Category Archives: world cup

Pyrotechnics

Accidentally—thanks to my wife setting the agenda—I found the ideal way to mark America’s 250th birthday weekend. Two Broadway revivals, “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman,” that dealt with the status of the American Dream. Plus abundant World Cup action on television that included the American nightmare of Donald Trump’s buzzkill interference in soccer protocol leading into the Yanks’ much-anticipated match against Belgium.

As a spectator sport, the theatrical performances in New York City, one a musical and the other a drama, were as exhausting as witnessing England’s survival—down a man, gasping in the heat and altitude of Mexico City, desperately holding off the home team—and Norway’s late rally against Brazil behind frightening striker Erling Haaland, and Argentina conjuring a 3-2 victory after being behind Egypt by two goals with 11 minutes to play.

Talk about fireworks.

The thing about the World Cup that clearly escapes Trump is the observation that American poet/writer Rowan Ricardo Phillips expressed in a New York Times opinion discussion, that political nationalism “too often struggles” to accept that “soccer nationalism asks you to love your side; it doesn’t require you to deny the legitimacy of the other.”

Trump’s meddling with the sport’s governing body FIFA, in overturning the red-card suspension of U.S. scoring threat Folarin Balogun, essentially took the air out of the American-Belgium tilt. And conjured the themes of both “Ragtime” and “Death of a Salesman.”

The first recalled how, at the turn of the 20th Century, the cards were stacked against Blacks and immigrants, which felt like a meditation on the Trump administration’s current priorities, the restricted Trump vision of who belongs in America. In “Wheels of a Dream,” John Clay III (as “Ragtime’s” featured Black pianist Colehouse Walker Jr., seeking dignity and justice against prominent racist attitudes), sings of his baby’s future, “When he is old enough I will show him America.”

Of course the audience could see the dead end ahead, just as for the play’s penniless Jewish artist Tateh, a proxy for the many faceless immigrants at the time. And for those now, again, in the news.

Same with the portrait in “Salesman” of Willy Loman (Nathan Lane), clearly faced with no future, relieved of his lifetime vocation, strapped for money, too proud to admit it, constantly fooling himself about his very worth. The acting—and in “Ragtime,” the dancing and singing, choreography and so on—is so energetic and emotional as to be draining, excruciating. Possibly because of a sense, 250 years on—decades since Arthur Miller wrote “Death of a Salesman” and E.L. Doctorow penned “Ragtime”—that the nation is stuck in its failure to assure that all men are treated equally and provided a realistic pursuit of happiness. Or, worse, is going backwards.

So many outside the privileged elite straining to score that elusive goal.

More from Phillips in the New York Times: “I don’t think it’s a mistake to look at the World Cup politically….What it can do, however, is show us something politics often obscures: conflict conducted under shared rules, rivalry that requires the legitimacy of the opponent, grief and joy that people enter into freely. The World Cup isn’t a mirror of politics so much as a reminder of what politics has forgotten how to stage—great acts of empathetic togetherness.”

One review of “Ragtime,” when it most recently was revived during the last presidential election, called it “apt timing for a show that rummages through an American moment to interrogate the American soul.” “Death of a Salesman,” too, examines not just where we were during its original iteration in 1949, but where the country is now.

So the Yanks lost to Belgium, with no thanks to Trump for providing the Belgians with added motivation by disregarding the rules. That particular sporting challenge, the fairly riveting World Cup action and a pair of gripping Broadway history lessons aside, it’s pretty clear we have been down this patchy road before, reminders that 250 years on, perhaps America can consider itself in stoppage time. Still, theoretically, with a shot at the universal Dream.

Sing along

What’s not to like about an international sports festival where an Argentine native who lives in Spain, working as coach of the United States national soccer team, gleefully joins his players and the celebrating spectators in post-match sing-alongs of a half-century old tune that celebrates rural America?

That coach, Mauricio Roberto Pochettino Trossero, wasn’t brought into this world until 1972, a year after “Take Me Home Country Roads” hit the U.S. charts. He hails from the South American town of Murphy, named for an 1800s Irish immigrant who became a wealthy Argentine landowner. And Murphy is a long way from Roswell, N.M., where Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.—later known as John Denver—was born and, at the height of his country/folk career, recorded “Country Roads.”

The ditty name-checks West Virginia, but in fact alludes to the comfort of a simpler, peaceful existence; it’s not really about geography as much as an emotional refuge found somewhere in a happy past. Denver’s co-authors, Bill Danoff and his wife Taffy Nivert, were inspired by affections for the rustic, very American byways in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Maryland.

