Just after my partner left and drove away from her parking spot right in front of our house, I watched the woman who gardens next door pull her own car up into the space. This pricked up my feelers, so I started to watch as I ate my soup.
This woman, the mother of the people who live next door, is someone who I would consider to be an exceptional gardener. I’ve seen her many times on her hands and knees, tending to the earth. The results are beautiful year round. Seeing the care that she takes in her own garden, I was a little confused why she thought it was cool to pop her hatch, don gloves and a garden shovel, and proceed to dig entire plants from one of the bee balm bushes that we have lining our sidewalk.
My partner saw her in the front yard as she left. There was no mistake that she made this move as soon as my partner left. But what she had not calculated was the possibility of me having a soup on the porch with her uninstall of our bee balms — bee balms that have been growing for four or five years — as my movie with the meal. She didn’t want to ask, but more importantly, she didn’t want to grow the bee balm from seed that my partner has spent years tending to. She just wanted to take someone else’s work, fill up the back of her car, and drive away.
This approach may work in the short term. But it’s tainted with colonizer stink.
The fallout after the USMNT crashed out of the World Cup has shined a magnifying glass on a thing I feel passionate about. Hot takes point out that we don’t prioritize youth development in a way that’s accessible for all. And US American soccer fans also seem to not care about the fact that a youth player bought by a big European club can bring enough money into the selling club to level up their entire operation. This happens enough times across the country, and it’s a cash infusion — cash primarily from Europe — going directly into the development of the game at the most fundamental level.
Imagine a generation or two of youth academies slowly getting stronger, morphing into teams of a particular level that we haven’t seen enough of in this country. New leagues. A real relegation ladder.
The financial structure of US Soccer must shift to accommodate the mass adoption of this model. It’s the quickest shortcut to getting there, when the federation has been trying to manufacture shortcuts for decades. We don’t want to plant the seeds, tend to the soil, take the time to learn what it takes to grow it organically.
This metaphor is appropriate. As a nation of colonizers with a real nasty history of how we deal with Others who have something we can justify is ours, it’s no surprise that our US Soccer — run as a US American business by US American business guys — moves in the same way as the government it operates under. The neighbor with the bee balm. The federation favoring pay-to-play instead of building youth development. Buy results. Steal growth. The same instinct.
What would Nick Hornby¹ write about the World Cup? It’s tough to reframe, since it’s usually that he’s written about the tribalistic allegiances of club football, the likes of which we don’t have in this country in the same way. What exactly is the World Cup?
It’s becoming clearer and clearer that it’s morphed into something else, something football adjacent. Every four years, casuals and die-hards alike gather and we all get to enjoy a spectacle that exists in a space close enough to our normal realities that we can recognize it. But the World Cup as it exists these days and seemingly from now on —
This is not the game I love.
It’s the uncanny valley version of it. Close enough that most people mistake it for the real thing. Wrong enough that I can feel it in my chest.
I just want to run in the grass, listen to music, and play five-a-side. Something purer than this. It’s been exploited. Every branch hangs low, heavy from the weight.
The World Cup is supposed to exist in the intersection between casual and die-hard soccer fans. But this tournament, it’s become clear that the ground-up capsule version we’re now given every four years is actually a mutated thing, outside of both circles but close enough that most of us can mistake it for the real thing.
We’re being fed an approximation.
FIFA seems to be driven by a constitution of financial extraction at all costs. They exploit our love for the game and turn it into as many dollars as possible. Is anything pure anymore?
Our bee balm won’t thrive in her garden the way it would have in ours. You can’t shortcut growth. You can only grow it from seeds.
I want my game back.
¹ Nick Hornby is an English writer (High Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch) whose devotion to Arsenal is so total it borders on a religious affliction — a fittingly English way of loving something that causes you almost constant suffering.