Last Thursday, The Athletic dropped an interview with Lindsey Horan that probably didn’t have fans flocking to buy her replica shirt.
Apparently, the co-captain of the trailblazing US women’s national team thinks that “American soccer fans, most of them aren’t smart … They don’t know the game. They don’t understand.” She did, admittedly, throw them a bone, adding: “[But] it’s getting better and better.”
Couched within a conversation that laments everything from the goofiness of Horan’s teammates to the platitudes of TV pundits, the Lyon midfielder, Champions League winner and 2019 World Cup champion argues that we need to focus more on football – the football which, according to Horan, the fanbase doesn’t always understand.
Before considering the merits of Horan’s inflammatory accusation, it’s worth pausing to consider the studious nature of America’s co-captain – she splits captaincy duty with Alex Morgan but wears the armband when the two are on the pitch together. The 29-year-old from Golden, Colorado with 139 caps to her name, has a voracious football diet. Once asked to describe her ideal day not playing football, Horan responded that it would be watching football. It’s easy to imagine Horan in a permanent state of football consumption, mired in detailed deliberation, calculating avenues to improve her game, with furrowed brow.
Horan’s unique path also reflects her worldly palate for the sport. In 2012, she passed up the traditional development path for USWNT stars of a college career in America, opting instead to turn professional in Paris at the age of 18. After returning to collect NWSL trophies with the Portland Thorns, Horan has taken up residency in Lyon, where she starts regularly as a leader for Europe’s most decorated women’s team.
Horan’s experience playing the game across continents is plentiful; her eye for the game’s idiosyncrasies is refined.
Within that context, one can see why Horan may kick back and criticize what she sees as a football culture that needs to get smart to get good, especially in the aftermath of last summer’s failure at the Women’s World Cup. Yet despite the respect owed to Horan’s knowledge and achievements, her flippant portrayal of American soccer fans isn’t quite right – especially in the context of the women’s game.
Taken broadly, it’s often repeated as a banal truism that soccer isn’t popular in the United States. But that’s not entirely accurate. While it’s not No 1 – and won’t supplant the NFL as king anytime soon – soccer is still remarkably popular and widely played in a country with more than 330m people.
Whether measured by revenue, attendance, viewership, participation or interest, soccer is easily one of the most popular sports in the United States, often beating out tennis, swimming, golf and boxing. Often considered one of the “big five” American sports – alongside American football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey – soccer occupies a unique space in that it’s the only major American sport in which the world’s top men’s league (or even close to the top league) is not based in the US. This means the most talented US men’s footballers must seek out careers abroad to reach the pinnacle of the game.
Given the American consumer’s endemic desire to seek out the best of any given thing, many fans pledge their support to a variety of international leagues, often in addition to watching Major League Soccer.
On the women’s side, while the US’s National Women’s Soccer League is certainly among the best in the world, the US women have also long sought the growth afforded by playing abroad. Generations of stars from the four-time World Cup champions have played for stretches in Sweden, Australia, France, England and Germany.
Similarly, women’s soccer fans in the US consume a tapas menu of leagues and competitions, while still considering their domestic league to be an elite one and their national team one of the most competitive.
All of this comes on top of the fact that many American fans come to appreciate the sport from an international perspective to begin with, either discovering the game through relatives and parents born abroad, or from travel overseas. The cultural agility of American soccer fans is a default facet, rather than an infrequent aberration. This often lends itself to a more sophisticated understanding of the world’s most celebrated game.
What’s more, the incredible success of the pioneering USWNT has fostered generations of American girls who grew up playing and loving the game themselves, generations that were afforded a head start over their peers globally.
The inheritance of 1970s-era legislation like Title IX, which accelerated development at the collegiate level, codified playing time for aspirational young Americans at a time when professional women’s football had been recently illegal in other countries. This paid dividends in the 1990s, when the US collected two of the first three World Cup trophies.
The cultural inheritance of the affectionately termed ‘99ers (think Brandi Chastain ripping her shirt off after scoring the game-winning penalty against China, claiming the USA’s second Fifa title) further accelerated playing interest to such an extent that, for many years, young girls in America may were more likely to grow up with a ball at their feet than their peers in other countries.
Over the years, fans of the USWNT have been spoiled, treated to the most successful women’s team on the international stage. It’s true that conditioning and athleticism once set the team apart, but to diminish the technical abilities and football IQ of anyone from Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly to Tobin Heath, Sam Mewis or Crystal Dunn would be misguided. An appreciation has grown in tandem for that lethal combination of intelligence and mentality, athleticism and skill.
Given the fanbase’s exposure to high-stakes football, and to the country’s elite talent performing at the height of it, dedicated American soccer fans knew what a cohesive, World Cup winning squad looked like. And it’s for that reason that many knew, from their first kick of a ball in New Zealand, and without needing the assistance of pundits, that last summer’s team just did not have it.
There is merit in arguing for an honest confrontation with the problems in US women’s soccer: development paths, tactical flexibility, and training for coaches all need to be assessed. But to characterize stateside supporters as lacking sophistication isn’t quite accurate. Especially given her status as America’s captain, Horan’s comments were careless and ill thought out.
