And, you know, that captures something essential about both this event and football itself. I think the World Cup only really works if you go for full immersion—abandon yourself to the whole thing, watch every match you can, even group stage third fixtures between geopolitical nonentities, and eventually you will be rewarded. Perhaps not by every match or any particular match, but by the whole experience.

I have been a conscious member of the global TV audience for six World Cups, and each one encapsulated a particular summer in a particular era of my life. In 1990, I barely knew what was going on, but I liked it. In 1998, I was drinking way too much cheap beer and living with eight other dudes in a converted (there’s an understatement) nunnery. In 2002, I was living with my girlfriend in Portland, waking up at all hours and rampaging on email with all my soccer friends during the work day. In 2010, that girlfriend and I are married and we’re systematically indoctrinating our helpless child to the point that he insisted on staging a full re-enactment of a pre-match ceremony the other day, complete with national anthems and handshakes.

My point is that a given World Cup lives on not because of specific matches, but because of the whole vibe of following the tournament, match in and match out, for a month. Certainly, if you were looking for all-time performances out of this tournament’s big names, they offered very few. Most of the “headliner” matches, including yesterday’s sour and small-hearted final, turned out to be pretty lame. Portugal v Ivory Coast? Both teams should have been summarily kicked out of the tournament. Germany v England; Germany v Argentina; Germany v Spain? All proto-classics on paper, but complete washouts (entertaining in their own way) because one side or the other failed to attend. Yesterday, Spain and the Netherlands put on a 120-minute display that felt designed to demonstrate why major soccer leagues (as opposed to Major League Soccer) don’t use playoff systems to determine their champions.

On the other hand, some matches that excited no one when they appeared on the fixture list were absolutely cracking. I would include all four matches played by our ever-embattled USA on that list—every one, a demonstration of football in extremis. No one outside of Auckland and Wellington marked their calendars for any of the New Zealand matches, but the heroic, semi-professional All-Whites staged a handful of the Cup’s most riveting moments. Slovakia v Italy, any one? Mexico v France? Australia v Serbia turned into a madcap track meet—one of the most fun matches I watched through the entire tournament. Who knew Uruguay would be so entertaining and compelling? Meanwhile, Brazil bored the life out of me every time they played—except in the North Korea match, when the Thousand Mile Horse managed to discomfit the Brazilians for a few gloriously weird minutes.

What the Cup does in microcosm, football does at large. It is the one major sport that raises more questions than it answers, and instills a fatalistic world view in just about all of its followers. Soccer says, what will be, will be—and we have no idea what that is, so you may as well have a Campari and soda and try to enjoy this 0 : 0 stalemate while you still have breath in your lungs. For better or worse, it’s hard to just drop in on soccer, because you’re likely to visit when Nigel De Jong is playing. To really understand the family, you have to crash on the couch forever.

And so it ends—badly, but fittingly, with victory by Spain, the one team in world football that imposes a comprehensive vision on every single match it plays. Like Spain’s style or hate it, right now everyone else is just reacting. As for the Netherlands—I mean, c’mon, dudes. This whining about the referees is just about the last straw. You played a shitty little match and were lucky not to have three players sent off. You trusted to luck and venom, and they served you well, until they didn’t. Take it with some dignity. What will be, will be.

Instead of inaugurating an era, the 2006 final ended one: the Zidane/Ronaldo Era, in which the French midfield genius and the mercurial Brazilian forward defined, between them, three consecutive World Cups. One of the questions hovering over today’s meeting between Spain and the Netherlands is whether the result will crown an era or feel like just a bit of an accident.

If Spain wins, then we will be experiencing the Era of Tiki-Taka, the short-passing, possession-oriented style that la Furia used to win the 2008 Euros and that, with minor variations, Barcelona used to win everything they contested in 2009. (The Spanish national team is basically just a subset of Barcelona at this point.) It may not be as radical or have a cool name like Total Football, and I don’t know if it has the spooky cultural relevance of catenaccio. But tiki-taka is definitely an idea about how to play, a comprehensive concept about how to win a match. As some critics point out, it has its conservative side; all that possession and restless geometric dicing of the midfield sometimes means that not much happens around the goal mouth. Not everyone can play this way—it takes a seamless midfield on the order of Xavi/Iniesta/Busquets. But Spanish victory would seal tiki-taka as the state of the art, for now.

