The Dutch Style Of Pickup Soccer And A Dog Named Jeff, With Leander Schaerlaeckens

It’s not the sort of anxiety that haunts you, or maybe it just rates below too many of my other haunting anxieties to register. But as a non-soccer person, the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup has a peculiar and not altogether unpleasant anxiety about it; a bunch of stuff is about to happen that I do not really know anything about, and I am going to put myself happily in that wave’s way and not know what hit me. I’m fine with that, for the most part, and this year’s 48-team World Cup field is sufficiently vast and varied that I couldn’t learn everything about it if I wanted to, our own stellar collection of team previews notwithstanding. For the true soccer dunce, the key is to learn enough to enjoy yourself, but not so much that you get stressed out. It was with that in mind that Drew and I welcomed Leander Schaerlaeckens, Guardian columnist and author of the excellent new book The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer And Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey To The Top, Or Thereabouts, to this week’s episode.

I am biased, of course, but I’d call this episode a success on those terms. After the usual goofery—remembering some salient scenes from The Insider, me singing in a Scott Stapp voice, Drew chastising me for referring to Long Island Cryptkeeper Bill O’Reilly a “friend of the pod”—we turned to soccer around the six-minute mark and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the hour. Even and maybe especially as a confirmed soccer dunce—one of two on the pod, as Drew cheerfully allowed—the result was pretty fascinating stuff. Leander knows a lot and explains it patiently, and he answered our questions on the possible positive and negative effects of this year’s new and much bigger field, where national soccer styles come from (and whether that question can be answered without doing major cultural essentialism maneuvers), and where the USMNT as a team fits into the current firmament of international soccer both in terms of quality and style.

Leander was especially good on that last bit, both in The Long Game—which I really do recommend; we ran an excerpt here—and on the pod. His book traces the history of U.S. soccer from its earliest and jankiest days to the present, and he knows the current team, which is better and more talented and more watchable than they’ve ever been, but probably not much more competitive, as well as anyone writing about the sport. The macro-level stuff was more interesting to me, and we spent a decent amount of time on that. Leander knows enough about soccer as it is played to parse how the U.S. style derives from imposter syndrome and an attempt to mimic what more advanced soccer nations do, but also enough about how international and American youth soccer works to explain how why the country has been unable to develop a sufficiently robust pipeline of big-time talent. We returned to that subject near the end of the pod, and Leander’s explanation of how the privatized youth soccer experience and its imperatives—and how this country distributes opportunity, and who gets excluded as a result—has warped and wounded player development is one of the most convincing and nuanced I’ve heard anywhere. I also enjoyed learning about newish USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino’s opinions on the energetic significance of “a tray of lemons.”

It wasn’t all about the U.S. side, though. We also talked about how much will the resting state of American Political Fuckery and the “please don’t tell anyone how I live” factor introduced by America’s bummy infrastructure will impact the proceedings, and how FIFA makes every World Cup a little more onerous and expensive and worse without ever quite breaking it. A quick spin through the best teams in the field was enlightening on both the talent and emotional volatility of France, the exciting World Cup debut of Erling Haaland, and Portugal’s problem with zombie Cristiano Ronaldo. Leander also confirmed that it is almost certainly not “coming home,” but did so with more nuance than Drew or I and our awful honking British accents typically bring to the proceedings.

This left time for just one Funbag question, but given that it was about best practices in dog naming, and given how much all three of us cared about this topic, that was plenty. If I was too vigorous in my insistence that you can name your dog Jeff if you want, it was only because I was so fired up by what had come before. Although I also really do believe that.

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