The reason our men’s team never made it to the top echelon of the sport, I deduced from my early years as a sports fan, is because American men didn’t care about football. What else could explain the disorienting dissonance? America was richer than everyone else, cared deeply about athletic competition, and won the most medals at every Olympics. Surely we would be superior in men’s football too, if only our most physically gifted boys didn’t dream of becoming ball carriers and full-backs.
From what I understood, football was too weak to satisfy our cravings for blunt excess and demanded too much finesse for our fetishization of toughness. European and South American players who exaggerated falls and injuries epitomized the softness of socialist policies that punished hard workers while rewarding shortcuts. A country mythologized on courage and merit has produced people like Ronnie Lott, the NFL player who asked to have his mangled little finger cut off so he could stay in the game; Willis Reed, who hobbled over a torn thigh muscle to inspire his team to win the 1970 NBA title; and Mickey Mantle, who broke circuits with a hangover. For a nation rooted in primal power and arrogant isolationism, incompetence in men’s football was not something to be ashamed of, but a badge affirming our exceptionalism.
I also subscribed to this idea. I discovered football in the first year, when I joined my school team. While I excelled at baseball and basketball, I sucked at soccer. I couldn’t hit the ball directly or with respectable force. In three years of competitive elementary school, I scored a grand total of one goal, an event so monumental that my mother rewarded me with a Lego set after the game. During my last year of football, in third grade, I applied to become a goalie, where I thought my hand-eye coordination could finally be put to good use. We lost 3-1. I never played goalkeeper again, and once the season was over my competitive football days were over.
I preferred to spend my fall playing the sport I loved the most, American football, a game of conquest by violent force, knocking down your opponent to take over their territory until you reached the other side to earn your obviously intended touchdown. While my mother and I moved to California over the years and repeatedly found myself as a newcomer to an unfamiliar school, my athletic skills earned me immediate friendships with the most respected boys in the class. In high school, my exploits on the football field got me in the newspapers and attracted college recruiters. Even though we lost most of our matches, our stands were filled with classmates chanting our names.
Football was far from my mind, though rarely far from my sight. The first-generation Mexican immigrant kids in my high school were playing around a soccer ball at lunch. One of my white housemates hung a Manchester United banner above his bed. In 2009, ESPN signed a broadcast deal for the English Premier League rights and began promoting the games it featured. When I was at New York University in 2010, I crammed into a Midtown Manhattan bar to watch the U.S. men’s soccer team lose to Ghana, ending a promising (by any standards) World Cup. American). As more and more research revealed the causes of footballing brain injuries, fewer and fewer parents were letting their children play, and I wondered if the kind of boys who dreamed of playing running back were now spending their autumns trying. to be like Lionel Messi.
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