This takes nothing away from The Netherlands, but these Dutch are a much more makeshift and scrappy side. If Spain is a crisp-lined modernist house with net-zero carbon impact, this version of the Oranje is a sprawling, weather-beaten compound littered with mismatched machinery, where the residents shave their heads and brew their own biodiesel. They tackle hard and create from there. Their goals come on guerrilla raids or rude little set pieces. The Dutch are improvisers and opportunists, and they get lucky too often for it to count as luck.

Another way to look at, perhaps: football is a game of control, but also of incident. Spain is the team of control. Holland is the team of incident. Usually involving Van Bommel.

I should note that I like watching teams like The Netherlands. The progressive-peacenik-social-democrat segment of my being would naturally like to see a team of thinkers—Spain, in this case—win. But there’s another part of me that digs the piratical smash-and-grab operation the Dutch have going. A Dutch win would be a self-contained coup, One Last Big Job for a lot of their aging safe-crackers and gunsels.

Era, or accident? In five hours, we’ll find out.

Image by Thomas Duchnicki :: Location Scout via Flickr

The World Cup’s final stages call forth, as they always do, certain inevitable developments. England goes down like a 12-story building fashioned entirely from burnt newspaper. A plucky underdog seizes the world’s attention, loses in heartrending fashion, and is then immediately forgotten. (Ghana 2010 isn’t so much Cameroon 1990 as South Korea 2002.) Shallow commentators (ahem) hail some team as the future-defining Next Model of the Modern Game, only to watch it unravel quite thoroughly. (Germany? Germany? Germany? You have a match against Spain toda—oh, no. Yesterday. Ah well. Hammer the bejesus out of Uruguay and we’ll see you next time.)

And, of course, we come to the ritual airing of the Will Soccer Now Make It In America? analyses. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg offers a particularly solid version—because it’s The New Yorker, and he’s Hendrik Hertzberg—that, nonetheless, defines the invariable form and limits of the genre. Soccer’s global popularity explained; the game’s paradoxical position in American culture examined; anti-soccer gapejaws quoted; statistics cited by the raft-load to demonstrate that football actually has a very robust following in the United States; brief coda in re: cosmopolitanism. This is how it’s done—you can write your own at home.

I just about managed to get through this whole World Cup without absorbing a single example of this article’s eternal counterpart, “Soccer is Gay and Foreign and Makes My Shriveling Mind Hurt” by [INSERT 50-SOMETHING DAILY NEWSPAPER SPORTS COLUMNIST or TALK RADIO HOST WITH AGE-INAPPROPRIATE SOUL PATCH]. My ability to avoid this nonsense no doubt owes to a complex structural change in the media, fragmentation, et cetera et cetera. The whole Soccer is Gay argument is also retreating deeper and deeper into the Hindu Kush of know-nothing obduracy, which makes it harder for a respectable family man such as myself to care much. In his piece, Hertzberg refers to such noted experts on sporting culture as Glenn Beck, G. Gordon Liddy and full-tilt oddball Marc Thiessen. I think this list pretty much speaks for itself. If Chuck Klosterman wants to run around in that crowd, I guess that’s his business.

The anti-soccer “argument,” such as it is, now sounds like something the North Korean media could drum up on a slow day: a spitwad of defunct ideology containing no facts. I’ve been following the sport since 1990, basically, and in that time the case for soccer’s gayness and foreignness hasn’t evolved at all. The sport, meanwhile, has changed beyond all recognition. Being an American soccer fan in 1990 was like being a lover of unicorns. We had a lot of time on our hands to worry about why the former high-school basketball equipment manager who now edited our daily paper’s sports page only printed the FA Cup Final result in agate type.

Now, frankly, we’re too busy. Between the World Cup, the Timbers, Liverpool, Barcelona, the rest of the English Premier League, the rest of Europe, the rest of the world, MLS, my futsal team, kick-abouts with three-year-olds (and Jesus) and trying to keep up with the likes of Run of Play and Pitch Invasion, the football quadrant of my brain is fully occupied. Meanwhile, the continued existence of the Soccer is Gay genre represents yet another lazy failure of modern journalism. Any editor or producer who allows one of their charges to regurgitate this old line in 2010 is just about ready for that buy-out package.

Final memo to my colleagues: soccer is decent-sized at home and huge abroad; all media audiences are now global; you wouldn’t hire a political writer who didn’t know who Barack Obama was, would you?

