Red Card

Are you kidding me?

Are you telling me that the United States men's soccer team, long the joke of international soccer, was finally getting somewhere after having won the 2017 Gold Cup and having beaten Panama 4-0 in a qualifying World Cup game, with this new team member Christian Pulisic being on the verge of becoming the first American male soccer player worthy of being compared to Pele, only to lose 2-1 to Trinidad and Tobago - Trinidad and Tobago, a country so insignificant that its only contribution to civilization was Billy Ocean - and thus they missed qualifying for the World Cup for the first time since 1986?  Which was the last time anyone ever heard anything from Billy Ocean?

Okay, I'm going to come out and say it.  In spite of Kanye West, in spite of his Kardashian in-laws, and in spite of Donald Trump himself, the U.S. men's national soccer team is easily the biggest  and most humiliating embarrassment to These States by a wide margin.  They are the most pathetic bunch of incompetents and never-rans I've ever seen.  They don't learn from mistakes, they don't capitalize on their improvements, and they always screw up when they can least afford to.  Their failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup is the worst thing to happen to men's soccer in America since the Iranians defeated the U.S. at the 1998 World Cup in France and set them on a course to finish last.  As humiliating as it was for American soccer players to be defeated by a country that loves to hate us, at least that time our team, pathetic though it was, made it to the World Cup.  This is even worse than their failure to qualify for the 2016 Olympics, the importance of which pales in comparison to this.  Our men's national soccer team no longer sucks. Now it chokes.

This defeat will deal a huge blow to a sport that's already having trouble gaining traction in this country against the competition from basketball, baseball and most especially American football, which is more of a sadistic tribal ritual than a sport.  Soccer is already in trouble here, as opposed to fútbol americano, which thrives whether the players take a knee for the flag or not.  Major League Soccer (MLS) just can't compete with the NFL for interest and excitement.  You could fill two stadiums with Americans who can tell you who won the last Super Bowl, but you could probably fit in a broom closet all of the Americans who can tell you who won the last MLS Cup without checking Wikipedia on their smartphones.  American sportswriter and noted soccer-basher Frank Deford, who died in May 2017, must be looking down and laughing.

The American absence from the World Cup in 2018 will translate into even lesser interest in Major League Soccer, which means fewer people attending matches or even watching matches on television, and they're already difficult to find on TV in the first place.  That means it will be more difficult to cultivate new players and even more difficult for MLS to attract new homegrown talent; even Christian Pulisic plays professionally in Europe (Germany, to be precise).  Without the U.S. national team in the 2018 World Cup, TV ratings in the U.S. will be a disaster - assuming, of course, that any American television network will want to air it.  Look, when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Olympics - which, coincidentally, like the 2018 World Cup will be, were held in Russia - to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, do you think NBC, which paid $87 million to broadcast that Olympiad, was going to air the Games without our athletes in them?  Of course it didn't!  As great as Sebastian Coe and Daley Thompson, the two track stars from the United Kingdom at those Games, were, do you think Americans were going to tune into the 1980 Moscow Olympics to root for the British?? 

The 1980 Olympic boycott occurred during one of NBC's worst ratings slumps, incidentally, when all the network had going for it were lame sitcoms like "Hello Larry."  At least "Hello Larry" star McLean Stevenson, unlike the U.S. men's soccer players, never embarrassed himself before an international audience.

Let's face it.  Despite some occasional moments of greatness - imagine a team so cursed it was considered a moment of greatness when it reached eighth place in the World Cup as it did in 2002 - our national men's team sooner or later regresses into mediocrity and has to strive to get back to something resembling a respectable position.  Sadly, our guys just keep falling flat on their faces; like a lovesick teenager who crashes the family car on his way home from a date in which he experienced his first kiss, our team suffers defeats that monumentally dwarf its triumphs.  We couldn't compete in men's soccer if our reputation depended on it, and because soccer is the world's most popular sport, it does.  Coach Bruce Arena's reputation certainly depended on a World Cup 2018 berth; he has since resigned.

We Americans are likely to shrug all this off and pretend it doesn't matter, because that's what we do when we suck at something, and we suck at a lot of things.  We happily ignore the fact that there are things we don't do particularly well at - literacy, health care delivery, infrastructure - and boast about being number one.  Number one in what?  Rich people?  Obese people?  Gun deaths?  Low voter turnout?  We don't stop to think about it. We're too busy congratulating ourselves for our greatness. 

The U.S. will still be a soccer powerhouse, though.  The women's team will likely be favorites in the 2019 Women's World Cup, because that's where the real stars of American soccer are; more people can name Mia Hamm or Brandi Chastain than Alexi Lalas or Landon Donovan.  So let's concede that, in These States, soccer is a "dame game."  Let's forget about the guys.  Really.  There's a better chance that the Washington Redskins will change their name than there is that the this country will ever win the World Cup.  However, we still have a better chance to educate our children well, improve health care,  create a passenger rail network with trains that don't look like they belong in a railway museum - in short, we have a better chance to make America a better place to live.  If we don't, we'll remain a laughingstock of the world, irrelevant and unworthy of respect.

Just like our men's soccer team.