Inching towards history

Will the U.S. ever win the World Cup?

It’s a tricky question, and one that’s been posed a lot in the last week.

We’re a big enough country. Even with soccer as the fourth or fifth most popular sport, we have more than 3 million kids playing the sport at the youth level, so there’s plenty of interest. We have a burgeoning professional league, growing interest among younger Americans and momentum from making the tournament each of the last six times.

So you’d think, at some point, we’ll be good enough to win.

But just because we’re interested and involved doesn’t mean it’s inevitable.

Only eight countries have won the thing. Major, soccer-loving, first-world countries have been left off that list. Mexico, Portugal, Netherlands and Belgium have never won. Until the last tournament, either had Spain. France and England have only won once, and only when they hosted.

The U.S. finished third once. In the first World Cup. It took us 20 years to get back. It took 40 more years to get to a third. We’re starting from behind. Nearly every country we face in the World Cup has a 60-year head start.

And that’s our trouble. We’re still kind of new to soccer.

Even then, we haven’t really gotten going until recently.

The sport finally was noticed again in 1990, a year after we learned we’d host in 1994. The team made a run in 1994 and we finally started a professional league. We bombed in 1998 before a very successful trip in 2002, beating Mexico and making the quarterfinals.

But it wasn’t until another terrible finish in 2006 that we put our entire weight behind becoming the best in the world. That’s a little more than seven years we’ve been working at this. Soccer hasn’t been shown regularly on television until a few years ago. Soccer in this country is still fighting perception from an older crowd that wants no part of it.

We’re just getting started.

When the American coach said before the World Cup that winning this year wouldn’t be realistic, he wasn’t kidding. Likely, winning in four years won’t be realistic.

But we’re learning fast. In the last four years, we’ve taken on and beaten some of the best in the world. All that support is starting to turn some of our best athletes towards soccer. We’ve had a good start to this World Cup and it seems like, even with a tough draw, we could have favorable finishes in back-to-back tournaments for the first time ever. Major media outlets have gotten behind the sport, which means it won’t be forgotten in the years between World Cups. All this momentum may actually carry through.

So will the U.S. ever win the World Cup? Probably.

But what it will take is one thing we don’t have a lot of in this country.

Patience.

Eventually we’ll get there. In the meantime, we still have some catching up to do.