But, by the same token, it’s time to retire pieces like Hertzberg’s as well. The Soccer is Gay/Will Soccer Make It? dichotomy has become just another obsolete media narrative that ignores developments in the actual world. The anti-soccer side sticks by its excuse for tub-thumping pseudo-populism; the pro-soccer side enjoys its platform for saying nice things about international culture. Meanwhile, objective reality has moved on.

Go have a look at the television ratings: it’s over. Here in Portland, one quarter of all active television sets tuned into the USA v Ghana match. One quarter. Of course, we’re kind of gay and foreign here in Portland. So go watch the YouTube celebrations of Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria. Lincoln. Springfield. Covington, Kentucky. This thing happened. The glaciers melted. It’s time to get solar panels.

I just devoted a whole book chapter to the curious case of soccer in America, and while I remain fond of that work, I don’t think I’d write it again. The curious case of soccer in America is closed. I guess we could come up with a chant—bigger than NASCAR! bigger than NASCAR!—to pound the point home, but that seems mean-spirited. Having been a soccer fan for 20 years, I have a soft spot for the strange customs of minority groups. It’s not 1990 any more; we don’t have to defend Tony Meola’s haircut. The time has come to live and let live.

Image by AFP via @daylife

One set of quarterfinals in the World Cup books, and one must say the entertainment value has repaid all that time we’ve spent listening to vuvuzelas, ignoring Glenn Beck and pretending that Portugal was going to do something. Today’s games were crazy, brutal, heartbreaking, dramatic and—as is always most important—hilarious in their own subtle, nasty way.

The World Cup run-in is high season for weird theories about how football works. Why, some genius just wrote an analysis suggesting that nations only win World Cups if they’ve experienced a period of authoritarian government. (Run of Play’s dissection of this thesis is a better read than the original itself.) There’s the Soccernomics approach, which factors in population, GDP and footballing experience, by which logic neither Uruguay nor Ghana stood a chance of winning today’s match (against one another) for various reasons.

All this theorizing ignores a key (if hoodoo) precept about football, which is: Given a choice between a rational outcome based on two sides’ relative merits and a result that plays a malicious, ironic, smirking little joke on someone, football will most often choose the latter.

Consider poor Brazil. They used to play so prettily—a brand-name circus performance, really—but then the football gods sat them down and gave them a stern talking to. Look, Brazil, we all like this jogo bonito bullshit you’ve been peddling, and please feel free to keep using it in the adverts. But these days, winning is is an adult pastime, so you’ve got to get some discipline and organization and a few bat-swingers in defense. Structure! Holding midfielders! Play like professionals!

So Brazil dutifully goes out and hires a squareheaded martinet of a manager. He puts together a side that leaves out a lot of the Federative Republic’s flair products in favor of cold-blooded pragmatists. The whole outfit spends a solid year bumming out the world with its insistence that winning comes first and, dammit all, we’re not going to have any fun doing it, either.

And, of course, today they needed flair. They ran into the other nation most associated with Art Football; moreover, the other nation that has been slapped around for not getting the result after scientific displays of awesomeness. (Holland is the Arsenal of international football: if they never had to play anyone, they’d win every trophy.) The Dutch lured Brazil into a tight, gritty foul-fest, a Stalingrad-style house-to-house fight all about achieving a position, bunkering in, taking a kick, achieving a position, and doing it all over again. Faced with a side content to tackle, harass, harry and flail in scrubby little set-piece goals, Brazil desperately needed a moment of aesthetic supremacy—an inarguable slash through midfield followed by an exclamatory finish.

Instead, all they had was Dungaball, and some naive and ineffectual thuggery. Dunga. He was the future, once—the guy who was going to grow Brazil the fuck up so it could win in the muscular modern game. Except today they didn’t need muscle. They needed Art. Cala boca Wesley Sneijder, bitches!

Then, Ghana. This is my sixth World Cup, and I have watched a lot of football over the last 20 years. (Time I’ll never get back, I suppose.) And I’ve never seen an ending weirder, more arbitrary and more cruel than the freakshow of missed penalties and evil-doing rewarded that brought the Black Stars’ inspirational, continent-uniting underdog run to an end. I loved it.

See, Ghana distinguished itself by becoming the only African team that knows how to get a result, come what may. Dating back (at least) to their cold-blooded 2006 elimination of the United States, they’ve always been willing to do the business. Dive in the box? Waste a little time with a fake injury? Why not? It’s a Man’s Game, after all.

