This is republished with permission from the author. The original, from House of Strauss, can be found here.
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Belgium has about 12 million people and the United States has 350 million. This shouldn’t be a fair fight and it wasn’t: The Red Devils slaughtered the United States men’s national soccer team (again), doing the Trump dance to mock our impotent side on their home field. In gaining Balogun for Monday’s match, the USA lost what could have been a failure-obscuring excuse.
So why are we back here, as we always are? I wrote that soccer has arrived in the United States. While that may be so, the United States has not arrived at soccer.
The classic explanations don’t stand up to scrutiny as catch-alls either. You hear the problem is that our best athletes play other sports. That’s part of the issue, sure, but I also reject this as the skeleton key. We’ve got more people playing soccer than Belgium has total population. By some measures, we’ve got three times as many children playing soccer as Belgium has children in total. The U.S. should be able to field competitive teams despite losing athletes to football and basketball.
You hear we lack street ball culture, so our hard knocks kids grow up with hoop dreams rather than ambitions for the pitch. I believe that’s an outdated explanation, for reasons I’ll get into.
And, after looking into the matter, I’ve got some bad news. The reason we now can’t compete has evolved. Even if you magically made the sport 10x more popular here among the youth, we’d have the same obstacle. In this country, it’s the generation gap in soccer avidity that’s killed us and continues to kill us.
America has the kids to compete on a world stage. We just happen to lack the adults. Put another way, though “soccer mom” became this omnipresent meme of the 1990s, the reason we struggle is our relative dearth of soccer dads. And I don’t just mean actual, literal, biological fathers, though yes also them. I’m talking about dudes who grew up playing, know the game well, and pass on advice to the next generation.
Obviously more such Americans exist in 2026 than when I grew up, but we are perpetually going to suffer this generational lag, even as it lessens. Every year, an increasing amount of young Americans might become soccer converts, but every year, America will still maintain a gap between adult and youth soccer avidity. And the issue for us is, in Europe, this generational chasm doesn’t exist. Grownups and kids are united in their fixation on the game.
There’s a lot of romance about how both basketball and soccer are incubated in the streets, where children learn the game’s poetry prior to sentience. I’m not saying this stopped happening, but these sports have gone through an optimization process at the youth levels. As you probably know, so many rising pro basketball players are upper class now, and/or the children of professional basketball players. There’s this trope that if America’s “urban” population fell in love with soccer, we’d suddenly dominate. But given the new path dependencies, it’s just not so simple.
It’s been argued that Brazilian soccer dominance was based on “street-style creativity,” an advantage that’s dissipated over the last couple decades. Pre-Internet, sports innovation and progress used to be more organic. I’m reminded of Isiah Thomas just developing his own basketball drills and moves as a kid growing up in Chicago.
Greatness isn’t found on the pickup courts now, like some future supermodel getting discovered at the grocery store. It’s cultivated, early on, by obsessive adults. The compounding soccer advantage in Europe over America is more obsessive adults per capita who then funnel kids into feeder systems that involve professionally obsessive adults.
This is what we can’t replicate. When a lack of “football culture,” is bemoaned, people are often referring to a sport’s overall popularity, sometimes with a focus on what kids are into. But a lack of culture can refer to an absence of transferred generational knowledge. This is a sad story for America, but also one I like, in a way. I’m heartened by the idea of an older generation helping the next succeed.
In that vein, let’s look at the background of a few international football superstars in this World Cup.
Erling Haaland: Father Alf-Inge was a famous EPL pro.
Kylian Mbappé: Father Wilfrid is a former regional footballer who coached at AS Bondy football club for 20 years.
Jude Bellingham: Father Mark was a “prolific” non-league player, who scored over 700 goals in his career.
Michael Olise: Here, the pattern is broken because Michael’s father, Vincent, wasn’t a former footballer. Instead, he was an international cricket player who was obsessed with making his kids great at soccer.
