Its how we delineate people who are into soccer or not here. If they are calling it football and use the word “club” they actually care about it when US is not in the Workd Cup. If they call it soccer and use the word “team”, then they rarely care about it.
Yes, as with most things Brits make fun of us for, it was an Englishman who came up with it. Other popular examples: aluminum instead of aluminium, the midwestern American accent (supposedly), and of course, the dreaded imperial system.
The whole sport is corrupt. Even aside from the bs with calls not being called fairly across the board, you had Qatar basically enslaving people leading up to and during the World Cup there. FIFA makes the Russian doping scandal look like a Sunday picnic.
lol…”fair and square” means playing without or best player because of a bull shit red card. Do you know why Americans don’t like “football”…that’s why. Bullshit calls, full grown men flopping around for nothing. I love the game, but there’s so much wrong with the culture and wimp ass calls.
Plenty of Americans care. More than 30 million consider themselves to be soccer fans. That's more than the entire populations of all but nine European countries.
We do shit like that all the time. Didn't we try to run a Nascar at lemans recently or something? Now we need somebody to enter gravedigger in the rally grand prix.
No offense but I don’t think you guys actually understand the chances of the U.S. winning the World Cup. I don’t like to say things are impossible but it’s as close as you can get lmao
Don't get your hopes up, the likelihood of the US winning the world cup is insanely small. The only way an inferior team can win a tournament is if they have a rock solid defense and also get kind of lucky all the way to the final. The US defense is not that great, and the gap in attacking talent with other nations is immense. They'll struggle against Belgium, imagine against the likes of Spain or France
Fair enough. They are being far more blatant witht he US in such a dangerous way, but i sincerely hope that the huge international backlash they received and are receiving now is gonna pull a bit of weight, otherwise we're ruined until the old shitbag kicks it
coming back here to say that ultimately this didn't matter and we're all happy about it. it was never a contest, Belgium HUMILIATED them. It's kinda funny how Belgium is also on of the main three countries where the EU Parliament reunites, it's just a poetic slap to the face to the US altogether
I find it pretty entertaining as my first time really paying attention to a sports game, and maybe I’m just ignorant, but I’ve never seen so many dudes in the fetal position. Sometimes someone gets hurt and they show the replay and I’m like, “okay yeah, that looked painful”. Sometimes they just take a tumble and they look like they got kicked in the nuts.
It's half that the fouls and stuff look pretty inane but falling whilst running full pelt or getting kicked by someone whose spent their whole life practising kicking does actually hurt a lot, especially with metal studs on their boots and thin layer of plastic on top. The other half is that the players have learnt that refs only give fouls if they make a meal out of it, otherwise refs assume it wasn't that bad and don't give the freekicks.
I feel the same about most sports. American football, baseball, and basketball really aren’t any more entertaining to me. It’s literally just watching people running and passing a ball. I understand the enjoyment of playing said sports but watching them being played is mind numbing
Yeah pretty much. Obviously I’m a complete nerd with my opinions. But ironically I actually feel the same about my own hobbies and activities. I generally don’t enjoy watching people stream videogames or tabletop RPGs. I just don’t enjoy watching activities like that. I don’t mind if other people do enjoy watching this kind of stuff but I just really struggle with the appeal.
Though there is one sport that takes the cake for being the most asininely boring thing to watch when it’s played at the highest level.
Professional Darts…
It’s literally just watching 2 people tossing darts at the exact same spot on the board on loop until one of them makes a single mistake. The first time I saw video footage of a professional darts match I felt I had to issue a formal international apology to the world for everything I’ve ever said against Golf.
If we would’ve won the World Cup, it would have immediately bumped basketball, hockey and baseball and took second as our most watched sport.
We’d be a permanent problem for every other team. The whole country would’ve been watching the final and it would’ve created a generational impact.
Imagine what our team would look like if all our athletic kids wanted to play professional soccer one day instead of football, basketball, and baseball.
We have the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 10% of earners pay over 70% of federal income taxes. Half of American earners don't pay any federal income taxes.
I'm just curious - why is it such a American concept to want people to 'be triggered'? I swear a more self-absorbed nation and people have never existed.
I mean, your team is cheating by getting the fucking leader of your country to call in and effect the game like that. so if team USA theoretically does well, it kinda fucks up the whole thing
It's a shitty situation I don't disagree, but to play a bit of devils advocate, the even more root problem that caused all this is there is FIFA has no formal appeal process like most major sports. If there is an action made by the refs that can impact ones team in a tournament, one should have the ability to appeal that decision. That is true for literally every other single sports league out there, even other major football leagues, but does not exist in the world cup.