Football’s message to Ghana: “Oh, you think you’re hardboiled? Meet Luis Suarez’s hand!” I’ve been wracking my brain for a Hand-of-God-style sobriquet for Suarez’s last-second “save”—someone will get there, I’m quite sure—but in the end, it was just the kind of bizarre intervention that twists history one way and not another. Plan all you want, and you cannot plan for Suarez’s hand. Sorry, Black Stars—but you had 120 minutes to win it, and you didn’t, so fare thee well.

Now we have one semifinal set, between two teams riding some seriously dark mojo. What vicious little pranks do football’s elves have in store for the Netherlands and Uruguay? I, for one, look forward to the horror with great eagerness.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

This morning, I turned on my television at 0700, conditioned to expect the oddly comforting drone of the vuvuzelas and one of ESPN’s plummy Anglo-Saxon accents. Instead: tennis. I have nothing against tennis, but the sudden absence of soccer—this lull between the World Cup round of 16 and quarterfinals—gave me a premature case of post-Cup depression. The end of soccer’s month-long festival always feels weird and empty, and today provided a foretaste of the desolation.

The only obvious cure is to think up ways to improve the World Cup. Oh, some would argue that the current tournament’s massive TV ratings prove that there’s nothing wrong with the World Cup. That view ignores one of the World Cup’s key attractions: there is always something wrong with the World Cup. There are too few European teams, or too many. We need video replay, or we don’t. There’s too much rough play, or too many red cards. The important thing is that there’s always, always, always something that needs fixing, i.e., debating at length.

So far in this World Cup, some problems have solved themselves. Portugal, for example, is out. But other problems loom. At the moment, I’m considering the Problem of Paraguay.

Paraguay, in many ways, is an admirable side. Ferocious. Committed. Organized. Their success in this tournament, as they are bound for a marquee quarterfinal match-up with Spain, testifies to those knottier aspects of football science that I called the weapons of the weak not long ago. One must admire a team from a small, poor country that rides its grit, determination and stubborn skill all the way to the last eight. And I like tight little teams that don’t surrender goals, in part because they piss off shallow American sportswriters.

But the problem is that Paraguay could actually, conceivably, win the World Cup playing this way, and that just won’t do. Whatever the ‘Guay’s steely virtues, their 120-minute 0:0 draw with Japan yesterday was a form of living death. (As Run of Play tweeted from the depths of this game’s existential crisis: “I think the abyss just gazed into me.”) If the CIA didn’t force inmates at all their worldwide black sites to watch that ‘un, they missed a trick in the enhanced interrogation sweepstakes. And yet, without scoring a goal in knock-out play, Paraguay plows on.

Here’s my bright idea: Install a special rule for the World Cup’s first knock-out round. This rule would stipulate that after a 0:0 draw in this round, a penalty-kick shootout is held as per usual. The loser of the shootout is out of the tournament, obviously. However, the winner of the shootout is not guaranteed a place in the quarterfinals. They have to wait. If any other team is eliminated on penalty kicks after scoring a goal in either regulation or extra time, those two teams meet in a special supplemental game scheduled for one of these two fallow days between knock-out rounds. (In other words, if Spain v. Portugal had finished 1:1, the shootout loser would play Paraguay tomorrow. If the US had held Ghana but subsequently lost on penalties, the Americans would play Paraguay tomorrow.)

If an odd number of teams meets these criteria (shootout winner after 0:0; shootout loser after any goals scored), the team with the fewest goals scored in the round—or, as the next tiebreaker, over the course of the tournament—is out.

See what I mean? Of course, as it turned out, none of the other seven games went to penalties, so the point is moot this time. But in the future, this rule would provide a massive incentive not to settle for a 0:0 extra-time draw. If an 0:0 result had already occurred in the round, teams would hesitate before settling for any draw. No players or managers would seek out an extra World Cup game. However, this rule would occasionally provide bonus entertainment for fans and extra revenue for cash-strapped FIFA and Sepp Blatter’s cabana-boy gratuity fund.

I’m sure there’s a flaw here, somewhere. But right now I am too blinded by my own genius to notice.

—

For more great solutions to sports-world problems you didn’t know we had, check out The Renegade Sportsman, book-length version.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

So this is new: I’m used to my football fandom marking me as a cappuccino-damaged rootless cosmopolitan who would gladly sell his homeland to the Frogs for a pack of Gauloises and a muscular rub-down from a vaguely Slavic pool boy. Now, however, I learn that I am actually a jingoistic propaganda machine spewing “nationalist dribble.” Well, times do change.

