{"id":67,"date":"2014-06-23T21:54:45","date_gmt":"2014-06-23T20:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/?p=67"},"modified":"2015-04-22T11:52:18","modified_gmt":"2015-04-22T09:52:18","slug":"the-german-american-soccer-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/the-german-american-soccer-team\/","title":{"rendered":"The German-American soccer team"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday night, like the Monday before it, was remarkable in the world of American sports. The World Cup tie<\/span> with Portugal, like last week’s victory over Ghana, showed that American soccer might finally have come of age<\/span>.<\/p>\n

It was really not so long ago that US soccer was a joke. A US team participating in an international soccer tournament had about the same status as the Jamaican bobsled team<\/a> at the Olympics. Soccer was a foreign sport in which the US simply did not feel at home.<\/p>\n

Hardly anyone in the US played the sport, let alone<\/span> watched it. Americans found it hard to get excited about a game that, after 90 minutes of play, might end in a score of 1\u20130. It was miles away from basketball, in which points are scored minute by minute, or American football, in which several points can be scored at once in various ways.<\/p>\n

Still, soccer was no more tedious<\/span> than baseball, a game in which busy parents sometimes enrolled<\/span> their kids in order to give them something to do. In baseball, only a couple of players at a time ever get to do anything. The kids who played “little league” rarely seemed to enjoy it.<\/p>\n

Word must have spread, because starting in the 1980s, and certainly by the 1990s, soccer began to take the place of baseball as a viable<\/span> after-school activity. More than 20 years later, a whole generation has grown up regarding soccer as a normal sport.<\/p>\n

In the international arena, there would be a lot of ground to make up<\/span>. Between 1950 and 1990, the US had not even qualified for the World Cup. Each World Cup after that was speculated to be the one in which the US men’s national soccer team might finally show how much progress it had made.<\/p>\n

Still, one could not aim too high. “[US] soccer fans tend to be … realistic,” New York Times<\/i> correspondent Sam Borden wrote in a recent article<\/a>. “Raised on a steady diet of disappointment, they are far more patient than fans of American football.”<\/p>\n

As Borden’s article lays out, a lot of the fundamental conditions of American soccer work against the national team’s success. The game is played at a different time of year than in the rest of the world. Instead of having an intense training period, the national team practices a little bit here and a little bit there. Compared to other nations’ teams, there is a far smaller sense of commitment<\/span> and unity, and no consistent<\/span> strategy.<\/p>\n

This is why, in 2011, German soccer legend J\u00fcrgen Klinsmann was hired to coach the US team \u2014 for a greater salary than had been offered to previous coaches. It’s his job to create order out of chaos, to add some European style, attitude and discipline. <\/p>\n

So far, this seems to be working, and not just because of Klinsmann’s influence. Several of the players on the US team \u2014 John Brooks, Timothy Chandler, Fabian Johnson and Julian Green among them \u2014 are Americans who grew up in Germany and have played for German teams.<\/p>\n

Midfielder Jermaine Jones, the son of a US Army soldier, is another. After Sunday night’s game, in which he shot the first US goal<\/span>, he spoke fluent German to reporters from German television. A few minutes later, Klinsmann, who has spent almost a third of his life in America, spoke to the American media in fluent English. It was the best of both worlds, and beautiful to watch.<\/p>\n

On Thursday<\/a>, the German-American team will face the German team, with Klinsmann pitted against<\/span> his former assistant, Joachim L\u00f6w. Whatever happens, America’s soccer fans, wearing their star-spangled<\/span> bandannas<\/span> and red-and-white-striped shirts, will be there \u2014 under the hot Brazilian sun as well as in the crowded bars of New York and New Orleans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sunday night, like the Monday before it, was remarkable in the world of American sports. The World Cup tie with Portugal, like last week’s victory over Ghana, showed that American soccer might finally have come of age. It was really not so long ago that US soccer was a joke. A US team participating in an international soccer tournament had … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[63,66],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1458,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/1458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}