U.S. Soccer Takes One Giant Step Back
In the United States, defeat brought hot-take recrimination on Twitter and examination on ESPN, but nothing like the scorn of national outrage. Soccer doesn’t elicit that same rawness of collective emotion here.
Only Brazil has perfect attendance at the 20 World Cups played since the tournament began in 1930. (Germany also has qualified each of the 18 times it has participated.) The architecture of soccer — its low scoring, its capacity for the strange goal, its shoehorning of the final World Cup qualification phase into 10 matches — lends it to extreme randomness not generally found in football, baseball or basketball, said Stefan Szymanski, a Michigan professor and author of “Money and Soccer.”
To say that missing the World Cup “shows everything is wrong with the United States doesn’t follow,” Szymanski said. “This doesn’t prove that. Stuff happens. It’s the nature of the game and not necessarily surprising to see the U.S. knocked out.”
Read the full article by Jeré Longmanin the New York Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/sports/soccer/world-cup-united-states.html