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Fueled by Envy & Scorn, Rivalry remains a Curiously Intimate form of Codependence

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments
Photographer Tony Quinn, whose work is featured throughout SR, captures the unalloyed bliss produced by another Dos a Cero! in Columbus, Ohio (Sept. 10, 2013).

See below a brief excerpt from Chapter 1 of Sibling Rivalry, 400-odd words that help explain why noted soccer scholar Dr. Andrei Markovits — author of Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism — had this to say in reviewing my new book, coming in March 2026 from the publishers at Bloomsbury:

“I cannot find the proper words of praise and delight that I felt having read in one fell swoop Hal Phillips’ magisterial work on the US-Mexico rivalry. This is not only a masterpiece in the cultural sociology of rivalries in sports and beyond; but it also features a nuanced command of all things soccer (and sports) deeply ensconced in the larger histories of Mexico and the United States with sumptuous detours into Britain, the Continent and Latin America. This is a remarkable book!”

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The emotional stakes that make a rivalry rarely take hold in the psyches of either party at the same time, with the same levels of intensity, according to the same sentimental logic. Perfectly symmetrical relations are hard to identify, actually. One party always cares a little more than the other, and that’s where US vs. Mexico stood in 1980. Up to that point, and for the next ten years, the Mexican futbol community considered the United States a rival—but only in the way boxers consider the punching bag a rival.

Should the punching bag suddenly strike back? Well, imagine the surprise.

Once we consider the economic, cultural, and military histories that Mexico shares with its northern neighbor, we better appreciate how much Mexicans enjoyed hammering the United States over and over again for sixty years. We can also understand why, during the 1990s, when the Americans really did start to compete as soccer equals, Mexicans weren’t so sure they wanted this rivalry anymore. Come the debacle of World Cup 2002, such ambivalence gave way to the six stages of Mexican grief: denial, anger, tequila, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Not only did El Tri and its massive fan base accept and recover, the communal trauma of 2002 galvanized the nation in a new way. Twenty-four years later, on the cusp of a World Cup they will host together, Mexico and the United States have developed a serial competition unlike any on Earth, in any sport.

On the pitch and off, national team wins and losses continue to come at extraordinary cost—a strange, psychic brew animated by blood, sweat, and tears, by honor and ridicule, by envy and scorn. In every other way, however, the two countries have built and come to share a North American futbol culture where their respective leagues, federations, clubs, fans, and broadcasters grow ever more intertwined. Some might describe these delicate relationships as codependent.

Because long-term rivalry is nothing if not an intimate form of interdependence.

Upon closer examination, it’s clear the Mexican National Team and its transnational fan culture remain torn between these fascinating realities and the unyielding, persistent idea that their primary soccer relationship is somehow beneath them.

Which does nothing but up the ante each and every time the two nations take the same field.

Decoding Distaff Indifference Toward Women’s Professional Sport

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Ever wondered why women’s team sports are watched and otherwise supported so meagerly by women themselves? The underlying premise here may strike one as obtuse, even churlish this week, what with thousands of women in the stands watching the 2019 Women’s World Cup in stadia all over France. But none of last week’s Round of 16 matches sold out and World Cup crowds can mislead. You’ll recall they were enormous during the 1999 Women’s World Cup, here in the U.S. That event was seen as a tipping point for the women’s game in North America, and yet three separate women’s professional leagues have been attempted in the two decades since. The first two folded and the third — the National Women’s Professional Soccer League — continues to teeter on the brink of financial collapse and cultural irrelevance.

Soccer remains a funny duck in America. More than those in other footballing nations, soccer fans here are beguiled by and pay outsized attention to their national teams — as opposed to the privately administered clubs that compete in domestic leagues. And surely there are entrenched gender biases that have worked against the serial iterations of women’s pro soccer in this country, or the WNBA, or women’s professional hockey wherein the Canadian professional league just folded. U.S. hockey international Kendall Coyne Schofield told the New York Times in April that, “People are drooling for women’s hockey. But the product we deliver isn’t being shown.”

Are they drooling for it really? And what does she mean when she says, “people”? I don’t have numbers on how many folks consume women’s hockey at the Olympics, for example, and how that audience breaks down by gender. But it might surprise you to learn that nearly 70 percent of the WNBA’s viewership is male. That surprised me.

The WNBA has been around since the late 1990s; it has never turned a profit, despite being financially backed and marketed by one of the most savvy organizations in world sport, the NBA — an organization that has every incentive to create a larger audience for both of its on-court products. The core of that new, larger audience would presumably be women who don’t otherwise follow the NBA. But women have responded to the WNBA with the same relative indifference they exhibit toward women’s professional soccer and hockey. Here’s Adam Silver on the subject in 2018:

“It’s interesting: Women’s basketball is largely supported — just in terms of the demographics — by older men, for whatever reason, who like fundamental basketball, and it’s something I’ve talked a lot to the players about,” he said. “We’re not connecting with almost the same demographic that our players are. I’m always saying our players are roughly, let’s say, 21 to 34, in that age range. I’m saying [to the players], ‘Why do you think it is that we’re not getting your peers to want to watch women’s basketball?’

“So in a way I think it’s a good problem to have in that I think the game looks fantastic, and it’s amazing where the league now is from over 20 years ago when it launched,” Silver added, “but we still have a marketing problem, and we gotta figure it out. We gotta figure out how we can do a better job connecting to young people and how they could become interested in women’s basketball.”