Lamine Yamal: Lamine breaks the pattern because his dad has no sports connection beyond vigorously supporting his son’s journey, but that’s where FC Barcelona steps in. The legendary Spanish club signed the 18-year-old phenom back in 2014. Yamal has humble origins, but I believe he actually illustrates the fallacy in thinking that a newly prevalent “pickup soccer” culture will solve our American problem. Barca discovered Yamal when he was playing for a club at age six. Lamine Yamal didn’t grow up freely playing the game on the streets; he played soccer, organized by adults, well before he grew up.
Speaking of Barcelona and Yamal, one narrative following this World Cup loss is that the game is too expensive for American parents. In Europe, teams bear much of the cost for development, whereas in America, parents spend many thousands on youth sports. Incentives are aligned to help talent over there. To quote one commentator:
In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year.
This is certainly an element that helps explain the soccer gap. I’d also add that the Euro clubs are pretty ruthless in the pursuit of elevating talent. Europe might have a rep for going on “holiday” rather than grinding in the capitalist rat race, but boy are they bottom-line Darwinian about the product they care about most. Star England striker Harry Kane was cut from Arsenal at age 9 for being fat. In the U.S., clubs are incentivized to keep lagging kids involved so long as their parents have cash.
The counterargument to the USA “pay for play” problem comes from Darren Rovell and it’s a good point:
The game that we are actually world-class at — ice hockey — at top youth levels costs double soccer.
That’s true, but Americans are also, relative to nations other than Canada, hockey-knowledgeable. As in: We have the dads.
“I did okay”
I’ve arrived at my theories on this subject through the most scientific of processes: Watching YouTube clips of famous footballers discussing their journeys. The most poignant example is Clint Dempsey, perhaps our best ever player (especially considering Christian Pulisic’s Monday flameout), emotionally reflecting on how he could have been better.
Dempsey grew up in Nacogdoches, Texas, and wonders what might have been if he were somewhere else. In conversation with Thierry Henry, Dempsey says:
I wish I’d a’ had someone like you, a coach, who could have helped me more. I had great coaches, they helped, but like, a coach that you had, something like that. What could I really done. I did okay. You know what I’m saying? But not like..(gestures to Henry).
There’s something just so painfully wistful about Dempsey’s “I did okay.” Later he says, “I’m at peace,” but you can sense he isn’t. He defied the odds, but it clearly eats at Clint that knowledge, as opposed to talent, held him back. But what could Dempsey do? There was an absence of soccer-knowledgeable adults in rural Texas.
Let’s contrast his journey with that of his French conversation partner. Thierry Henry likes to tell a story about the coach who unlocked his potential. Not only was Henry’s father an obsessive soccer dad, but Thierry acquired the right training at the right time. At INF Clairefontaine academy, Henry was commanded to not use his speed for scoring, even though it was his dominant attribute. That bit of guidance set him on the path to all-time greatness.
In summary, Europe dominates us at this sport with two large advantages: A culture of adult-led cultivation, feeding into academies that benefit the world’s best teams. I just don’t understand how we can, as presently constructed, disrupt Europe’s edge over us. Even as more of us become soccer-heads, they’re compounding the advantage with a newer superior generation building on the older superior generation.
We have the money. We have the athletes. We now have the interest. What we lack is generational connective tissue, and I have no clue how we’d ever acquire it on a level that allows us to beat our Euro foes. I should believe in this nation. We’ve accomplished a great many things and continue to. But even though we put a man on the moon, I’m losing faith that we can ever put the ball in the net.
I’ll close with this. There’s a massive, fancy soccer hub near where I live, called the COPA Soccer Training Center. Parents of local soccer prodigies know it well. It’s a “90,000–117,000 sq ft facility with multiple training zones,” and I was blown away by the place when visiting for a kids’ birthday party. This expansive, modern interior is a testament to American wealth and recent will to finally succeed on the world stage. Plenty of kids use the training center. That part is taken care of. But does it have the adults?
Related: Would it occur to Europeans that they should make money off such a place as weekend kids’ birthday party setting? I’d assume the Euros would view this side hustle like generations prior would have regarded playing soccer in a church.
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Ethan Strauss is the creator of the Substack House of Strauss. He is a former NBA PR gopher, basketblogger, and NBA beat writer.
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