We are already well over a week into June, which, in the current year in what Canadians and perhaps only Canadians insist on calling “North America,” means two things: Pride Month and World Cup soccer. Rainbow flags flutter alongside the occasional Stars and Stripes while virtue-signaling thin fellows and exotic-looking talking heads debate whether this year’s soccer—association football—tournament will feature enough kneeling and armband lectures to satisfy the commissars. However that may be, the first matches of the FIFA Men’s World Cup—Czechia vs. South Africa, Switzerland vs. Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Canada vs. Qatar—are today. For reasons this article will hopefully make clear, I won’t be actively encouraging the American men I know, or readers of American Greatness, whether male or female, to watch the event.
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This article, happily, won’t dwell on the abomination that is this, or any other year’s, Pride Month, though it’s impossible to ignore how soccer, in its current form at both the international and local levels, has been dragooned—like so many other sports—into honoring homosexual lifestyles and “the LGBTQ+ community” under the banner of forced inclusivity. I won’t be discussing here in detail the embarrassing rainbow laces or how the “Pride Houses across Canada, the USA, and Mexico are welcoming LGBTIQ+ fans, athletes, and allies during the 2026 Men’s World Cup.” The BBC itself has documented some of the utterly absurd results—with this year’s “Pride Match” to be hosted in gay-, grunge-, immigrant-, and apparently soccer-friendly Seattle, featuring the two decidedly non-LGBTQ-friendly nations of Egypt and Iran.
No, the real subject here is the broader theme of how a heavily sanitized version of soccer in the United States has, with a few exceptions among immigrant communities and expatriates who still play and follow the game in its authentic form, become the preferred sport of the credentialed progressive elite—“progressive goodwhites,” as John Derbyshire once called them. Their sympathies or outlooks, even or especially because they are apparently so well-intentioned, are increasingly dangerous to the well-being of American society. And soccer, for reasons that I will discuss here, is their preferred sport—to watch and, above all, to have their kids play. In fact, soccer, at least in the cultured and cultivated form practiced in this country, is perhaps paradoxically dangerous because it is seen as safer than traditional American alternatives and thus appeals largely to the eternally feminine element in human nature. Moreover, as “the world’s game,” it is international—anti-parochial and anti-local—and therefore, as an article in The National Review once argued, ultimately at risk of becoming “anti-American.” It is, at least in most of these respects, fundamentally the opposite of what it is—or used to be—in Britain, where the game was invented.
That danger started with the way American soccer was engineered, at least after the 1970s, to appeal to girls and women, set in motion by Title IX. What the public was sold in 1972 as “a law granting equality of educational opportunities between the genders” eventually turned into an egalitarian sledgehammer. The good this did for girls’ athletics is absolutely real—nobody who wants girls or women to thrive physically seriously denies that—but it came, I think it is safe to say, given the increased leftist politicization of much of women’s team sports, especially soccer and basketball, at a steep cost. Despite their ability to play the game in numbers seen almost nowhere else, as well as their enormous success at it—the United States women’s national soccer team has won a record total of four World Cups—this was never enough. As so often happens with egalitarian trends, what was afforded by equality of opportunity was ultimately deemed insufficient; only equality of outcome—equity, to use the leftist buzzword—was deemed acceptable. So ultimately, at least at the U.S. national level—the professional reality of soccer abroad is totally different—the ladies got what they wanted, and the U.S. women’s and men’s soccer teams signed equal pay agreements.
But the effects of the gradual feminization of the game—never mind the almost masculine zeal with which some of its most outspoken American female stars pursued the social-justice causes they insisted on shoehorning into it—weren’t confined to legal battles and national teams. They also changed the way the sport was sold to ordinary Americans and, in turn, the kind of people who came to embrace it. For the two developments went hand in hand. As increasing numbers of girls and young women took up soccer and excelled at it, playing the game not only for mere fun but to beat opponents and win, the game was simultaneously being marketed to anxious middle-class mothers and their increasingly feminized “partners” as something very different for their sons: “a safe alternative to football,” as a Chicago Tribune article put it in 1994.
This cultivated image of soccer as “safe”—and therefore sterile—only worsens the problem. American youth organizations trumpet its no-hands rules (no hands, no punching?), restricted headers, and supposedly lower concussion risks, claims that are partly overstated but are easily sold to risk-averse parents. The marketing in the United States pushes precisely this form of softness: soccer is inclusive, low-impact, almost therapeutic. This version fits the almost instinctive progressive recoil from true masculine exertion and the preference for participation trophies over decisively beating an opponent. Whereas American football rewards hierarchy, conquest, and the channeling of violence into strategy, resilience, and victory, the domestic version of soccer in the United States, by and large, while not exactly eliminating those tendencies, tamps them down and softens them. The feminine character of the game almost feels woven into its fabric here.