What’s not to enjoy about a real all-over-the-map event? Though technically a victory anthem in this soccer setting, “Country Roads” evokes feelings for one’s beloved home, and that fits right into the World Cup’s melting pot of international visitors and the diaspora of hyphenated Americans giddily demonstrating their affection for cultural ties. And no passport required to participate in the fun.

Beyond just an elite soccer tournament, the World Cup is flags, anthems, chants, languages, geography and glimpses of citizens and life beyond these shores. Scotland’s kilted, bagpiping Tartan Army of fans. Norway’s Viking-mimicking followers pulling imaginary oars. The La Mancha Amarilla—Yellow Stain—of the Colombia fanbase gathering for matches attired in yellow. The Dutch supporters’ dress code of orange. Always orange. There is a constant global awareness, an ethnic and religious pluralism, that Americans really can use right now—maybe more than ever—at a time of rampant institutionalized xenophobia.

What could be a problem with the fact that, of the tournament’s original 48 national teams, 28 are coached by managers from other countries? According to The Athletic, of the World Cup’s 1,248 players, just under a quarter are representing a team other than their country of birth. There was a bad joke, during the 1990 World Cup in Italy, when Ireland was scouring beyond its boundaries for better soccer talent, that anyone with an Irish grandparent or long-lost ancestor—even anyone who owned an Irish setter—was welcome to play for the Ould Sod. In fact, it’s fairly typical for players to have the choice of representing their birth nation or that of their parents.

A prime example is the Americans’ early goal-scoring leader, Folarin Balogun, who was eligible to play for Nigeria (his mother’s home), England (when he was raised) or the United States, where he was born during his mother’s visit to New York. This sort of thing tends to take the jingoism out of national consciousness.

So there is the Denver recording, requested by U.S. Soccer officials when FIFA—soccer’s international governing body, which operates the World Cup—queried teams for their preferred songs to be played on stadium sound systems after victories. Reportedly, Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” and Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline” were considered along with “Country Roads,” with “Sweet Caroline” eliminated because England preferred that one.

Whatever. “Country Roads” is just the ticket. It references, rather than a narrow, us-against-them patriotism, an identity to home and/or forebears. So members of Ecuadoran communities, Cape Verde communities, Portuguese communities and so on gather to celebrate teams that represent, at some point in personal histories, their people.

Whether your side wins or loses, what makes the World Cup so appealing is the mood of the John Denver song.

Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong….

Universal truths

GOAL. The World Cup format of grouped round-robin play before single elimination matches gives everybody a chance to get rolling and enjoy the opportunity to be part of massive global event. And builds tension toward the knockout phase.

YELLOW CARD. Soccer’s insistence on labeling a score on a deflected shot an “own goal,” somehow crediting to the defender who last touched the ball instead of that defender’s opponent, the fellow who actually initiated the shot and whose mates benefit on the scoreboard. And “own goal” is not necessarily a botched play and therefore thoroughly fails to describe how the score was created. Compare that statistical failure to the recent Stanley Cup overtime score by Las Vegas’ Shea Theodore, when his shot bounced off the boards, off Carolina winger Jordan Martinook’s stick and off Carolina goalie Brandon Bussi’s skate and into the net. Theodore, rightfully, was credited with the goal. Not the last-man-to-touch-it: Bussi. There is such a thing as a pin-ball wizard, who deserves the kudos for a successful attack.

GOAL. Old goalkeepers from tiny World Cup debut nations, giving us terrific athletic drama as well as a glimpse of little noticed lands and cultures. Curacao’s Eloy Room, 37, produced a World Cup-record 15 saves in a scoreless tie against Ecuador. (Curacao is a Caribbean Island within the kingdom of Netherlands, with only 156,000 residents who often are annoyed that foreigners only are aware of neighboring Aruba.) Then there is Cape Verde’s 40-year-old Josimar José Évora Dias, who goes by Vozinha—Portuguese for “Little Granny”—who shut out former Cup champion Spain and followed that with a 2-2 tie against two-time Cup champion Uruguay. Little Granny is so-called because he was raised by his grandparents. (Cape Verde—Cabo Verde in Portuguese—is a volcanic archipelago of 10 islands off Africa’s West Coast, first settled by Portuguese sailors, strategically positioned to have given it a significant role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 16th and 17th centuries.)

GOAL. Argentine superstar Lionel Messi’s ability to essentially play possum—walking, walking, walking around the pitch while his teammates defend, organize offensive build-ups—only to materialize at just the right instant, in just the right spot, with the ball, to repeatedly demonstrate an uncanny ability to conjure a score. Seemingly out of thin air.

RED CARD. The Trump administration’s repeated actions throwing sand into the gears of a global party: Withholding visas from various international fans; refusing to admit to the U.S. a soccer official from Somalia as well as several Iran team officials; ordering the Iranian team, whose games were in Los Angeles and Seattle, to relocate its original training/hotel base in Arizona to Mexico.

