Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

USA Blows Two-Goal Lead to Brazil. Nuts!

For the U.S. national team, the Confederations Cup was a crap sandwich with the crap on the outside. After starting the tournament with feeble losses to Italy and Brazil, Team USA scored five straight goals in ripping through Egypt and Spain. That streak ran to seven goals in Sunday's final, with Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan out Brazil-ing the Brazilians, scoring on the kind of spectacular strikes that usually come off the feet of the guys in the yellow shirts. The Guardian's live commentary, having referred to the Americans as "raggy gits" prior to kickoff, described the action as "frankly surreal." In the last 45 minutes, alas, the gits once again turned raggy, the Brazilians resumed being Brazilian, and surrealism made way for futbol vérité.

Loads of pundits have compared the Americans' win over Spain to 1980's "Miracle on Ice." One major difference: After taking down the USSR, the U.S. hockey team beat Finland to win the gold. Brazil ain't Finland, and after a dominant first half the Americans were lucky to lose by just one goal—a header by Kaká that clearly breached the goal line was, inexplicably, not counted. (If nothing else, international soccer tournaments are a good reminder that the officiating in the NBA could always get worse.) According to U.S. captain Carlos Bocanegra, his squad got trounced by Brazil in group play because they gave the Samba Kings "too much respect." The Americans played a far less-reverent first half in Sunday's rematch, but the underdogs ultimately fell back into bad habits, giving the ball away too easily and failing to shut down Kaká and Luis Fabiano. The United States' loss, however, wasn't a failure of strategy or fortitude. The team with the better players won.

Does the team's second-place finish augur better days for U.S. soccer? ESPN's commentators put a happy face on Sunday's loss by arguing that the national team will now assuredly have greater confidence for the 2010 World Cup. But as the Americans' topsy-turvy Confederations Cup revealed, confidence on the soccer field comes and goes in minutes, not years. More significant than some vague sense of emotional uplift is the possibility that, as George Vecsey pointed out on Wednesday, the national team's impressive showing might earn them an easier draw in 2010. The United States, clearly lacking in skill compared with the likes of Spain and Italy and Brazil, still needs all the breaks it can get. For a game and a half at least, the U.S. got the feeling of scoring and swaggering like Brazilians. It was frankly surreal, and it was fun while it lasted.

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.