National Teams And The Vibes

I'm a soccer guy. Ever since I took the first steps towards a soccer media career with my first blog post in 2008, soccer has been at the center of my sports experience.

But before I was a soccer guy, I was a baseball guy. Baseball, for lack of a more evocative way of saying it, was my first love.

I'm telling you that because I want you to understand that I'm not a tourist when it comes to the recently-concluded World Baseball Classic. While the WBC is still new enough that I don't feel the emotional pull of my country participating the way I do with, say, the FIFA World Cup, it's difficult not to find international competition compelling. In normal world, I would have spent the last month watching the WBC and rooting for the United States to bring home the title in a similar vein to the way I'll be watching the World Cup and rooting for the United States to bring home the title.

It's not a normal world. Aside from my affinity for Puerto Rico because of my connections to P-fucking-R through my wife's family and a desire to see Team Rubio bring glory to an oppressed territory, there's the matter of our political moment (up to and especially including the unnecessary war against Iran). My capacity to celebrate my country's sporting exploits is mitigated by a healthy dose of shame.

Then the USA WBC team decided to lean heavily into the "We play for the troops and only the the troops" and somehow made it even more difficult to cheer their success. I'll admit to some discomfort about the way my social media bubble (exclusively Bluesky at the moment) went all-in on hoping for American defeat, but I can hardly blame anyone with a conscious for thinking it might be better if America took an L—especially against countries we've recently invaded.

And so many, many words have been spilled on the American baseball stoic soldier nonsense as juxtaposed to the joyful exuberance of countries like La Republica Dominicana, Italy (a team almost entirely made up of North Americans of Italian descent) and, of course, Venezuela.

Read Ryan Rosenblatt, who hit it out of the park on the issue.

But like I said, I'm a soccer guy. The WBC prompted some awkward questions and some uncomfortable feelings about rooting for my country in international competition, but ultimately neither the competition nor the team (by virtue of their attitude) matter all that much to me. The United States men's national team, on the other hand...

I think I'm using this space to wish into existence a USMNT that not only enjoys itself this summer and sends out joyous energy, but finds a way to celebrate more than one chauvinistic facet of what it means to represent the United States. The marked difference in the makeup of the the WBC team and our national soccer team—thick as it is with dual-nationals, first-generation Americans, and those who spent lots of time abroad—should make our soccer team very different than our baseball team (whose makeup is a lot more...um...homogeneous).

I'm not suggesting the players need to make big political statements, as much as I might want them too. It would just be a tragedy if a World Cup already draped in the shadows of avarice and fascism is further ruined as a vehicle for American soccer growth by a national team with bad vibes.

It doesn't help my mood or expectation when we're dealing with the issue of dual-nationals in the soccer conversation following Noahkai Banks' decision to pass on a USMNT call-up. Dual-nationals make us feel things as a soccer country that we're uncomfortable with and we often deal with those feelings by lashing out with hard and fast declarations about what depth of patriotism is need to represent the United States on the field.

Landon Donovan's solution—that players only be permitted to play for the country of their birth—doesn't solve the problem (or the one he's perceives, at least). While national identity is an extremely black-and-white thing for some, it take a special kind of chauvinism to presume it can be that way for everyone. Never mind that at the very heart of America's national identity is the idea that we accept and welcome people from everywhere else. Donovan's idea is so troubling not just because it strikes at the very heart of soccer melting pot that reflects that idea, but because we're living through a moment when malevolent actors in the halls of American power are actively working to destroy it.

A small DIY disaster killed my plan to do a Thursday night episode of The Best Soccer Show, but you can always listen to the roster review show I did on Tuesday morning to hold you over. Show favorite Jonathan Tannenwald made an appearance.

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