How America fell in love with the beautiful game

BACK IN THE 1980S, AROUND WHEN I FIRST MOVED to the U. S. from Mexico, Republican Congressman Jack Kemp, then one of conservatism’s brightest stars, who’d quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills before going into politics, declared America’s brand of football stood for democracy and capitalism, unlike that dodgy foreign football, which was a European socialist plot to undermine our ways. The message was that like socialism and the metric system, soccer should be resisted to preserve America.

- BY ANDRÉS MARTINEZ

And Americans were doing an excellent job resisting. To move to the U.S. as a teenager in those years was like moving behind some sporting Iron Curtain. I found myself suddenly cut off from the shared global culture of the world’s default sport, in a country that insisted on playing its own games to reinforce its exceptionalism and then proclaimed their domestic league winners “world champions.” There was no soccer to be watched on American TV, efforts to establish a vibrant domestic league had failed, and I had no schoolmates with whom to talk about Bayern Munich and Barcelona. Worse, when we had downtime, they’d pull out a Frisbee instead of a soccer ball.