YELLOW CARD. Miami police reflected the Trump’s inhospitable agenda. When the Tartan Army of Scottish fans, who had charmed Boston—singing, dancing, bagpiping and partying in kilts when their team played two matches in Foxborough—arrived in Florida for their third game, local cops scuttled the Scots’ giddy ritual of placing orange traffic cones on the heads of public statues. In Massachusetts, the Scots had been embraces for their behavior and enthusiasm (and spending lots of money in pubs), as well as the coning thing.

GOAL. Reports of U.S. communities welcoming international teams and their fans, mixing with players at their training sites, hotels and restaurants. It’s the DEI ideal, uplifting antidotes to spreading xenophobia and a measure of hope that U.S. citizens can make America friendly again to outsiders. As with Scotland’s Tartan Army of fans, Norway’s followers who delighted locals with their public “Viking row.”

GOAL. Group L’s opening match between England and Croatia—won by England, 4-2—was about as theatrical as the sport can be and set the tournament tone. Goalie saves, penalty kicks, indefatigable runs up and down the pitch, another look at England’s brilliant striker Harry Kane, who can do with his feet—passing, shooting, defending—what most athletes can’t produce using both hands. Well, some athletes can do what Kane does: Messi, France’s Kylian Mbappe, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, Norway’s Erling Haaland, Spain’s 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, whose goal against Saudi Arabia made him only the second player that young to score the World Cup’s opening goal. (Pele was 17 when he did so in 1958.)

GOAL. Team kits. (What Americans call uniforms). The best are creative versions of national identification, such as this year’s U.S. flaggish shirt with a waying red stripe and Norway’s equally unmistakable red flag shirt, a white- bordered navy Nordic cross. Ironically, the Yanks’ first match was against Paraguay, which has a remarkably similar “home” kit with vertical red stripes though, to avoid total confusion, Paraguay was attired in its “away” shirts, a swirling mix of “new Navy” and “tropical blue” color. Argentina was nattily attired in its classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatian in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germany with its traditional black, red and yellow stripe on white; Brazil in yellow shirts, as always.

RED CARD. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, banned Haiti’s kits hours before the team’s opening match because the shirt featured a small flag-raising illustration from the 1803 Battle of Vertieres, when self-liberated slaves of Haiti defeated Napolean Bonaparte’s forces to secure independence as the world’s first Black republic. FIFA called that “forbidden political imagery,” though FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been cited for “repeated breaches” of the organization’s duty of political neutrality, all in relation to the FIFA president’s public championing of President Trump. That included the bogus, first-of-its-kind FIFA “peace prize” Infantino presented Trump last winter as he has enthusiastically embraced the man who started a war in Iran, seized Venezuela’s president and vowed to militarily intervene in Greenland and Cuba.

RED CARD. U.S.-centric pre-tournament claims that “nobody cares” about the World Cup, widely argued by many American closed-door advocates, have proved to be just as ill-informed as similar rants leading up to the last time the event was in the United States in 1994. The ’94 tournament set a still-standing Cup attendance record of 3.6 million—68,991 per game—with the current Cup on pace to shatter that mark, in spite of FIFA’s roundly criticized dynamic pricing (rip-off), the Trump administration travel restrictions and building anti-American sentiment overseas. Facts on the ground: A Reuters analysis cited stadiums being 99.6 percent full. This is a hyphenated nation; every team has American citizen with roots in its country. National flags are being displayed by fans from their home nations or, in many cases, the land of their ancestors. The World Cup reminds of the positive influence of immigrants.

Welcome to the U.S. World Cup?

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Abandon all hope, ye who enter here for the 2026 World Cup soccer tournament. Whichever of the 47 visiting national teams you come to support during the month-long competition, to be hosted mostly by the United States (along with Canada and Mexico), there is the specter of Trump’s Inferno.

The “welcome” that Vice President JD Vance has offered foreign visitors to the 78 matches scheduled for 11 U.S. cities really is an ominous warning: As soon as the event is done, Vance said, “we want them to go home.” Overstaying visas, he said, would result in dealing with Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and the suggestion of a deportation round-up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Don’t overstay your visa,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy added during a task-force meeting regarding preparations for next year’s June 11-july 19 production. “Don’t stay too long.”

So already the Trump administration has thrown sand in the gears of what figured to be a financial gold mine and global party. According to Politico, Human Rights Watch is urging Gianni Infantino, president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, to “be prepared to reconsider” staging games in the United States at all, based on “grave concerns” over U.S. border policies. In soccer terminology, creating such concerns amounts to an “own goal” by the White House.

