The Facelessness of American Soccer

by Jose Mena

This is a second part of our coverage of Jürgen Klinsmann's signing with US soccer.  I get into some pretty abstract stuff - somehow I've turned into a writer about culture, which I don't understand either, and I swear it turns into soccer eventually.  

We like to complain about the cultural void here in America.  We’re not really a nation of literature, art or music.  With industrial regularity and precision, we make Michael Bay films, Katy Perry singles and Dan Brown novels in clockwork fashion to please the stockholders.  In general, we’re okay with this; most of us recognize intellectually that our culture is meaningless, but something about “Telephone” just feels so good.


It’s common to refer back to older times, when it seems like things were simpler.  We romanticize the past and ask why we can’t have communal experiences like our ancestors had.  To the conservative social thinker, the great evil in the world isn’t “liberalism” or “modernism”: it’s “atomization”.  People in the US aren’t connected to each other in quite the way they used to be, and it’s troubling to a lot of people.

It’s also not surprising.  Culture is built on shared experiences that give rise to common beliefs, values and outlooks.  It’s easy to preserve and define culture in nations that are mostly homogeneous, because everyone’s on the same page and nobody asks too many hard questions about the established way of things.  Growing up in a tight, unified community makes subconscious all kinds of fundamental assumptions about the world, and people tend to act in an internationally distinct but locally common manner.  That’s culture.

The main problem is that we’re a nation of immigrants.  I don’t have a whole lot in common with the experience African-Americans have in this country, or that of the Indian businessman, or that of the Chinese expat, because Hispanics bring different core values to the table and society views all of these groups in different ways.  It’s a whole different set of pressures and expectations for me than many of my fellow citizens, and so there’s not much that we’re on the exactly same page about.

At the same time, I’m the son of an immigrant and an American national, and our branch of the family will grow steadily more “American” as time passes.   By this, I mean that we’ll lose many of the characteristics that make Hispanics what they are and replace them with a Midwestern accent and a love of the Founding Fathers.  This isn’t a story that’s unique to me; pretty much any second-generation immigrant to this country – be they of African or Asian or European origin – has the same experience.

We’re so successful at integrating different viewpoints on the world precisely because we don’t have one by default and we don’t impose many arbitrary concepts on people we come here.  What we do have in common are those things that drive people to immigrate here: belief in liberal democracy, capitalism and meritocratic concepts are pretty universal to American citizens.  It’s all that unites us, and reasonably we’re not able to expect anything more than that.

* * *

This is severely limiting for our soccer program.  Successful international soccer programs have identity, and they’re at their best when they play toward those identities.  Brazil play like Miles Davis, all individual brilliance and attacking with jagged, weaving verve and flair; Spain play like Bach, building cathedrals of perfectly timed passes that considered individually seem somewhat innocuous but that inexorably come together in mesmerizing beauty and elegance; Holland play like Beethoven, sometimes wielding a club to beat opponents into submission but other times capable of sublime majesty.

The United States’ philosophy, on the other hand, has generally been “run fast, tackle hard and kick the ball into the net”.  It’s what you get when you try to distill all of the competing soccer philosophies brought to this country down to one, but it’s not terribly conducive to winning games.  It’s not enough to say “we want to win”; a team has to answer the question of how it will win.  Soccer at its best is order and identity forced onto a chaotic and random game.  The United States don’t force anything on the game; they react to it.

This helps to explain our continual difficulty with weak opposition and over-achievement against difficult opposition.  A team like Panama gives us nothing to react to, so while we dominate possession we don’t really know what to do with the ball once we have it.  Spain and Brazil in the 2009 Confederations Cup had very clear ideas about what they wanted to do, which in turn gave us very clear ideas about how to counteract them.

That’s not enough to win a tournament.  Teams that are successful, even highly defensive ones (like Italy in 2006) have exceptionally well-defined identities and don’t deviate from them.   Without identity, a team doesn’t know what to do, and consequently it doesn’t do a whole lot of anything.

* * *

This is why US Soccer’s signing of Jürgen Klinsmann is an excellent move.  Klinsmann himself doesn’t have strong ideas about the way the sport should be played, but he strongly appreciates that the sport must be played in a specific fashion for there to be success.  In Germany, he took a moribund team and showed them a path.  Klinsmann and Joachim Löw created a blueprint for how German soccer was to be played from first principles using reasoned arguments (in highly German fashion), and made sure that the senior and youth international teams were playing in the same, well-defined style.

American soccer needs this.  We need a path; we need an identity.  Klinsmann refers liberally to the concept of playing “proactive” soccer, and this is what he means.  We may not play pressing, attacking soccer like the Germans do, but we will play a distinct, well-defined manner.  We may not win all of our matches, but we will at least lose on our terms, contented that we played a style that we believe in.

More generally, US Soccer needs to be unafraid of signing international managers.  We aren’t partial about the kind of style we employ (unlike Brazil, who were intolerant of Dunga’s conservative style) because in typical American fashion we only care about winning.  That doesn’t obviate the need for there to be a particular style, and American-born coaches that are too American to understand that concept aren’t going to be particularly good for US Soccer.

Klinsmann said in his introductory press conference that “soccer reflects the culture of the country”.  Let’s hope, in this case, that he is wrong.