With both the European Championship and Copa América in full swing—as well as the MLS and NWSL seasons—plus men’s and women’s Olympic tournaments coming soon, we’re shaping up for an enormous summer of soccer.
Roger Bennett, whose work with Men in Blazers Media Network has done wonders for growing the game in America, has been preparing for this moment for years. Decades, even. When the Englishman dialed up GQ last week from his hotel in Atlanta—where he was navigating the throngs of soccer fans there to watch the United States lose to Panama, as well as those in town for the first presidential debate—he theorized that this summer might lay the foundation for the full-on construction of red, white, and blue soccer mania. “I moved here 1994, right before the last World Cup that was meant to make America a normal football-loving nation,” he said. “We joke on our show that soccer is America's sport of the future, as it has been since 1972. It's actually the next big thing. But with the men's World Cup coming in 2026, it's going to finish the job that '94 was meant to start.”
Bennett and Men in Blazers recently commissioned a study that examined the state of soccer fandom in the United States. Bennett acknowledged that most old school, American purists will never elevate their local MLS club to the same status as their favorite NFL or MLB team, but the action across the pond has undoubtedly captured America’s attention. “[Soccer] is this next dimension of sporting interest, mostly propelled by the rise of the internet,” he shared. “That allows you to connect to Liverpool from Los Angeles, or the Chelsea women from Chicago, as closely as if you live a stone's throw from their home stadium.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that American fans are only interested in the best of the best. The Premier League and the Champions League dwarf the MLS in terms of US popularity. Increased stateside television coverage has certainly helped tremendously, but other countries like Germany and Spain—which care much more deeply about soccer—are also fighting the Prem.
“It is not just an American problem,” Bennett said. “The Premier League is burying alive the Bundesliga. La Liga is threatened by the Premier League. It is a monster. Having said that, when I was a kid, Italian football was light years ahead. English football was a muddy backwater played by bald men who just wanted to kick each other. There was an Italian player, Ravanelli, who went to play at Middlesbrough in the beginning of the Premier League. They wrote in the paper how sad it is for him that his career has come to an end so he has to move to the Premier League.”
Nowadays, with the Premier League unquestionably one of the best in the world, MLS is the place where global superstars come to end their career. From David Beckham to Thierry Henry, Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Wayne Rooney, the American soccer circuit has provided a place for some of the best players of the modern era to begin their deceleration into retirement. The latest and greatest foreign icon to move to America is Lionel Messi. “It's been incredible for Inter Miami, whose popularity, in our study, is bigger than that of the league right now,” Bennett informed. “So MLS has this moment—and it is a moment—and needs to work out how to convert and build upon it.”
For many Americans dipping their toe into the soccer pool, the lack of true stakes provides a nice temperature. The Men in Blazers study discovered that a sizable swath of American fans will alleviate their anguish by switching their allegiance, finding that 12% of the survey respondents had changed their favorite team within the last five years. “12% of American football fans are essentially like Rob Lowe with the ‘Yay, league!’ hat on their forehead,” Bennett joked. “43% of respondents said they support three teams or more, which is incredible. It’s just a remarkable number.” Along with the internet making everything immediately accessible, the soccer video game FIFA, a staple of seemingly every college dorm from California to Connecticut, is a major force behind young Americans becoming soccer fans. “Diego Forlan, the Uruguayan striker, once told me that scoring a goal was like an orgasm, but even better,” he laughed. “I think when you learn how to play with Messi on the Xbox and really get the best out of [it], it's in that range.”
When watching the best international sides from Europe and South America duke it out in their respective tournaments, Bennett suggests zooming out and taking a wider, anthropological view. Yes, every team has individual players worth tuning in for, but there’s also much to be gleaned about a country at large by watching them play a little footy. “International football is a refraction. It's just a mirror that's held up to the society that surrounds it,” said Bennett, before offering a breakdown of England men’s team, who have eked into the Euro quarterfinals without playing to their full potential yet. “Number one, England is in a time of challenge. There's an election that's going on, it's a royal nation. And so you could make the case that this team have done really well recently, but they've done it by playing very conservative football…The quality of the football is not inspiring. It's very, very pragmatic.”
At the time of this conversation with Bennett, the USMNT was only one game into the Copa América group stage. The debacle against Panama had not happened yet, neither had the pandemonium against Uruguay that eliminated them. But no matter how well or how poorly they play, or how much helium they have heading into any major fixture, Bennett has a clear understanding of Uncle Sam’s place in soccer’s global hierarchy. “There is undoubtedly a sense of inferiority, which is built into [American] footballing culture,” Bennett offered. “It's the one place where the rest of the world—no matter what nation—they know that we know that they know that we're not very good at men's football. When you speak to players from the early 2000s, the American team, they say, ‘Yeah, when we took the field in that World Cup game against X, I didn't really think we were going to win.’"
Bennett refers to global football as a telenovela that Robert Altman would be proud of, and offered one parting thought on why it produces such memorable moments.
“It's the [national team] jersey, the weight of expectation, the weight of pressure. It's like watching human beings drown under the weight of the national urge, the national craving, the national yearning. I don't think any human can match those standards.”