How Soccer Became ‘Un-American’

From June to July, the United States will co-host the FIFA World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico. The tournament will overlap with the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence. It also arrives in a political moment in which the administration hosting the tournament has, through its broader immigration agenda, created significant barriers to attendance for fans from many of the qualifying nations. The United States is hosting the World Cup and obstructing the World Cup’s fans at the same time.

This contradiction has been repeatedly observed, but what has gone less remarked upon is that this is just the latest chapter in an argument that U.S. soccer has been having with itself since the 1870s—an argument, conducted through the sport, about who belongs in this country and who the country belongs to. At every stage of the last 150 years, whether Americans have played soccer, watched it, or refused it has been a way of answering a more fundamental question: who counts as an American.

This contradiction has been repeatedly observed, but what has gone less remarked upon is that this is just the latest chapter in an argument that U.S. soccer has been having with itself since the 1870s—an argument, conducted through the sport, about who belongs in this country and who the country belongs to. At every stage of the last 150 years, whether Americans have played soccer, watched it, or refused it has been a way of answering a more fundamental question: who counts as an American.

A program for a soccer match between England’s Eton College and Yale College (now Yale University) played on Dec. 6, 1873, the first international soccer match in the United States. Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

Soccer arrived anyway, by a different route, carried by the people that U.S. nativism was worried about. British and Irish textile operatives in Fall River, Massachusetts, and immigrants across the industrial northeast hailing from Scotland, England, Germany, and Hungary brought “association football” with them. The American Soccer League, founded in 1921, briefly succeeded through the support of these immigrants, rivaling the NFL in attendance through the 1920s. Thomas W. Cahill, an Irish American from St. Louis, spent decades trying to integrate the United States into world football, traveling to FIFA’s Stockholm Congress in 1912 and founding what became the U.S. Soccer Federation the following year.

The fanbase was a recognizable political constituency: the immigrant industrial working class of the interwar north. It was also a constituency whose American-ness was under active challenge. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 had just slashed immigration from southern and eastern Europe; the second Ku Klux Klan was at its peak. When the Great Depression (which, Simon Kuper’s World Cup Fever notes, also wiped out FIFA’s finances) dismantled the ASL, the collapse coincided with a reassertion of who the country belonged to. The sport retreated into immigrant enclaves and stayed there for half a century.

On June 29, 1950, in a stadium in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a Haitian accounting student named Joe Gaetjens playing for the United States scored the only goal of a World Cup match between the United States and England. England’s players, who had been the overwhelming favorites, flew home in disgrace. The U.S. press barely noticed. Cahill died in 1951 convinced his campaign had failed. The United States did not qualify for any of the World Cups between 1954 and 1990.

English goalkeeper Bert Williams (left) and Haitian American soccer player Joe Gaetjens of the U.S. team, in a match in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on June 29, 1950.Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images

Over those four decades, decolonization made football the language of postcolonial national legibility and the Soviet Union developed deliberate football diplomacy aimed at the same postcolonial world: It joined FIFA in 1952, won Olympic gold in 1956, and forfeited a 1973 qualifier in Santiago, Chile, rather than play in a stadium where Augusto Pinochet’s regime had detained prisoners. Despite this staging ground for a potential face-off between U.S. and Soviet soft power, the United States preferred to export baseball.

Meanwhile, the North American Soccer League was founded in 1968 with great hopes in an era of liberal internationalism. But the league was split against itself on the same question the sport had been asking for a century. In New York, soccer was cosmopolitan glamour—imported stars like Pelé played for the Cosmos, which was funded by Manhattan money. The NASL rewrote the rules to make the game more legibly American: a countdown clock in place of the ticking-up 90 minutes, a 35-yard offside line, shootouts instead of draws. When Philadelphia won the 1973 title with six U.S. starters, Sports Illustrated announced “Soccer Goes American” on the cover. No one had ever needed to run that cover about baseball! Beginning in 1979, the NASL legislated “belonging” directly, requiring each club to start two U.S. or Canadian players, rising to three by 1980. The league collapsed in 1985, as the Cold War heated up again and money poured into sports perceived to be more authentically American—ones where the United States could take on the Soviet Union, or where its teams would be undisputed “world” champions.

The country returned to the World Cup in 1990 and hosted it in 1994. FIFA awarded the tournament to the United States on July 4, 1988—a fortuitous date echoed in this year’s timing—on the condition that a professional league follow. Major League Soccer began play in 1996. Satellite television and the internet brought European club football into U.S. living rooms. By the mid-1990s, the “soccer mom” was a presidential campaign demographic, and the sport was increasingly operating through a private club system concentrated in affluent suburbs.

In his 2004 book, How Soccer Explains the World, the journalist Franklin Foer devoted a closing chapter to what he called the U.S. culture wars of soccer: Supporting Arsenal or Milan had become a claim to a globalized, cosmopolitan identity; fandom of a Premier League team was often bound up with a semester spent abroad during college. The sport had become a marker of a particular relationship to the wider world, one based on globalization and the liberal international order.

What made that marker politically charged was that the other side of the culture war was reading it the same way. The conservative complaint, articulated most memorably by Ann Coulter in 2014 but by no means confined to her, treated interest in soccer as prima-facie evidence of declining U.S. character, linking the sport directly to immigration and cultural decay. Soccer fandom became politicized because its opponents coded it as un-American.

Running parallel to that Anglo-cosmopolitan fandom—MLS teams, NBC’s Premier League package, Chelsea flags in the suburbs—is a continuing immigrant fandom. The Mexican national team has an estimated 60 million fans inside the United States, more than the U.S. men’s national team itself. Liga MX was the most-watched soccer league in the country until the Premier League overtook it in 2023; more viewers in the United States watched the 2019 Apertura final than that year’s UEFA Champions League final.

Immigrants from Ecuador gather for a soccer match outside a shelter in El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2022. John Moore/Getty Images

Meanwhile, immigrant communities from Latin America and the Caribbean, together with the Spanish-language soccer culture they sustain, are among the principal targets of the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. The enforcement apparatus will be running at full intensity through the tournament window, on the working assumption that the fans most affected are not the fans the administration has political reason to accommodate. Both groups of soccer fans have had their American-ness questioned in roughly the terms Coulter was using a decade ago. When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani hosted an African Cup of Nations viewing party in January, he was making a version of the argument that Fall River textile workers were making 100 years earlier in insisting that this fandom, too, is American.

The president himself is the World Cup’s enthusiastic host, forming a White House task force and even receiving the first-ever FIFA peace prize at the draw. It turned out to be a bit premature, and since the start of the president’s war in Iran, at least one envoy has suggested replacing the Iranian team with the Italian team, which failed to qualify. Perhaps this is a calculated attempt to court the demographic of Americans who are both potential soccer fans and potential Trump voters. But the majority of Americans most likely to root for the U.S. men’s national team are the Americans most likely to oppose the government that is hosting the tournament.

The 2026 World Cup coincides with U.S. birthday celebrations in a moment that showcases the way that soccer in the United States has continually raised the question of who is American. The administration hosting the tournament has one answer. Soccer’s fans have another.