Apparently my misty-eyed ramble about Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria—undertaken, as all good blog posts should be, after a couple of beers—marked an effort to elide America’s “history of slavery, genocide, and imperial expansion, as well as its present day reality of ongoing racism, war, impoverishment, and inequality).” I’m glad I deleted the paragraph in which I wrote that we might as well just INVADE IRAQ AGAIN! now that we’re good enough at soccer to beat those Baghdad kids’ teams our troops were always playing for morale purposes. That really would have stirred things up at the Institute for Policy Studies, “a think tank without walls,” and perhaps a few other things.

So goes the weird life of the American football fan. I recently devoted a book chapter to my people’s shadowy existence. (A book written, it might interest the IPS Political Commissariat to know, largely in my “stoner anarchist” persona.) I guess my celebration of American soccer fandom’s grassroots, DIY nature might establish me as some kind of patriot, although probably the kind of pansy who, when pressed to identify what makes him proud to be an American, starts babbling about Miles Davis, Mark Twain and the Ramones.

But, then, I’m used to an odd and ambiguous national identity vis a vis el futbol. The night before the World Cup began, I was in San Francisco, out to dinner with some knowledgeable friends. (In fact, out with some of the Project 2010 braintrust, responsible for a blog brilliant enough to analyze Kasey Keller’s hair.) Naturally, we started talking about the then-imminent USA v. England match. While red wine and subsequent time impair my memory of the moment, I’m sure England’s relative terribleness figured into the conversation.

We were midstream, in fact, before I simultaneously realized that accents among the foursome at the next table bore a decidedly English flavor, and that they had gone very quiet. Some sotto voce recriminations then began to crackle our way. When our new “friends” departed, one gent made a pointed observation to the restaurant’s manager: “Football’s a funny game, and you never know. But I don’t think I’ll be disappointed on Saturday.”

It was, in other words, just a typical night out in any major American city, all of which hold people from all over the world and scads of soccer folk. All the same, it was evident that our fellow diners found hearing their team derided (or accurately diagnosed, perhaps) in dulcet Yankee tones particularly infuriating.

And let us face facts—there’s a reason ESPN hired a bunch of Englishmen to supply their World Cup commentary. Hell, I’ve following football for 20 years, and I even sound unnatural to myself when I say stuff like “they’ve got to keep their shape.”

“I think for a lot of the world,” I said (to no one in particular, I’m sure), “hearing an American talk about soccer is a little like seeing a monkey smoke a cigarette.”

“Right,” one of those knowledgeable friends chimed. “You know, on some level, it’s physically possible—the monkey’s got hands, he’s got a mouth—but there’s something not quite right about it.”

The political/cultural/sporting right wing will certainly never tire of their anti-soccer diatribes and lazy attacks on the game’s place, or lack thereof, on these shores. This, of course, despite the fact that the US undoubtedly holds more football fans and players, in raw numbers, than most other countries on Earth. On The New Republic’s excellent World Cup blog, the ever-marvelous Aleksandar Hemon says about all that’s worth saying on the eternal (and clichéd) question of whether soccer will “make it in America”. As Hemon points out, Americans have been playing football for more than a century. We sent a team to the first World Cup. American teams compete in one of the world’s oldest national cup competitions. And then:

Beyond history, evidence can be found on the streets and in the parks of, say, Chicago, where on any given weekend you could find armies of people playing soccer entirely unconcerned with what some hard-nosed sportswriter or David Brooks might think about their game.

If dismissing soccer as un-American were not a sure symptom of windbag-ness, I would worry about the majority that not only disregards a minority but perceives it as un-American for being so. It is a fundamentally undemocratic position and thus fundamentally un-American.

I would add that the reverse is also true: supporting Team USA, and admiring its internal and nationally characteristic (i.e. rooted) cosmopolitanism, does not equate to endorsing Wounded Knee or Coca-Cola or wanting the Stars and Stripes to rule the world. The truth is, soccer in America is messy and complicated and big and sprawling. Like the country itself, you might say. The American game’s cultural, aesthetic and social nuances are beyond the thinking of the rigid and righteous on both sides of the political spectrum.

The monkey smokes the cigarette. He thinks it makes him look cool. He prefers Gauloises.

