Why I'm cheering for the US in the Confederations Cup

It's weird not to wish that a US national team loses. Our country has always had a natural rivalry with the states, both historically and based on the last ten years' political events. When a Canadian NHL team plays an American one in the later rounds of the playoffs, it polarizes people, and it is the same due for Olympic tournaments. Moreover, it seems that soccer more than other sports is built on rivalry, with supporting a team and hating their rivals seeming to go hand in hand (Any Spurs fan who has watched an Arsenal match hoping they'd lose knows what I'm talking about). The 2007 Gold Cup game between the US and Canada was amazing, and I still think the goal stands. As much as I especially want us to beat them every time, there are good reasons, both pragmatically and sentimentally, to hope the US wins the Confederations Cup tomorrow.

Pragmatically, business is a sport. In the past, we have proved to be unable to sustain a Canadian league anywhere near the level of MLS. To develop a culture of soccer in our country in both the professional club game and national game, we must ride with American teams in MLS. Because of single-entity, what benefits their clubs benefits us, and anything that helps soccer culture in the states helps the clubs. Which filters down to us. The stars of our league, largely, are also the stars of the US Men's National Team. So, pragmatically, we should hope the US wins things so that our club teams get stronger and can better develop our stars.

But there's a sentimental argument, too. We all love the beautiful game, but the fact is, from someone who only watches the English Premiership all the way to someone following several local and overseas clubs at once, it is hard to be a soccer fan in this country. It is just as hard, however, in the US. It's the same for all of us; shitty TV deals, bad announcers, poor national team results, sports TV that doesn't give a shit about us and can barely present our highlights correctly, european football media who won't give us a fair shake because we say "game" instead of "match", watching streams a couple of inches wide in order to see your team, locals who pay more attention single season AA baseball than your second-division football team, tailgates in parking lots, friends whose eyes glaze over the moment you say anything remotely related, away bus trips, newspapers that only mention us when talking about the bad parts of our sport, getting weird looks for wearing scarves in June, waving flags and banging shitty pieces of railing plastic every weekend, culture that reinforces disdain for soccer for the sake of it before having ever watched the game, yelling and screaming and living and dying for players and a club that someone who sits beside you on the bus cannot name or recognize; all of these are the shared experience of the North American soccer fan. We all have to fight through some of these things and enjoy others, and we're all fighting together.

When we play each other, no doubt I want us to win every time. But when the US are playing against Mexico or in a FIFA tournament defending the reputation of soccer on this continent, I think of my New England supporter buddy who carves MLS-themed pumpkins at Halloween, my Houston Dynamo friend who wears orange construction hats and lederhosen while grilling bratwurst in a parking lot, and think that the Americans won't try to win it for me, but they will certainly try to win it for them, and we're all in this together. Tonight, and tomorrow morning, thousands of people who are just like us are scared and excited and worried and jubilant and just can't sleep before they watch their team compete for a victory bigger than anything they have accomplished in their history. Win it for them against Brazil, US men. CONCACAF pride.