In addition to all this—especially among the cultured and cosmopolitan members of America’s upper middle class—is soccer’s faux internationalism, the effectual truth of which is the same sneering sort of sanctimoniousness that looks down on blue-collar Americans—especially white ones—in almost all walks of life. Our cosmopolitan-seeming, middle-class lovers of culture from the right kinds of “goodwhite” or “snob” leafy urban neighborhoods or suburbs—not the wrong “slob” kind—adore soccer precisely because it is “the world’s game” and not America’s; as such, it undermines parochial American tastes—especially gross and yucky flyover country ones that find expression at cookouts and at Super Bowl parties—and exceptionalism. The sport is growing in popularity, not only “because people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies have brought their love of the beautiful game to an increasingly multicultural United States,” an NPR article gushed in 2010, but because the right kind of Americans—the ones who listen to NPR—imagine they love “people from Latin America, Africa, and the West Indies” and so on more than they love those same people’s working-class, white American equivalents. Now, it should be said here that a healthy dose of patriotism does seem to shape these same people’s support for the U.S. national team during the World Cup, suggesting that even among this deracinated group there remains a basic impulse to identify the good with one’s own. But there is also evidence that Americans who, for all the reasons I have gone into already, follow European club soccer—and by “Americans” here I do not mean first-, second-, or even third-generation immigrant groups who remain loyal to their ancestral national teams—often end up favoring the countries that produce “the elite players at European teams” they already support. And it is often the case, of course, that those same “European teams” are hardly European, since the elite clubs frequently have squads where well over a third, and sometimes close to half, are non-European players anyway.
None of this bears any resemblance whatsoever to soccer’s—British football’s—authentic roots as a working-class game. The great English clubs—those of our Anglophone ur-ancestors—emerged from the hardy spirit of working men formed by the Industrial Revolution. West Ham United, for example, was started by the Thames Ironworks shipyard laborers in 1895. Manchester United originated among Newton Heath’s railway workers. And Arsenal was established by employees of the Woolwich armaments factory. These were organizations of proletarian identity, territorial pride, and raw masculine passion, later echoed in the terraces and pubs—and yes, among the rowdy young men, the “supporters,” and even the hooligans, the “casuals,” and “thugs,” as Bill Buford called them—that sustained them.
As someone who grew up kicking a ball with other boys on the grey, gritty, grimy asphalt playgrounds of working-class Scotland in the 1980s—jumpers for goalposts, broken bottles in the corners, no referees coddling feelings, and no mums frantically watching us and worrying about ouches or concussions—I at least have a palpable sense of what this version of soccer, or football, was. It was rough, raw, territorial, and very much working-class. That stands in striking contradiction to the soft version of the game so loved by the urbane, pseudo-sophisticated, latte-loving members of the upper middle class here. As I said above, these people often seem to despise America’s homegrown working class while fetishizing the “working-class game” imported from abroad, almost actually blind to, or paradoxically romantically deluded about, its actual character. They cheer the sanitized version played on television or at their kids’ private schools—or even at the heavily secure, probably hooligan-free World Cup matches this summer—but would recoil in horror from the true British working-class football supporters, with their derisively labeled “lad culture,” who are now standing against mass migration, grooming gangs, and cultural replacement in Britain. The Football Lads Alliance represents the ardent and desperately needed defense of nationhood that our domestic, soccer- and “luvvie”-loving Left would brand as primitive bigotry.
Soccer, football, possesses an objective beauty that I can’t deny—I miss the almost uncanny, but thoroughly British, juxtaposition of the roaring crowds with their chants and the soothingly calm voices of the best English, Scottish, and Northern Irish commentators calling Saturday matches. And there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that soccer is a beautiful game when played well. But the version cultivated here over the past 50 years is fundamentally antithetical to both its original version and true Americanness. American football, by contrast, grew up as a home-grown expression of toughness, determination, skill, and unifying team spirit, whether in its Ivy League origins or its working-class NFL evolution. It belongs to this soil; despite its distant kinship to rugby, it is not a foreign import.
American “soccer,” by contrast, is mostly pay-to-play globalist cosplay. It thrives in affluent suburbs and urban enclaves among dual-income professionals chasing the mirage of “global citizenship.” Youth leagues have become a lucrative racket, another résumé line for college applications, with polite cheering from folding chairs and halftime orange slices. The absurdity of the thing here finds its most bizarre expression when Major League Soccer teams in sterile stadiums ape British working-class names like “D.C. United” with zero connection to shipyards, railways, or dockworkers. It is an empty lifestyle brand for credentialed members of the upper middle class, soaked in the very woke illusions that Americans, of whatever class background, should actually reject.
Authentic soccer culture demands unapologetic masculinity, working-class attitudes, and national particularism. Traditional American sports still reward the virtues that Britain’s terraces once embodied. If Americans want to learn anything useful from European soccer fans and their fellow travelers in the United Kingdom, they should watch the ones currently attempting to defend their countries against civilizational collapse—not the rainbow-kneeling globalists. That lesson, of course, is unlikely to be received in good faith in the United States, where elite cultural instincts tend to turn every functional hierarchy into a therapeutic one. So in the meantime, keep your boys, if you have them, in American football, baseball, or any genuinely American pursuit. And, at the very least, don’t go out of your way to watch the World Cup. You’ll have the additional guilty pleasure of annoying all the right people. When you tell the soccer moms that your son plays American football, say, or a similarly tough sport that also requires raw ruggedness, they will look at you with that mixture of contempt, bewilderment, and disdain that Angela Merkel displayed when she tossed aside her own country’s flag in 2015. “That’s so barbaric,” they’ll quietly think, which they will hide even from themselves while they feign concern with the follow-up question: “Aren’t you worried about concussions?”