Since the World Cup last was contested in the United States, in 1994, the tournament has doubled in size—from 24 national teams to 48, from 52 matches to 104—and therefore doubled in economic potential. In ’94, the event generated a $1.45 billion profit—mining more than $84 million in ticket sales, more than $90 million from television rights, more than $60 million in merchandizing.

The irony then was that, leading up to the tournament, there had been a general sense of “Who needs World Cup soccer in the United States?” Soccer still was widely considered a furrin sport on these shores, not yet challenging baseball, basketball, football or hockey for fervid spectator interest. There was not yet a major professional soccer league here. At the time, the great Sports Illustrated sportswriter Frank Deford’s sly perception—that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-Tall”—was on the mark.

Yet that 1994 tournament set an attendance record that still stands after seven subsequent Cups—68,626 per match, 3.57 million total. It proved, beyond America’s taste for spectacles and America’s aptitude for hucksterism and merchandizing, that the United States indeed is a hyphenated nation. The great majority of Americans are descended from somewhere else, after all—Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Argentine-Americans and so on—and so many were able to feel a connection with, and the allure of, teams from the ancestors’ Old Country.

There is no specific data on the percentage of foreign fans who added to the ’94 tournament’s rollicking success, but it was clear that a huge number came along with their visiting teams, enlivening the American competition venues.

Contrast that with current build-a-wall politics, with the rolling up of the U.S. welcome mat, with the Trump administration’s demonization of virtually all immigrants and non-citizens. (An exception appears to be white people from South Africa, whom the White House has welcomed as refugees it considers persecuted in their Black-majority homeland. The paradox is that white South African fans would be following a national team, which is so far dominating its World Cup qualifying group, that is composed of mostly Black players—a team informally known as “Bafana Bafana,” which is a Zulu term that translates to “the boys, the boys.”)

All this Cup uncertainty is unfolding amid declines of 10 to 17 percent in international visits to America because of foreigners’ negative perceptions of U.S. policies, reports of detentions and deportations, higher tariffs related to travel (among other things), and many nations advising their citizens to skip treks to the United States.

The New York Times just reported that the U.S. is on track to lose $12.5 billion in international travel spending in 2025, from $181 billion to around $169 billion since last year. Land trips into the U.S. by Canadians are down more than 20 percent. Western Europeans’ holidaying from across the pond has declined for the first time in four years.

The inhospitable vision of Trump, the isolationist bent and irrational xenophobia, recall novelist Henry Miller’s observation from 80 years ago: “It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world. It’s the American way of looking at things.”

These days, it’s the rude go-back-to-where-you-came-from decrees.

Soccer’s meteor

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You have to be fairly old, or Italian, or to have joined the soccer cognoscenti long before that sport made serious inroads around here, to realize the brief but somehow lasting impact of one Salvatore Schillaci, who died last week. Maybe you had to be there, at the 1990 World Cup in Italy.

He was this poor kid from Sicily, subjected to longstanding regional prejudices in his own country, who nevertheless came to prove the aphorism that “fame in Italy lies in the back of the opponent’s net.” He had entered that World Cup a bench-warmer, a last-minute edition to the home team roster, yet emerged a national hero, scoring a tournament-leading six goals—five of them game-winners—in leading Italy’s Azzurri to a third-place finish.

A comedian in Florence named Roberto Benigni had snidely declared, in the midst of Schillaci’s flash-in-the-pan heroics, that “a Cameroon-Italy final in the World Cup would mean Schillaci could play for either team.” The not-quite-one-of-us slur. But Schillaci—“Toto” to friends and ultimately to an entire nation—is being remembered as the very face of that international event, the unquestioned star. “Toto was tutto,” James Horncastle of The Athletic wrote. “An everyman who, through sheer determination, seemed capable of everything. He showed that even the fleeting can paradoxically endure.”

With Schillaci’s death at 59—a relatively fleeting life, like his soccer masterpiece—that month-long tournament is being fondly recalled by Italians as the summer of the Notti Magiche—the Magic Nights—mostly because of his lightning-strike scores that set off gleeful, frenzied celebrations by fans and Toto alike.

He was a workingman’s hero who had spent eight years on lower-division pro teams in Sicily, was virtually unknown before—and essentially disappeared from the national team after—that World Cup.

He was 25 at the time, and acknowledged “living through a moment of sheer magic. I remember very very well when Italy won the World Cup in 1982 [when he was 17]. I was one of the fans running up and down the street screaming and yelling and waving a flag.” Only to become the spark for the same 1990 response, streets filled with fans, honking horns, brandishing Italian flags and chanting “Forza Italia!”