Image via Wikipedia

Today, the World Cup officially got serious. Uruguay and The Good Korea played a fierce win-or-go-home game in the pouring rain. The United States’ gutsy run ended against the sinister forces of Ghana…again.

The Epcot Center portion of the competition is over. Henceforth, no hanging around just because your country has cool indigenous music or because you hosted the 1954 World Cup and everyone feels bad for you now. The comedy novelty acts and legacy admissions are out—France, Italy, off to medical experimentation with both of ya. Several hundred Chinese actors can now return to the casting couches of Shanghai after their dream gig playing fake North Korea fans got spiked.

And with the USA eliminated, things get emotionally complicated for American fans. In my case, there’s England, who play Germany tomorrow in a rematch of 1914, 1939 (I’m sorry, but you have to mention The Wars; it’s in the by-laws) and 1966 (again, the by-laws). This part of the World Cup almost always brings on a weird personal dilemma for me. I call it my England Problem. The problem: On the one hand, now that Team America Fighting is out, I would like to support England against Ze Germans, for reasons of Atlanticist brotherhood and almost speaking the same language. I have a lot of English friends and I’m just goofy for Wodehouse.

On the other hand, the England team kind of makes me want to vomit.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this should be. Yes, I would rather see more of Germany’s super-cool Mesut Özil than England’s lumbering Emile Heskey. Yes, many of England’s supporters and about 99 percent of its sports media pull off an unappealing combination of arrogance, hubris, self-hatred and paranoia. And they haven’t been playing very good soccer so far, with just two goals scored against USA, Slovenia and Algeria. But in all of that, they’re not really very different from any other team in the tournament. So what’s with my deal?

I think this is it: knowing too much about English soccer makes it hard for me to support England. This has everything to do with the twisted sentimental education received by many American soccer fans. Like many of my fellow Yankee imperialist scum who’ve liked the sport for awhile, I have a complicated relationship with English soccer that English soccer doesn’t know (or, in any case, care) anything about.

With this World Cup inspiring actual interest in this country, it bears remembering that not too long ago, being an American soccer fan was akin to belonging to a particularly obscure and pitiable sexual minority. You had to visit strange bars at odd hours and mix with unusual people whom you recognized by coded sartorial choices, such as a Bayern Munich scarf worn in July. You had to seek out “speciality publications.” In my case, I spent many pre-Internet hours secreted in my university’s library, reading three-week old copies of The Observer, which somehow retained a peculiar damp, British industrial scent of their own, making the practice feel even more like hanging out in the back room of sketchy porn shop.

In this sad but sociologically fascinating context, getting into English soccer was a right of passage. We all have favo(u)rite English Premier League teams and we all spend far more time reading The Guardian for its soccer coverage than we spend reading, say, The Washington Post for any reason. (Here I should note that all this really only applies to whitebread Anglo boys like me; American fans of Latin or other extraction have anxieties of their own.) We all tend to talk like fake Englishmen when we talk about soccer. English stadiums (stadia!) boast Medieval-war names like Anfield and Turf Moor; the clubs (clubs! not “franchises”!) all sound cool, exotic and ultra-English. Arsenal? Yes! Preston North End? Amazing. Sheffield Wednesday? What the sam-fuck is that? What happened to Sheffield Tuesday? In contrast, American teams use naff (“naff!”) names thought up by marketing interns, like “Real Salt Lake,” the sports equivalent of naming a one-horse frontier shithole “Paris.”

If global soccer was a high school, England would be the popped-collar preppie kid with the infinity-edge pool in his backyard; maybe his family hasn’t actually accomplished anything in decades, but they have a huge trust fund. Meanwhile, American fans are the kids on the short bus, looking on in envy and thwarted, unspeakable love.

Personally, I add a broader and even more pathetic sports-dork Anglophilia to the equation. I recently devoted most of chapter of an actual book to my love for English darts players and gonzo British sledders. This is the sport-cultural equivalent of donning knickers, bending over and screaming “THANK YOU, SIR! MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?”

England is the default second choice for many American fans come World Cup time. (Or first choice. I know this one dude, as American as you or me or Barack Obama on his mother’s side, who actually supported England instead of the US when the two teams played at the beginning of the tournament. As a symbolic protest, I un-followed him on Twitter for ten minutes.) This makes some sense. We sort of speak the same language; many of us had emotionally abusive youth-soccer coaches with British accents—which, incidentally, is all you need to get a job coaching youth soccer in this country. Thanks to the Premier League, England’s players, even the ones who aren’t David Beckham, are famed icons of global sport. That makes the team easier to relate to than, say, the Slovakians.

