The American men's soccer team is excellent. Does anyone care?

Photo: Sam Hodde/Getty Images

Last Thursday, my soccer-obsessed 10-year-old son and I sat at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and watched 70,000 people hum the Argentine national anthem together. It was just before the first match of the Copa Amrica, the South American football tournament hosted this year by the United States, and almost everyone in the stands was wearing the national jersey of Argentina, the world champion in title. The real attraction, of course, was Lionel Messi, the world's most famous athlete. That such a massive crowd could gather in Georgia to cheer him on may have been surprising at one point, but that is certainly not the case anymore. Last year, SSRS, a research firm that has surveyed Americans for three decades, discovered that the most popular athlete in this country was not LeBron James, Tom Brady or Stephen Curry, but Messi. Some of the crowd were surely singing the anthem in what must have been a deeply moving moment for any Argentine present. But most of us just hummed. We didn't know the words. We didn't speak the language. We were just there to see Messi.

This week, the United States Men's National Team (USMNT) will play its second Copa Amrica match, also in Atlanta. I will be attending as well, and let me tell you: the tickets are a plot cheaper. This is partly understandable: the United States is playing Panama, not Messi and Argentina, after all. But as someone who attended the last match played by the USMNT in Atlanta, a miserable Gold Cup defeat in 2015 against Jamaica at the since-demolished Georgia Dome, the lack of anticipation for the U.S. men's national team playing in Atlanta, a city that, in the years since that Gold Cup loss, launched a highly successful, championship-winning MLS team who plays regularly some of the most attended football matches in the world is palpable. Eight years ago, the Georgia Dome was filled with maniacs dressed like Benjamin Franklin and wearing T-shirts with bald eagles on them; This week I can't find anyone here who knows the team is playing.

This is despite the fact that the current USMNT is light years better than the one I saw in 2015. That team was 34th in the world, which was a generous ranking; nine years later, they are 11th in the world and led by Christian Pulisic, who has the right to claim to be the best American player of all time. During this time, MLS has become a hugely popular entity (30 teams, up from 19 in 2014), now with its own global television package via Apple TV and a reach so vast that Messi himself, at the height of his worldwide popularity. , decided to make it its local league. And anecdotally, any American parent of young children can tell you that the sport their kids are most obsessed with, even kids who otherwise aren't even into sports, is soccer. (Unfortunately, I can't get my 10-year-old to go to a baseball game with me.) The kids used to practice their favorite players' batting stances in the backyard: now, they copy their goal celebrations. Even those of us who predicted an impending explosion of soccer fandom in the United States in 2014 couldn't have imagined this much progress in a decade.

And yet the USMNT itself reaped almost none of these benefits. American players regularly complain about their fans being outnumbered in the stands despite the home advantage. Many fans are actively cheering against the Copa Amrica team because they I don't like coach Gregg Berhalter such. (Unfairly, I would say.) The enthusiasm behind American men's soccer, which once inspired so many people in Brooklyn, Portland, Columbus, Omaha and countless other cities to build American Outlaw Fan Chapters and cosplay what At the time I called hipster patriotism, has now almost disappeared from the sport. Even the highly successful U.S. women's team has lost visibility, partly because of bad faith political actors and partly because it is no longer a women's team. THE dominant team in sport. (They fell to fifth in the world after being number 1 or number 2 for almost 20 consecutive years.)

So what explains the strange disconnect between football's popularity and the loss of stature of national teams? As with so many other cultural phenomena of the last decade, it might have something to do with Donald Trump. Trump's relentless embrace of a very Andhipster patriotism made all this cosplay instantly rancid, something I should have seen coming when chronicling this movement caused a backlash among the people who would become the backbone of MAGA and caused many of the national teams' most dedicated fans and defenders to step back and ask themselves how bad they really were did want to shout USA! UNITED STATES! facing fans of the Latin American rivals. And Trump's first months in office coincided with the USMNT's failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, a devastating failure that instantly stifled what momentum the national team movement had. This one-two punch, the shocking failure of teams on the field and the even more shocking failure of nations off the field, was devastating: it transformed something fans were decidedly uncynical about into something they are suddenly found conflicted and ambivalent. Football is booming in this country, but the national teams have not yet recovered.

The Copa Amrica, in which the United States is favored to advance and potentially challenge world powers Brazil and Argentina (they have already won their first match, 2-0 against Bolivia, on Sunday), is a test to see if the USMNT can come back. on the radar nationally. THE real The referendum, however, will take place in two years, when the United States, alongside Mexico and Canada, hosts the World Cup for the first time since 1994. That's all American soccer has been heading towards. built for 40 years, the perfect illustration of how far gaming has come in this country and there is still much to do. But, depending on how these elections play out, they could also be an illustration of how far the nation itself has come. Right now, it's much more exciting, rewarding and even relaxing for Americans to cheer for Messi and Argentina than it is to cheer for their own country. Whether that changes over the next couple of years, or at all, can be decided away from the football field.