That tournament’s primary essence was to have set the record for the lowest average scoring per game in Cup history (2.21 goals), with a championship final—West Germany over Argentina, 1-0, on a penalty kick—that the New York Times’ Rory Smith called “perhaps the ugliest in living memory.” There was the famous Cup-associated debut concert of the Three Tenors supergroup in Rome and the goofy Lego-like tournament mascot, “Ciao.” Mostly, there was Toto, punching holes in mountains, bringing out the Roman candle in the tifosi—Italy’s soccer fanatics.

So, the Schillaci Papers:

Italy, a strong pre-tournament title favorite, had its artistic, flowing play on full display in its opening game against Austria but still was stuck in a scoreless tie when coach Azeglio Vicini brought Toto off the bench with just 16 minutes to play. Four minutes later, Schillaci leaped in the goalmouth to meet a high crossing pass from Gianluca Vialli, snapping his twisting body to the right to head in the winner.

Eyes wide, arms raised, Schillaci mirrored the shocked, awed reaction throughout Rome’s Olympic Stadium. Italian fans, after all, suddenly had perfection to go with the beauty they expect from their team, though soccer doesn’t necessarily work that way.

Crew cut and slightly stocky as opposed to most teammates’ dashing, long-haired look—and not in the starting lineup until Italy’s third game—Schillaci again scored the second-half winner against Czechoslovakia. And conjured the decisive goals against Ireland and Uruguay, and the opening goal in the semifinal before Argentina’s eventual shootout victory.

He was all over television. Staring from the front page of every newspaper. In his hometown of Palermo, Schillaci’s father was hoisted on neighbors’ shoulders and paraded around the square. When the 123 entrants of that year’s Miss Italia competition were polled on which national team player they’d most like to go on a date with, 87 picked Schillaci. “He enriches his performances with masterpieces of goals,” Vicini said of Schillaci.

You had to be there.

Football. And football.

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Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”

But about the laundry…

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It was inevitable. Pundits and spectators who rarely pay attention to soccer—but apparently were lured into taking notice of the significant World Cup match between the potential insurrectionist Americans taking on imperial England—rushed to label the resulting 0-0 tie as “boring.” At least when long-ago sports columnist Jim Murray wanted to make that sort of personal observation about the sport, back when most Yanks still dismissed soccer as a foreign enterprise, he did so with some snarky humor: “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”

Fine. I will not work myself into a high dudgeon in defense of what I found to be a tense and dramatic duel in the globe’s most-followed athletic event. The argument over soccer’s relative appeal remains a truly dull one. You like soccer or you don’t. Like poetry or gardening.

What obviously was boring were the American uniforms. “Kits,” in the soccer vernacular. A humdrum monochromatic blue? Blue shirts, blue shorts, blue socks? (With black splotches upon really close examination.)

There are teams running around loose at the World Cup nattily and appropriately attired: Argentines in their classic Albiceleste, the white-and-sky-blue stripes that mimic Argentina’s flag; Croatians in the red-and-white checkerboard from that nation’s coat of arms; Germans with a wide vertical black stripe on white; Brazilians in their traditional yellow shirts; Mexicans in inventive alternate jerseys of white covered with red doodles representing the country’s pre-Hispanic memory and current cultural touchstones.

In ranking the top uniforms in this World Cup, a cbssports.com post previewed “which teams will look the most stylish in Qatar and why the USMNT [U.S. Men’s National Team] won’t be among them.” (The English outfits aren’t much better—white with pale-blue touches, hardly summoning England’s white flag with red St. George’s cross—though England’s alternate uniforms, all red, save the day.)

The Americans’ present sartorial tedium recalls 1990, when the United States qualified for its first World Cup appearance in 40 years and showed up in unremarkable white duds with some blue trim. It was fellow journalist John Powers of the Boston Globe, exposed to that drab kit, who argued that the Yanks should have come “looking like Apollo Creed, all stars and stripes.” (Creed, kiddies, was the fictional boxer, sort of a pugilist Uncle Sam, played by Carl Weathers in the series of 1970s and ‘80s “Rocky” movies.)

Then, voila! For the U.S.-based World Cup in 1994, the athletic outfitter adidas tailored a pair of bespoke outfits for the home team that indeed broadcast stars and stripes in national colors. One uniform featured a faded blue shirt of imitation denim—very American—with huge stretched-out white stars and red trim and red shorts; the other consisted of a white shirt with wavy red stripes and blue shorts—very flaggish. (Photo above)

Of course, the whole uniform project—then as now—always is based on marketing, and most of the U.S. players were startled, and not particularly thrilled, upon being introduced to the ’94 outfits, which they found a bit gaudy. “I opened the box and said, ‘There must be some mistake,’” John Harkes said at the time. “But,” he added with a shrug, “it kind of grows on you, actually.” Alexi Lalas—now a World Cup commentator with the standard middle-aged businessman’s appearance but then a lanky goateed, flowing-locks redheaded defender—was said by a couple of teammates to “look like Raggedy Ann” in the red-striped shirt.

