The reaction to the U.S. men missing the Olympics said a lot about American soccer
The dismissiveness of Honduras reeked of an ever-present classism and racism for our Concacaf counterparts.
I’m back again, with more soccer. More American soccer. More real, serious things. I thought they should be said. But I promise my next newsletter will be lighter and include something about food.
The United States is not sending a men’s soccer team to the Tokyo Olympics. They failed to qualify … again.
This is the third straight Olympics that the men have failed to qualify for and, unsurprisingly, this caused plenty of outrage in American soccer circles. It makes total sense for people to be upset. This team was far more talented than the previous two, and combined with the 15 age eligible players currently playing with the senior national team, it was impossible not to look at the program’s young talent and expect big things.
Instead, they will sit home again. All because they couldn’t beat Honduras.
But “couldn’t beat Honduras” took on a pretty disturbing tone after the loss on Sunday. The reaction, while fair in some circles as the U.S. team was rightly lambasted, was also imbued with a disgust that the Americans couldn’t beat a team that was beneath them.
The dismissal of Honduras is hardly new, or unique to the way American soccer views Honduras and many other Concacaf countries. They are beneath us and of course we should beat them, is the thinking, whether that’s explicit or implicit.
But while the U.S. failed to qualify for the last two Olympics, that inferior Honduras that the Americans should have beaten made it to the quarterfinals, where they took two leads on a Neymar-led Brazil, and then the semifinals. And Honduras were playing in the intercontinental playoff for a 2018 World Cup spot, something the U.S. couldn’t muster.
Honduras, for a decade now, have been a better U-23 team than the U.S. And by a large margin.
But now? Well, the narrative was that the U.S. had a better team on paper. But that narrative was also a widely held belief and largely was based on nothing.
How many people who said the U.S. was the better team on paper know the Honduran U-23 players? Few. The FOX announcers calling the game didn’t even show a passing knowledge of them. What most know of them is that most of them play for Honduran clubs, and the thinking here is that makes them lesser. This despite one of those Honduran clubs, Olimpia, knocking the Seattle Sounders out of the Champions League a year ago.
This entire premise especially falls apart if you look at every men’s World Cup that the U.S. has ever played in - on paper, the American players played at less prestigious clubs than almost every single team they have played against. Should the U.S. have expected to lose all of those matches? Should the opposing teams have been embarrassed to lose them all?
So why, exactly, should the U.S. have beaten Honduras? Why should they have made it to the Olympics?
The U.S. absolutely could have beaten Honduras. They could have made the Olympics. But the prevailing opinion that they should have was based entirely on a characterization of the country, its national team and the clubs they play for. The “should” there is carrying a lot of weight and a lot of ugly weight.
Meanwhile, there were people who had the gall to say that the U.S. expected to make the Olympics, while Honduras wanted to win, but would have been happy to just make the semifinals of qualifying.
So the team that routine goes to the knockout stages of the Olympics would simply be happy with making the semifinals of the qualification tournament, whereas the team that hasn’t qualified in more than a decade demanding nothing less than advancing? I don’t remember many U.S. fans saying they were happy just to be in the World Cup in 2006, or 2010, or 2014, despite going out against teams with more accomplished players at bigger clubs. And projecting “just happy to be there” to other teams is grossly paternalistic.
The assumption that the Americans should have beat Hondurans is simply a grievous lack of respect. We don’t respect Panama or Jamaica either. We barely, and insufficiently, respect Costa Rica. American soccer has decided that all these Concacaf countries are lesser, in part because they are poor and in part because they aren’t white. It’s impossible to separate this attitude from classism and racism.
The U.S. is a rich country. It is a big country. It is a white forward country. Honduras is not. Almost all of the other countries in Concacaf are not. Many Central American and Caribbean countries are places we have meddled in and plundered. Where we did not respect their humanity. Where we looked down at their poverty.
Soccer, and certainly not international soccer, is not independent of these realities. How we view the national teams is, to a degree, reflective of how we view the countries. So while most are not thinking classism and racism when they look down on Concacaf, classism and racism are informing it. However unconscious or unmalicious the person, those tenets are underpinning it all.
All of this isn’t just a matter of right and wrong either, although, yes, it is wrong to think less of countries’ teams for being poorer and browner. These attitudes are reflective of a culture that has real consequences on the on-field product of the U.S. men’s program that can’t even qualify for tournaments, let alone excel at them.
The dismissiveness, arrogance and lack of respect you hear when talking about the rest of Concacaf isn’t just among a handful of fans. It’s not just a media member or two. It permeates the players and management too. This attitude has incubated in American soccer and is in every single corner of it.
How good is a team and program going to be when everyone in its domestic ecosystem doesn’t respect the bulk of the teams they play. When the way they talk about these teams demeans the national teams and competitions they play in. When the fans don’t find the matches competitive enough to enter them with the intensity they require. When the what informs that arrogance continually turns off and excludes Americans in this country who would want to be passionate about the sport or national team, but don’t feel welcome.
There is plenty of room for criticizing the U.S. men and the U-23 team that fell on their face again. For criticizing Jason Kreis, his hiring, the roster selection, the tactics, the decision to send a slew of age eligible players to the senior team instead of ensuring the U.S. would qualify for the Olympics. Criticism of the U.S. or anger at their loss is not inherently problematic. In fact, it is deserved. But also look at the undertones of a lot of what accompanies that criticism.
Look at what people are saying. Maybe look at how you’ve been viewing it. It is saying as much about how Honduras is viewed, through a lens of ignorance, than what the U.S. did or didn’t do. It is saying who is deserving of status and success, and who isn’t. Who has a right to excellence.
It’s wrong. It’s harmful. And it says as much about American soccer as a bad 90 minutes on Sunday.
The reaction to the U.S. men missing the Olympics said a lot about American soccer
Perhaps the premise of "Should" is simply built on the always present "America is better" attitude that we carry.
We have had this way of thinking a long time, whether right or wrong, and often are proven to be wrong.
When it comes to the Olympics, the USA has primarily won the most medals for a long time now. Few countries count among their citizens as many Olympic medalists as the USA.
I don't think that people are inherently or subconsciously thinking "we should have won because that country is *poor, *stupid, *lazy, *brown". I think it mostly falls on American exceptionalism. The funny thing is a lot of Americans who think we are exceptional fail to see how much they are not.
I still see the huge gap that American soccer has to go compared to the rest of the world's football. What was started in the 70's and 80's isn't quite to the point of producing the world's best soccer players, but maybe one day it will. Perhaps one day America can put forth a "dream team" of soccer players and dominate the rest of the world..
Hm I actually agree a lot with the premise, but I think a bit of nuance is needed to address the players on the USMNT team. That US team is made up primarily of players who are not white, so while I agree that US soccer Twitter and pundits (who are mostly white) use language that is dismissive of other CONCACAF nations, I do not think that filters to the players who are just as likely to deal with racism due to their Blackness or American Hispanic heritage playing against those teams. And teams are intensely dismissive about the US men's teams so your point about teams playing against us who SHOULD have one falls pretty flat because tying England or Portugal in WC games got press coverage in those countries that was 100% dismissive of US players in the same vein of racism, elitism, and classism. So yes and no? I love that you started a conversation about it. Keep it up!