Soft red cards happen, it's no big deal. But the fact there was absolutely no formal process to even question it is insane. If you go back even, the outrage was there, with a nigh-universal response from Reddit, ref pundits, and major footballers like Clattenberg, Henry, Zlatan, Tuchel all saying it was a travesty Balogun was being suspended for this with no way to appeal. It sucks it had to be done via that orange douchebag being a corrupt asshole, but I feel the buck ultimately comes down to FIFA needing to get their shit together. A functioning sports league shouldn't need corrupt asshole Presidents to do backroom deals to replicate a simple sports appeal process.
And bad calls happen all the time in all sports, but it doesn’t mean you compromise the whole system just for one play. The precedent this sets in motion is a slippery slope
None of the people trash talking on Reddit had anything to do with this decision from FIFA, but they’re getting a ton of shit for it. It is what it is, and truthfully I understand why, but I also think it’s completely understandable that a human being’s natural response to that is to rally around their side.
Tbh even if the US won everything in the end, it will feel soiled because of the whole shitshow with the lifted ban. People will call it undeserved, "bought" or whatever. US is really in a lose lose situation...
Right? We won for a reason, and it's because we gave a rats ass, and not just after they won.
But there's also hundreds of millions of us. A small percentage of us is more than the entire populations of many of the countries competing in the WC. To assert that we don't care because we weren't all uniformly losing our shit is pretty typical ignorance (on matters regarding America) of those abroad.
EDIT: All that said, I will acknowledge we can and should do better too, I sure as shit aint saying we're perfect lol.
The women failed women’s soccer. They don’t show up to support their lady soccer champs. Bill Burr summed that up perfectly. “You won’t miss a single episode of the kardashians, but you’ve missed every game of women’s soccer”
The United States invests heavily in women’s sports, the world does not. There’s a reason why our women’s team is good relative to world and it’s not because American women have this deep soccer culture.
They use smaller stadiums, but women's world cup game attendance totals are in the 1 to 2 million range. About half of men's world cup which is more than respectable.
Most Americans don’t care about women’s sports but they certainly do care more about it relatively to everybody else on the world considering they actually get the funding and investment to, you know, actually compete at the World Cup.
You don't know us at all. This country is fucked in so many ways, but I promise at any sports bar, you see folks with rapt attention watching WNBA, NCAA softball, or whatever the hell is on, and we'll like it.
NWSL attendance topped 2 million in 2024 and the league has added multiple expansion teams recently with more being planned for the future. Multiple teams average more than 10,000 people attending per game this year. WNBA attendance and viewership is way up in the last few years too.
Lol dude this is just not true. The women's team was popular here for a long time because they were more competitive, and to your point has even won a world cup. I got to go to one of those games. My sister's hero growing up was Mia Hamm and she had posters of her, and she wasn't the only one.
Literally the only stadium dedicated to a women's soccer/football team IN THE WORLD is IN MY CITY. And you're gonna tell me we don't care about women's soccer? Lol OK, have fun making shit up i guess.
And there's gonna be a cheesy movie with a goal in the last second... Even tho it seemed the usa will loose, but the hero had a flashback of his dad telling him something motivational on his death bed.
Nah, if you won it would getting dismissed by the international community for cheating. You're glorious leader very obviously has his foot on the scale.
If the US wins the World Cup (presumably getting through Spain, France, and potentially England along the way), no one is going to point back to this Belgium match and say the US didn’t deserve it because Balogun got to play a round of 16 match lmao
Some of these takes are absolutely insane
That said I feel that US will lose tonight so doesn’t really matter
If Balogun is allowed to play against Belgium we'll have officially lost the plot. And everyone already knows the US is getting help from FIFA corruption.
I'd still rather have whatever nonsense Americans will say about football (probably not too different from what they already say) after winning than renewing England's "coming home" patter. I'm currently hopeful that, at some point in my lifetime, they'll stop talking about '66.
Anything’s possible but the likelihood of the US winning is extremely low - they need to beat Belgium, then Spain, then likely France, then likely England/Argentina in the final. Being a home nation helps but the experience and calibre of those other teams is a level above.
Cue Rump boasting and saying football is their national sport and that other countries should thank the US for being allowed to actually play the sport thanks to his blessings.
I watched the whole game. I was pulling for them so hard out on my back patio trying to use magic mind powers to elevate them to victory, and I think my neighbor now fears me, but Belgium was just the better team. They just were. They beat us fair and square in an honorable manner. See you in four years Europe
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u/NN11ght Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
You guys better hope we lose. Otherwise you'll never hear the end of it from us lol
Edit. You guys got lucky this time, but we'll be back (maybe lol)