How the Club World Cup Is Proving the Power of Local Soccer Support

 

Imagine you grew up in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro or Mexico City and you love soccer.

But because your domestic league isn’t the best in the world, and because your nation’s best players eventually move on to clubs in Europe, you don’t follow it. Instead, you stay at home and watch games from across the ocean. And you insist your friends who regularly frequent the Azteca or the Bombonera aren’t authentic fans, because they root for an inferior product.

It’s the kind of chatter that would guarantee a bar fight most places. Yet in too many corners of American soccer fandom, it’s become accepted that your Peacock Premium subscription offers a better value than a ticket in an MLS or USL supporters section.

Perhaps the FIFA Club World Cup will change that.

Yes, the play of Brazilian clubs in particular has impressed so far. But the tournament’s more lasting legacy in America may be the tens of thousands of passionate supporters from South and Central America, North Africa and even East Asia who have literally taken over stadiums, mass transit systems and public plazas throughout the group stage.

In the process, they’ve shown at least a few Yanks that your street cred isn’t less simply because you don’t pay your season ticket bill in euros or pound sterling.

From the Xeneizes in South Florida to the Red Devils in Seattle, fans from all corners of the globe have brought an energy rarely seen at American NFL stadiums, even if their numbers weren’t always enough to completely fill such cavernous venues.

Those supporters, whose countries have produced Messi, Neymar, Achraf Hakimi and Mo Salah, are well aware their teams and their leagues aren’t the best on Earth.

They’ve watched as the European scouts come and cherry-pick the best talent to take across the Atlantic or Mediterranean, before that talent has even completed the transition from adolescence to manhood.

And yet they live and breathe every single moment with their clubs because what they see in them is their identity: themselves, their families, their cities and their nationalities.

Critics may argue American fans are handicapped from making similar investments in a sporting product unless they believe it to be an elite product. It’s a nonsensical take once you realize our second-most popular sport literally involves watching college students beat the bejesus out of each other for three-and-a-half hours, 12 fall Saturdays a year.

It’s a fairer critique that MLS clubs haven’t built the same cultural collateral as a big-time college football program or a storied South American soccer club. The only ones that come close typically benefit from histories that precede MLS, either in the original NASL or, more recently, the A-League or the USL Championship. And MLS hasn’t helped itself in recent years by (poorly) mimicking European soccer culture and (greedily) charging English soccer prices.

Even so, in the end there’s only one fundamental difference between a Botafogo fan in Rio and a Fire fan in Chicago: When the Botafogo fan goes to work on Monday, there’s no jerk in the break room who tells him he’s never seen an MLS game because he only watches Chelsea.

If anything, that makes American fans of MLS and USL even more impressive, exactly because their versions of the sport are less popular than they should be.

Don’t get it wrong. Plenty of Americans watch all the soccer they can get — local and foreign, men’s and women’s, all of it. And there’s nothing wrong with following the Premier League or the Champions League. They’re both fabulously entertaining.

But supporting the local game makes you more of a true fan, not less. Hopefully that’s become a little clearer amid the wonderful true supporters who have flocked all over the globe to see their local sides at the Club World Cup.