Now, with the ’22 World Cup in progress, and really not much to say about the Americans’ attire—impossible to describe it as chic or snappy or dapper or modish—it was interesting to come across an exhaustive report on The Athletic website resurrecting the then-shocking departure from the norm with those 1994 outfits: How most of the players initially were appalled by the kits, which were unlike anything soccer had ever seen, yet over time have embraced them, partly based on fond memories of having made a surprise run to the Cup’s knockout round that year.

Honestly, fellow World Cup observers—whatever you think of soccer—is there anything about the current U.S. kits that fits Nike’s claim that they “inspire unity, symbolize diversity and celebrate [a] commitment to expanding the game for the next generation on and off the pitch…”? Is there anything interesting about them at all?

Sorry. Boring.

Love for the underdog

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Americans are a fortunate lot, born to moon landings and miracles on ice on other unprecedented successes. We assume a degree of superiority in comparison to other peoples, an over-the-top arrogance based on a history of industrial and technological advances. We invented the airplane, chemotherapy, chocolate chip cookies. Baseball.

But we ain’t perfect, and the start of another World Cup tournament is a reminder to have some humility. As Will Leitch noted in a New York magazine essay, “In no other context outside international soccer are Brazil, Argentina, Belgium and Denmark global powers and the U.S. a plucky upstart.”

So, no, there is no expectation that the Yanks will bring home the Cup from the month-long event being staged out of season and out of the sport’s normal zone of influence—in the tiny oil-rich, culturally restrictive Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. Of the Cup’s 32 participating countries, the United States is ranked roughly in the middle, with—according to FiveThirtyEight website predictions—a 1 percent chance of going all the way. FiveThirtyEight gives the U.S. only a 53 percent hope of surviving the three-game opening round.

The Leitch article accurately headlines the World Cup “the only real American underdog story,” even as Leitch posits that this situation “makes the team considerably more fun to cheer for.” The lovable underdog. And, while there is plenty of evidence that the 2022 Yank team has a number of handicaps—the second-youngest roster in the tournament, a disappointing run-up to the tournament in terms of victories, perfect health and firepower—it ought not to be forgotten how far American soccer (and American soccer fandom) has come in the last 40 years.

1983. Caracas, Venezuela. Pan American Games. There was a first-round U.S. soccer match against Guatemala, a country with roughly 1/20th the population of the United States, in which the Yanks had their rather large heads handed to them. 3-0, I think it was.

The Latino fans in attendance were kind, not averse to showing appreciation for the Americans’ efforts but fully aware of the chasm of competence and how foreign the sport was to the 1980s American scene. One could imagine a thought bubble over the fans’ heads, with the words: Gringos, this is a football. It is round. Are we going too fast?

It was another seven years before a collection of U.S. college lads, lining up against hardened pros from around the globe, barely sneaked into their first World Cup in 40 years only to remind that “American soccer player” was widely regarded as an oxymoron. Like “jumbo shrimp.”

Then again, how much adventure is there in rooting for a team always assured of victory? How real is that? When the Yanks trampolined into the second round of the 2002 World Cup with shocking wins over Portugal, then fifth in the world, and longtime rival Mexico, U.S. soccer spokesman Bryan Chenault summed up the giddy reaction—and sudden interest from the opinion-shaping media—saying, “Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. And they’re all welcome. There’s plenty of room.”

Something clearly was afoot. That year, as the Americans came within a referee’s failure to penalize a German’s illegal touch of surviving a 1-0 quarterfinal loss, talk-radio and sports-column pundits began to unreasonably fret over the possibility that soccer somehow could shoulder aside the place of football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of U.S. sports. As if that were the point.

The truth is that a large portion of the American citizenry has come to acquire a taste for soccer, and their national team—not a world-beater but clearly competitive—has added to the appeal of the World Cup’s top-notch sporting theatre.

Old friend George Vecsey, among my sports journalism heroes, who has written a book about the eight World Cups he covered for the New York Times, has just posted thoughts on the Yanks’ present football situation, including this (to me, surprising) observation: “The accumulation of injuries and benchings and transfers lead to my conclusion that the best days of American soccer just might be—I hate to say this—in the past.”

Whoa. But we still have chocolate chip cookies.

The sports time machine

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(Florence)

Maybe you have noticed, during the three-plus months of compulsory sports inertia due to the coronavirus pandemic, a forced nostalgia among the chroniclers of competitive fun and games.

With almost nothing happening on the world’s playing fields, we are hostage to video of bygone championships. Arguments over whether Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Duke Snider ruled center field in the 1950s. Personal yarns of having Been There when this or that “classic” unfolded.

