It’s The Hype That Kills

So what did we learn this time, kids? Other than the cost of accepting gifts from creepy strangers always being much higher than you think, no matter how much you justify accepting the gift as your due, that is.

Well, in the wake of Monday night’s dopeslap in Seattle, in which the USMNT was the face and Belgium the gloved hand, there are so many lessons to absorb, and that’s even after you leaven off the top 35 percent of the vitriol, which is just snark from late-to-the-party nitwits. That’s the first thing, maybe—that when you open the tent to everyone, the quality of the guests necessarily drops. The amount of abuse the USMNT will take as an adjunct to the amount of abuse it took from the allegedly past-their-sell-by-date Belgians will be impressive, and will lead necessarily to a harsher reassessment of soccer in America, and how it is never going to amount to anything, and how you should just buy more beer and wait for training camp.

And for some of you, maybe, that should be the lesson. You came to see what the party was like. It was fun for a while, then it came time to clean the hall and you fled like a rabbit, saying the party sucked anyway. It was just a way for you to kill time until training camp, and good for you, we suppose. You got something out of it, even if it wasn’t anything satisfying.

That, though, isn’t learning, it’s just drinking for a different reason than usual. There are other more important matters to be dealt with, starting with this one: The value of hope.

In the wake of last night’s game, in which the U.S. was roundly thrashed for nearly the entire game both technically and tactically and no American player acquitted himself well, the first reaction among many was, But Belgium was supposed to be a bunch of geriatric doddlers whose two best players weren’t even playing and the power of the fans and how could they lie to us like that and I hate them forever and blah-blah-blah-de-blah-blah. The old adage of hope killing has been applied often here.

But it isn’t the hope that usually kills you in America as much as the hype. When the Americans were the plucky underdogs and treated as such, watching their play was actually quite fulfilling. Beating Paraguay without getting kicked half to death by them was an accomplishment, and beating Australia was a lesser but associated one. We may be adrenaline junkies, but the gateway drug is always early momentum.

But as the Americans advanced, the American tendency to start thinking in terms of global hegemony rather than the joy of punching uphill started to hide this team’s cracks from view, because they’d played teams unqualified to expose them. The loss to Türkiye was dismissed as meaningless, even though there were hidden lessons in how to deal with the Americans’ shortcomings, because the first two victories were labeled as intoxicating precursors to the glories ahead. That was only doubled after their rout of the game but under-clubbed Bosnians, and suddenly this stopped being about the process of taking the matches in order as increasingly difficult and different challenges and more about charting a glorious denouement.

The Balogun Affair, which should have been an embarrassment but instead was turned into a case of shameless corruption for the greater good, made the U.S. seem almost brutish in its belief that what it wants is always right because it wants it. Soccer had finally risen in the American consciousness to become a matter of interest for the grubbiest of politics and politicians, and at that point karma was waiting with a studded belt.

But karma didn’t do 4-1. Talent and tactics did. American soccer has indisputably grown and improved, but the part that is too easily forgotten is that everyone else got better, too, so the century’s worth of advantages the world has on the U.S. hasn’t shrunk nearly as much as we think it has. Not only that, growth is not always steady, but happens in fits and starts and occasional backward steps. What American soccer has achieved in its existence is to make its audience susceptible to bullshit and impatient for the bullshit to happen, which is not an achievement because people are impatient in ATM lines, and ATMs are a marvel that gives you money in literally seconds.

So where does Monday put us as a soccer nation? Probably nowhere, if only because the results are quite literally the same ceiling upon which the USMNT hasbeen bashing its brains for decades. We don’t enjoy wake-up calls to give us the same information we already had. Belgium is better because it has always been better, and the round of 16 is still the end of road because it has always been the end of the road.

More to the point, these few weeks will not change our sporting character as professional audience members. The soccer dilettantes and trend-seeking passers-by will not linger long on this defeat because they will move on to other things even sillier than this, like football practice in the same weather the soccer teams played full games in. When John Strong and Stu Holden were begging people to keep watching the World Cup in the waning moments of Monday night, they were hoisting themselves on their own self-parodic petards because Fox sold the World Cup as a solely American construct, and now want to sell it as a global epic. Indeed, Strong and Holden, who were so painfully contorted in pro-American blather, should be kept away from U.S. games for the next four years so they can get their chops back. Conversely, Zlatan Ibrahimovic should be put on Commanders-Eagles in Week 1, but that’s a different issue.

Besides, the truest truth of this World Cup is that Cape Verde was the team that won the tournament, because it was the feel-good story Americans thought was their domain. It isn’t. Americans either win or condemn the losers, and that’s because hype is the enemy, not hope. We may be too jaded for hope; that’s a case-by-case matter. But we are definitely too susceptible to hype and disinterested in changing. That’s the lesson.