What the World Cup teaches us about America at 250
On the night of July 1, in a stadium south of San Francisco that FIFA had temporarily stripped of its corporate name, a striker named Folarin Balogun scored, then got himself a red card and sent off from the game, then left his teammates to finish the job a man down. They finished it as Malik Tillman curled a free kick off the goalkeeper's hand in the 82nd minute, and the United States beat Bosnia and Herzegovina 2-0 to reach the round of 16 for only the second time this century. It was the first knockout-round win the men's team has managed since 2002, the year some of these players were learning to walk.
I watched the way a lot of us watched, half standing, phone face-down, yelling at a television that could not hear me. And somewhere in the second half, down a man and hanging on, it struck me that the two players who decided the game were a fair summary of the whole country now turning 250 years old.
Balogun was born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents and raised in London. He could have played for the United States, England, or Nigeria, and in 2023 he chose the country he was born in. Tillman was born in Nuremberg, Germany, near an Army base, to a German mother and an American father who wore the uniform. Look down the rest of the roster and the pattern holds. Tim Weah, born in Brooklyn, is the son of George Weah, the only African player to win the Ballon d'Or and later the president of Liberia; his mother is Jamaican American; he was eligible for four national teams before he picked this one. Ricardo Pepi was born in El Paso to Mexican parents. Haji Wright was born in Los Angeles to a Ghanaian father and a Liberian mother. Gio Reyna was born in England, and his grandfather crossed into the United States from Argentina in 1968. Six of the 26 men were born outside the country. More than half hold dual citizenship. Across the whole tournament, close to a quarter of the players are representing a nation other than the one where they were born.
Some people look at a team like that and feel the ground shift a little, wondering what exactly they are cheering for. I understand the reflex. But I think it has the story backward. The American team has almost never been eleven sons of the same soil. It has been an act of assembly, and that assembly is the oldest and truest thing about us.
Here is the anecdote I keep returning to. On June 29, 1950, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, a team of American amateurs beat England, the inventors of the game and one of the best sides in the world. The Americans were letter carriers, a schoolteacher named Walter Bahr, a man named Frank Borghi who drove a hearse for his uncle's funeral home. They had trained together almost not at all. Oddsmakers had the United States at 500 to 1 to win the tournament. The only goal came in the 37th minute, when Bahr took a hopeful shot from 25 yards and a center forward dove headlong across the box and grazed it with his head, sending the ball the wrong way past a wrong-footed keeper. They still call it the shot heard round the world.
The man who scored it was named Joe Gaetjens, and he was not, strictly speaking, American. He was Haitian, from a prominent family in Port-au-Prince, in New York on a scholarship to study accounting at Columbia. He washed dishes at a café in Harlem to get by, and he played for a club in the Bronx for about $25 a game. Under the rules of the time you did not need citizenship to wear the shirt. You only had to declare that you intended to become a citizen someday. Gaetjens declared it, and then he scored the most famous goal in the history of American soccer. It was the only goal he ever scored for the United States. He went home to Haiti, and in 1964 he disappeared, apparently taken by the Duvalier regime's secret police, killed by the country he came from after giving his adopted one a moment it still brags about.
I find it hard to think of a cleaner picture of the American bargain. A man arrives with his talent and his intentions, gives the place something it could not have produced on its own, and asks in return for the chance to belong. Sometimes the country keeps its end. Sometimes the world he left behind reaches back for him. Both of those are part of the record.
The second time the country hosted, the bargain was institutional. FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States on July 4, 1988, which is either a coincidence or a punchline, depending on your mood. Almost nobody thought it was a good idea. The United States had no top professional league. Skeptics predicted empty stands and general confusion in a nation that reserved the word football for a different game entirely. What happened instead was the best-attended World Cup ever played, nearly 3.6 million people through the gates, a record that stood for 32 years. FIFA had attached one condition to the whole gamble: the country had to build itself a real league. Major League Soccer was the result, ten teams then, thirty now. The 1994 team reached the round of 16 and lost to Brazil on the Fourth of July.
That 32-year attendance record is falling this summer, broken by the tournament the 1994 gamble made possible. The United States is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico, 48 teams, 104 matches, the final set for July 19 at a stadium in the New Jersey marshes across the water from the harbor where so many of the relevant grandparents first arrived. The whole thing lands on the country's 250th birthday.
So what does the World Cup teach us about America at 250? Mostly it teaches us what we already had the evidence to know and periodically talk ourselves out of.
It teaches that being American has always been closer to a declared intention than a bloodline. Gaetjens signed a piece of paper saying he meant to stay. Balogun weighed three passports and chose this one. The country was founded on a document, not a lineage, and a document is the kind of thing a person can walk up and sign. That is a feature. It always has been.
It teaches that the diversity of cultures here is a competitive advantage before it is a moral one, and it is a considerable moral one. A country that can draw talent from Lagos and Nuremberg and El Paso and Kingston, and braid it into something that plays for a single crest, is a country doing the thing it is uniquely built to do. Nations with older and purer ideas of who counts cannot assemble this team. We can. On the field the payoff is obvious. Off it, the payoff is a civilization that keeps renewing itself with people who chose it.
None of this is happening in a quiet year. The tournament is playing out against a loud national argument about immigration and who belongs, and the roster reads, whether the players intend it or not, as a modest rebuttal. You can hold a serious view about borders and enforcement and still notice that the men wearing the shirt this month are the argument's living footnotes. A country gets to decide how it manages its edges. It does not have to lie to itself about where its strength comes from while it does so.
I keep thinking about the crowds in Santa Clara last week, the fans who drove hours and could not sleep the night before, the ones who told reporters that a moment like this comes maybe once in a life. Some of them were waving flags with fifty stars. Some were waving the flags of the places their parents left. A lot of them were waving both, one in each hand, seeing no contradiction at all, because there isn't one. That is the country at its best, and it is worth saying plainly on a birthday: the flag in your left hand does not weaken the flag in your right. It is the reason the right one is worth waving.
The team may lose to Belgium on Monday. Home teams usually do lose, eventually, to someone. But the point was never the trophy. The point is the assembly, the yearly proof that a nation can be built out of arrivals and still cohere, can hand the ball to a dishwasher from Port-au-Prince or a kid from South London and say, for these ninety minutes, you are us. Two hundred and fifty years in, that is still the most radical thing about the place, and still the best. We should keep choosing it, and keep being grateful that so many people keep choosing us back.
Happy Birthday USA!