Television, talk radio, newspapers and magazines have rolled out their version of the WABAC Machine—that delightful “Peabody’s Improbable History” segment in the old Rocky-and-Bullwinkle cartoons. (Talk about nostalgia.)

Okay. If you can’t beat ‘em….

Thirty years ago, Newsday dispatched me to Italy to cover soccer’s month-long World Cup tournament. At the time, the vast majority of Americans were thoroughly uninformed about, and mostly uninterested in, that no-hands sport. The 1990 U.S. team, furthermore, was the Yanks’ first to qualify for the Cup in 40 years, a collection of wet-behind-the-ears lads metaphorically doing the doggy paddle in a pool full of Michael Phelpses. No threat to capture a nation’s attention.

But the idea then was to acquaint our local readers with a significant global event that would be coming to the United States for the first time four years hence. (It’s an irony now not only that soccer has gotten a solid foothold on these shores but especially that, with the lack of other programming, soccer—from the professional European leagues—currently is the most available live sport on American TV.)

That 1990 adventure played out over 35 days, requiring travel via trains, cars, busses and, on one occasion to reach the island of Sardinia, a plane—24 trips among 11 cities—eight of them competition sites for the 24 national teams, the other three team training camps.

Florence on Sunday, Pisa on Monday, Florence on Tuesday, Montecantini of Wednesday, Florence on Thursday, Milan on Friday, Rome on Saturday….

As much as the soccer, geography and culture were stars of the show, all the stunning Renaissance architecture and layers of history to experience. (“Ancient footprints are everywhere,” as a Dylan lyric describing Rome goes.) To a furriner, of course, there were a few challenges among the plentiful visual and culinary delights.

No two Italian cities did anything the same way. Telephones. Train accommodations. Signage. All different.

Restrooms were marked “signore” and “signori,” but some forms of signore apparently could mean either “ladies” or “sirs.” And there were no little pictures on the signs. Traffic patterns best could be described as chaotic. “Anarchy,” an Italian explained to me with delight.

The American players certainly were naïve travelers, out of their depth off the field as much as on. With an average age of 23, they were the youngest—and least worldly—team in the tournament. Just settling into their training base on the coastal town of Tirrenia, on a U.S. military site known as Camp Darby, the Yanks complained of skimpy breakfasts consisting of toast and jelly. They wanted eggs and pancakes and so on, the luxury of air conditioning and a refrigerator in each room. The Italian daily La Republica slyly described them as “ben nutriti”—well fed.

Florence on Sunday, Genoa on Monday, Tirrenia on Tuesday, Naples on Wednesday, Rome on Thursday…

Patriotic fans from across Europe constantly were in evidence. Scots arriving at games in team shirts and kilts. Austrians touring the Vatican with their red-and-white national flag draped over shoulders. Italians flying their green-white-and-red colors next to the laundry from apartment balconies, from car windows, from the passenger seats of motorbikes.

On game days in venue cities, wine and beer were banned in restaurants, a decidedly un-Italian circumstance. But more than a few establishments navigated that problem by serving wine in green mineral-water bottles, leading to the observation that they were “turning wine into water.”

A couple of soccer clichés were at work during the tournament: 1) The widespread lack of scoring. (Jim Murray, the snarky Los Angeles Times columnist, once wrote of the sport that had too many 0-0 ties for his taste, “I’d tell you the final score but there wasn’t any.”) And 2) hooliganism.

At the time, England’s club teams had just had lifted a five-year ban on playing in continental Europe because of thuggish English fan behavior. For the ’90 Cup, England’s national team, for its three first-round matches, was sentenced to Sardinia—reachable only via plane or boat—to better screen potentially troublesome followers. There were a handful of scuffles with police, though no problems at the stadiums.

Florence on Friday, Cagliari on Saturday and Sunday, Tirrenia on Monday, back to Florence on Tuesday…Turin by the weekend, then Rome, then Bologna and back to Florence…

Oh, yes. The soccer. Cameroon was a revelation, knocking off reigning champion Argentina in the Cup opener, giving the otherwise defensive-oriented tournament jolts of rare creativity and style and advancing to the quarterfinals. Cameroon’s star was 38-year-old Roger Milla and its coach a Siberian who spoke Russian and used Cameroon’s Soviet Embassy chauffeur to translate instructions to his players.

Italy’s Salvatore (Toto) Schillaci, a 25-year-old journeyman from Sicily who started the tournament on the bench, became an overnight sensation with six goals in six games—five of them game-winners. Argentina’s Diego Maradona was a shadow of his heroic 1986 World Cup self, except for one exquisite assist that saved his mates from a mid-tourney elimination against Brazil.