But in my case, this familiarity has produced a certain level of contempt. I spend a significant portion of my fall and winter following a Premier League team (Liverpool, no doubt due to some grisly crime I committed in a previous life). And so I have been psychologically conditioned to hate a large majority of the England team’s players.

Whatever the reality may be, I can’t help but think of defender John Terry, who plays for Chelsea, as a whiny cuckolder. Wayne Rooney, reportedly a very nice man in real life, is firmly established in my mind as an unnervingly childlike psychopath. All those hours wasted on Limey “football” websites leave me steeped in all the worst aspects of England’s soccer culture: the petty, vindictive urge to chop down anyone successful (Exhibit A: Beckham, David); the bitchy arrogance about any and all other sporting cultures, especially ours; Manchester United.

Due to this exposure, I have also accidentally developed a connoisseur’s enjoyment for English suffering. The Dutch invented “total football.” Argentina has Lionel Messi. Brazil is the sport’s global good-times symbol. But no one suffers like England—it’s the one aspect of modern soccer they have totally mastered. So something sick, dark, and dishono(u)rable within me longs for the moment when England stops pretending it’s going to win the World Cup and begins the torturous inquest into why it failed. In many ways, that’s when the entertainment begins.

But there’s another impulse within me, one which says that maybe England has suffered enough. My chosen club’s heroic captain, Steven Gerrard, is also leading the national side after Rio Ferdinand hurt himself and John Terry got caught rogering. I may be a horrible person in many ways, but I don’t think I’m capable of rooting against Stevie G. I also have a sneaking suspicion that England’s Italian manager, Fabio Capello, just might be able to coax his boys into playing “good football” yet.

Thus it continues, my England Problem. At 7 am Pacific time tomorrow, I will likely don a tweed blazer and start saying “quite” after anyone makes a statement. But I won’t be proud of it.

Image by AFP via @daylife

Like every other soccer fan in America, I have been on an extended nitrous oxide high today, following Landon Donovan’s instantly epochal, last-last-last-ditch winner against Algeria. American soccer fans are an emotionally febrile and volatile breed, due to decades of emotional abuse. Today’s victory hit us all pretty hard. In the moments after the USA (The White Buffalo? At last?) clinched advancement to the World Cup’s next round, Donovan was crying. I was crying. My wife was crying. Everyone was basically having a mass collective orgasm/sob/consciousness-raising on Twitter. This team tortures us beyond belief, but this time the ending was happy, and we didn’t even have to leave a $50 tip.

I was going to channel all the vim and ecstasy into one hellacious blogpost celebrating the team’s particular Americanness. As in so many things, George Vecsey of The New York Times does it better than I could ever hope. Vecsey even quotes the neo-Whitmanesque sage DaMarcus Beasley (?!) on our National Character: “We bring something to the table, the American people as a whole.”

Well, hell’z yeah. That we do. And this team, as Donovan said in his trademark squeaky grown-up voice in the post-game interview, embodies that something in many ways. Call it, perhaps, a protean, republican spirit of inclusion through merit. The pile-up on Donovan after his goal involved Hispanic dudes, white dudes, black dudes—even a Scottish dude. It was a fleshy amalgamation produced by a country that has always been polyglot and multihued. As my colleague and teammate Andrew Guest—who is in South Africa, blogging his mind out for Pitch Invasion—pointed out in a fascinating analysis, 60 percent of the USA’s preliminary squad players had parents born overseas. And yet you couldn’t unearth a more prototypically American group of guys at any mall in the nation.

Our republic’s best asset and finest quality is its capacity for fusion. Today’s decisive goal began with a brilliant quarterback-style lob from Hungarian-American Jersey kid Tim Howard to sort-of-Canadian Cali boy Landon Donovan, who slid it forward to another New Jerseyan, Haitian-American Jozy Altidore. Everyone’s favorite word for Altidore is “raw,” by which I think people mean he makes really bad decisions on the ball quite frequently. The kid is part bull, though, and this time he muscled into the box and cut it to Clint Dempsey, a Texan who claims his parents sold some of their guns to finance his youth soccer career. UNITED STATES! UNITED STATES! Dempsey jabbed, the fine Algerian ‘keeper parried, and Donovan lashed it home.

