
American players just don’t seem to have that kind of threat in their shoes. Think about the difference between American soccer prodigies and a Messi, who took up the game at the age of 3 or 4 in his sprawling home city of Rosario. The son of a house cleaner and a supervisor in a metal factory, he played for a local nonprofit club that sometimes didn’t have enough practice balls to go around. His footwork is partly a function of improvised games he played by himself as a boy; as he related in an early TV interview , he would juggle oranges and tennis balls off his insteps. He could kick an orange 60 times in a row without it hitting the ground; a tennis ball, 120 times.
One of Messi’s earliest coaches, Carlo Marconi, once recalled that he baited Messi with cookies for every goal he scored. Messi had a particular passion for alfajores , caramel-flavored treats, and would score four or five goals a game to get them. He scored so often that Marconi decided to change the game: He would give Messi a double reward if he could score on a header. Marconi recalled: “So what did he do? He would start here, dribble past everyone, get to the goal, kick the ball up with his foot, and score with his head. Then he’d say to me, ‘Two.’” But Marconi also remembered that Messi would divide the spoils among his teammates, handing out alfajores to other boys. Marconi said he ended up just giving Messi cookies for free: “Here, take it. But I’m giving it to you not because you’re a good player, but because you’re a good person.”
That story almost certainly wouldn’t happen today in America, for the simple reason that the youth-soccer culture here is mainly built on a profit-driven “pay to play” system. Parents fork over heavy fees to enroll their child in local clubs that charge for training, field rentals, coaching, and travel. As a result, soccer remains a mostly suburban, middle- and upper-class sport. (Not that soccer is the only game that requires American parents to dig in their pockets: According to one study , the cost of all youth sports rose by 46 percent from 2019 to 2025.)
The cure for this problem is not more spending. The U.S. Soccer Federation spent more than $6 million in yearly salary and incentives on an illustrious European head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, yet his overhyped team was beaten, badly, the minute it faced a top-10-ranked team. Belgium’s 4–1victory over the U.S. in the round of 16 came despite intercession by the American president to have the suspension of the U.S.’s best player, Folarin Balogun, overturned after he was given a red card. “Overturn this,” the Belgium team posted on its social-media account after the game. Balogun, by the way, is really the product of British—not American—soccer. He has U.S. birthright citizenship because he was born in Brooklyn to a Nigerian mother who was merely visiting. He was reared and trained in London.
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