The Americans lost all three of their first-round games and were sent home, no surprise, though their 1-0 loss to host Italy established their worthiness as a Cup participant. West Germany—the official reunification of East and West still was three months away—won the dull championship final against Argentina on an anticlimactic penalty kick.

There you have it: Another proxy for a real-time 2020 sports story.

The World Cup escape

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Comparative happiness is immoral. I’m not about to take pleasure in the fact that England currently suffers with some dreadful politicians stoking fear of immigrants and other perceived grievances. Besides, that sort of thing is abundantly available right here at home.

On the contrary, I am a bit jealous of how the English were afforded a temporary, euphoric respite from anti-social turmoil by the World Cup and their national team’s delightful run in the tournament.

It was just soccer and, in the end, the English lads didn’t necessarily reverse a self-deprecating “narrative of decline” described by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker, that it’s been “all downhill since the end of the Second World War, or the end of the Empire, or 1066…”

Or the Brexit chaos that reportedly has Prime Minister Theresa May facing the possible collapse of her government. But by changing the subject—“Don’t You Know There’s a Bloody Game On?” the Sun newspaper headlined amid bad bureaucratic developments—the soccer team unleashed a unifying giddiness in pushing to the Cup semifinals for the first time since 1990.

From my perch in New York, and with the United States having failed to qualify for the first time since 1986, I allowed myself multiple, shifting allegiances from the start of the tournament. Spain, for its buzzing, precise passing and teamwork. Portugal, just to watch Cristiano Renaldo’s out-of-the-blue strikes. Argentina, in anticipation of Lionel Messi’s magic. Mexico, because our neighbors to the South deserve a break. Brazil, because Brazilian soccer is true performance art. Panama, because a tiny country making its World Cup debut is a beautiful thing, however it fares. France, based on a family ancestry going back many generations, and with the discovery of France’s wondrous teenager Kylian Mbappe.

The whole thing, even without a home team to follow, was a welcome escape from the daily—hourly—assault of depressing national and international news, an uplifting antidote to spreading xenophobia.

By the end of group play, I was all aboard the English bandwagon. Marveling at goalie Jordan Pickford’s lightning reactions. Raheem Sterling’s downfield sprints. Harry Maguire’s precise headers. Manager Gareth Southgate’s formal attire (a vest?). Harry Kane’s relentlessly unmussed hair in spite of his diving, lurching, rumbling charges toward goal—not to mention his role as the target of repeated fouls. (“A friend,” reported my daughter, who now lives in London, “called him ‘the most English person possible.’”)

Even England’s excruciating extra-time loss to Croatia in the semifinals couldn’t break the celebratory fever. The soccer anthem “Three Lions,” with its bullish chorus originally written when England hosted the 1996 European Championships, was revived with a vengeance:

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

Because England invented soccer, the natives nurture an assumed superiority regarding the sport—but offset by the contained melancholy of knowing their side has won the World Cup only once, in 1966. And, since then, repeatedly has endured the cruelest of losses in major international tournaments, six times beaten in penalty shootouts, beginning with the 1990 World Cup semis.

A sidebar: I covered that shootout loss for Newsday, in Turin, Italy. The English manager then was Bobby Robson, who gamely declared that he and his team had “to put on a bright smile and accept it. There’s nothing you can do about it.” The English had played the Germans to a 1-1 tie through 90 exhausting minutes of regulation, plus 30 of extra time, only to lose the sport’s version of a game of H-O-R-S-E. Or something akin to taking turns throwing a football through a tire.

Of course it was noted then that the Germans had been England’s victims in the ’66 final, and that called to mind the English sportswriter who is said to have written, on the eve of the ’66 title match, a wickedly clever reference to matters beyond soccer:

“Fret not, boys, if on the morrow we should lose to the Germans at our national game, for twice this century we have defeated them at theirs.”

But, as I say, comparative happiness is immoral. And this World Cup did a good job of sidelining political stuff and cultural differences. While the English jauntily sang their “Three Lions” song (the title referencing the team’s official shield with national roots dating to the 12th Century):

Three lions on a shirt/Jules Rimet still gleaming/Thirty years of hurt/never stopped me dreaming. (Jules Rimet was the longtime soccer official after whom the World Cup trophy is named.)

It’s coming home/It’s coming home/It’s coming/Football’s coming home.

After England eliminated Sweden in the quarterfinals, my daughter texted that “People are driving around honking horns and singing out of windows….I just saw a young white kid on a bike yell, ‘It’s coming home’ and high-five two old black guys sitting on a bench as they yelled it back to him….Everyone here is talking about weather (in a good way) and the World Cup. It’s a lovely change in atmosphere.”

We could use some of that here in the Colonies.