See? Fusion. We’ve heard a lot about “real American” this and “real American” that over the last couple of years, and lately certain polities have indicated that people should be prepared to show their papers to prove that they are, indeed, real Americans. Offering no further comment on that nonsense, I would submit that this goal, among its many fine qualities, was real, real American.

I was going to append these rambling observations with a hearty and profane dismissal of all the talk-radio blatherheads and Jurassic daily newspaper columnists in this country who have slagged off the sport of football over the years. But, y’know, victory leaves me in a benevolent mood. I hope those guys (they’re all guys) watched today’s game and enjoyed it. Maybe a few will weigh the error of their misspent past and join us, the Soccer People, on the right side of history. (We’ll become less annoying in the future—but not today.) Fusion, right? Fusion.

Now, it’s all-in for the group rounds. We’re in a bracket with Ghana, Uruguay and South Korea. Anything can happen.

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For more on the strange psychological netherworld of the American soccer fan, check out my book, The Renegade Sportsman.

Easy! With Diego Maradona’s Patented Management Secrets, you too can achieve global success, national iconhood and impressive bearditude. Here are three simple ways that you can DO IT LIKE DIEGO!

1) ESTABLISH A BIZARRE FREUDIAN/OEDIPAL RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR TOP EMPLOYEE: In the run-up to this World Cup, if you could not sense the tension between Argentina manager (<<this is the Argentine word for “capricious living god”) Diego Maradona and Barcelona uberwunderkind Lionel Messi just by the peculiar metallic tang in the air, you were probably dead. You had to feel for both parties—a little. Maradona was chosen to manage the national side on a day when the entire AFA was drunk and in a reckless, fatalistic mood. (“Fuck it! Y’know? FUCK IT! We’re fucking hiring fucking Diego. FUCK IT!”) Messi, spirited out of Argentina to receive growth-hormone shots and the world’s finest football instruction when he was a mere child, will basically punch the next person who suggests he’s “the next Maradona” straight in the throat.

So Maradona was playing Messi out of position, and Messi was acting all “miserable child” in the way that only he can. Then there’s the personality gap between the two men; i.e., Diego Maradona owns one of the most robust personalities of modern times, whereas Lionel Messi seems like a nice boy who has no life whatsoever outside football. Maradona hobnobs with Castro. Messi—and I’m not saying he’s stupid; just that this information holds little meaning for him—gives the strong impression that he would struggle to describe Castro’s world-historical significance. The whole team looked doomed for disaster.

BUT WAIT. Instead, Messi seems quite happy playing back in midfield for Diego, and Diego seems overjoyed with little Lionel’s performance. Could it be that Diego has played Messi’s psychology perfectly, drumming up creative tension and instilling an intense desire for affection withheld? What did Maradona whisper in Messi’s ear as he embraced him after Argentina’s easy win over Greece today? Wouldn’t you die to know? Did he say: You are my son and heir, the chosen one? Or did he say: Messi, you look like the fifth fucking Beatle and you should have buried three today? Either way, take note for your next big meeting!

2) HIRE ONLY THE OLD AND INFIRM, WHILE SHUNNING THOSE AT THE TOP OF THEIR PROFESSION. On its face, Maradona’s decision to include Martin Demichelis and Martin Palermo in his squad, but not, say, Juan Roman Riquelme or Esteban Cambiasso seems patently absurd. Demichelis’ oft-flailing play with Bayern Munich this season had me firmly and unshakably convinced that he hailed from some obscure French-speaking part of Germany and was the product of some bizarre agricultural development program. Meanwhile, Cambiasso spent a season as an integral part of Inter Milan’s brain-freezing defensive machine. Riquelme is every romantic’s choice to run the Albiceleste midfield. Martin Palermo is older than me.

And yet, today, Demichelis and Palermo combined to score the goals that set Argentina up for the next round. Could it be…this is a terrible thought…could it be…that Maradona knows what he’s doing?

3) MARK EVERY MOMENT OF SUCCESS WITH AN OUTBURST OF PSYCHOTIC GLEE. Indeed, Maradona’s out-of-hand goal celebrations are fast becoming the best reason to watch this World Cup. Middle-managers of Earth, be advised! This is how you blast an organization straight to the top! By the force of will, Rosary beads and a general Wolfman-on-mescaline vibe!

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My new book, The Renegade Sportsman, is now available.