Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

Do You Believe in Miracles? Maybe!

The United States' 2-0 win over Spain in soccer's Confederations Cup semifinals was a colossal shocker: Spain hadn't lost since 2006, while the Americans looked horrendous in losing to Brazil and Italy in just the last week. ESPN.com immediately equated the victory with 1980's Miracle on Ice: "Do you believe in miracles?" the headline copy read, echoing Al Michaels' famous call of Team USA's win over the USSR in the Olympic hockey semis. Undercutting the comparison a bit was the poll that ESPN linked to in the next sentence: "Vote: Do you care?"

Within a few minutes, that leading question was softened to the less-suggestive "Vote." The original formulation, however, was a far more honest summation of the American sports fan's traditional relationship to soccer: tenuous at best, dismissive at worst.

That they-don't-score-enough-and-ties-are-dumb attitude is, in some measure, generational, as younger folk who grew up playing soccer and its video-game analogue certainly think more highly of the game. America's rising Latino population has also buoyed stateside interest, as has the increasing prevalence of the American soccer intellectual. (As Bryan Curtis argued in his 2006 Slate piece "Among the Brainiacs," footy has replaced baseball as the sport of choice for this country's scholarly sports fans.)

The sport's defenders can be seen, en masse, in the results of that "Do you care?" poll: 81 percent of the 41,000 respondents (as of 5:15 eastern) say they care about the U.S. win over Spain "a lot." But does the American soccer fan really care about American soccer? ESPN's ratings for the Euro 2008 tournament were higher than its figures for Major League Soccer contests and U.S. national team matches. This year, ESPN killed Major League Soccer's regular Thursday night slot on account of poor viewership; MLS games can now be seen scattered throughout the schedule on a different day from week to week. Meanwhile, the network just bought the rights to air games from Spain's La Liga. For American audiences, Spanish national team stalwarts like Xavi and David Villa make for more compelling television than America's Landon Donovan.

Don't blame American soccer fans for preferring the international product—foreigners play the game better, after all. (It's also true that the best domestic talent leaves the U.S. in search of better competition abroad. See: Tim Howard.) Still, the U.S. national team's titanic upset takes on a different cast when you consider that American soccer fans are more interested in watching soccer when Americans aren't playing. That's ultimately what makes this Confederations Cup win so different from the Miracle on Ice. In that hockey game, our guys heroically took on and overcame the indomitable, faceless Soviets. In Wednesday's match with Spain, our guys heroically took on and overcame an indomitable team—but the foe wasn't faceless. This time, we know our opponent better than we knew ourselves.