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The Most Productive Response to World Cup Failure? Choose and Support an MLS Club

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Who is best equipped to cope with U.S. Soccer’s elimination from the 2018 World Cup? Seattle Sounders fans…

Instead of asking where U.S. Soccer goes from here, let’s take a bit of time to first understand where we are, and why.

Dropping the Oct. 10 match to Trinidad & Tobago and missing out on the Russian World Cup this summer do not change America’s standing in the soccer world.

In the grand scheme of things, we are still operating in the “modern” era of American soccer, thanks to a generation of now-50something players who, almost exactly 28 years earlier (on the same Caribbean island), qualified their country (one that had operated for 40 years as an irrelevant footballing nation) for the 1990 World Cup in Italy. From that moment forward, the U.S. graduated into the company of proper footballing nations, i.e. those that qualify for World Cup finals with regularity and harbor reasonable expectations of advancing out of the group stage. Here’s the proof of this evolution: 1990 marked the first of seven straight World Cup appearances for the U.S., four of which ended in the knockout stage.

To argue that missing the 2018 World Cup “shows everything is wrong with the United States doesn’t follow,” Stephan Szymanski told The New York Times this week. Symanski, co-author of the wondrous book, Soccernomics, is among the keenest soccer observers on the planet. “This doesn’t prove that. Stuff happens. It’s the nature of the game and not necessarily surprising to see the U.S. knocked out. This is what being a soccer fan is like. You’re prone to the extreme event all the time. There’s no royal road, unless you’re Brazil or Germany.”

We’ll unpack this more thoroughly below, but this understanding of world football viability is really important for U.S. fans to get their heads around in wake of this week’s admittedly gut-wrenching events. Not going to Russia truly sucks, on multiple levels, and while it may well prove a “teachable moment” for the U.S. soccer establishment, we are obliged to remain clear-eyed about how international football works and exactly why this failure to qualify (for the first time since 1986) truly IS such a pivotal moment. Because it’s not what you may think.

As I’ve written before, international football is hard. Failures like Tuesday’s happen each and every World Cup (and European Championship) cycle, to perfectly capable footballing nations. England missed the WC in 1974 (just 8 years after winning the whole ball of wax), then again in 1978 and 1994. The Netherlands just crashed out of Russia 2018 qualifying — the second straight major-tournament qualification failure for one of the planet’s traditional powers. Chile, runners-up at last summer’s Confederations Cup and one of the game’s most entertaining sides, failed to qualify for Russia, too. So did mighty Italy, qualifiers for every WC finals since 1958.

Every four years, at least one really good European team and one strong South American side don’t qualify for the World Cup. In England, Holland and now Chile & Italy, these failures either have led to or will lead to genuine soul-searching re. team coaching, talent identification/development, and national team administration. This is the introspective process American soccer is wrestling with now.

But if history is any guide, this introspection will come to nothing.

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US Soccer: Just how bare is thy cupboard?

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

USMNT manager Bruce Arena in lighter times — with former L.A. Galaxy charge, David Beckham.

Some 60 minutes into what remained of a 1-0 game in San Jose, Costa Rica on Nov. 15, 2016, BeIN color commentator Thomas Rongen festered aloud at the visiting Americans’ inability to go forward. He identified the problem, quite rightly, as originating in the center of midfield, where 29-year-old Michael Bradley dropped ever deeper and 35-year-old Jermaine Jones drifted even further into irrelevance. Rongen suggested that Jurgen Klinsmann needed to make a change — that inserting Sacha Kljestan was the best option to link up, in attacking fashion, with the troika of Bobby Wood, Jozy Altidore and Christian Pulisic.

It was then that I realized the U.S. was doomed this night and that Klinsi would soon be out of a job. Rongen’s analysis was spot on. But if Sacha Kljestan is your best midfield attacking option off the bench, one can reasonably argue the cupboard is more or less bare.

As it happened, Klinsmann was relieved of his U.S Men‘s National Team duties the following Tuesday morning and L.A. Galaxy skipper Bruce Arena was hired in his place.  And so, pointless and facing a win-at-all-costs game at home vs. Honduras this Friday night, March 24, U.S. Soccer finds itself at an unfamiliar crossroads.

Yeah, sure, the U.S. has once or twice stumbled or started slowly in Hexagonals past.

But the U.S. finds itself in an altogether different situation in 2017.

Prior to 1990, the U.S. had never qualified for a World Cup, of course. That signal success, after 40 years of utter failure, ushered in a new era of American soccer, one where qualification was a given and the challenge lay in determining a) how U.S. teams would inevitably ascend to the next echelon, to truly compete toe-to-toe with the best 12-15 teams on the planet, and b) who would lead them to this new place of relevance.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to relevance.

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Unsightly American Soccer Podcast: April 4, 2011

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Join Hal Phillips and a cast of characters/correspondents spanning the Globe to discuss  the burning, hot, molten issues of the footballing day. This week we talk with Tom Wadlington about the two international friendlies the U.S. played last week, vs. Argentina and Paraguay. Hal and Tom also touch on the fate of Jozy Altidore, the Champions League quarters that begin Tuesday, and the new statue of Michael Jackson that was unveiled this weekend outside Craven Cottage, home to Fulham FC. If you’re wondering what the connection is between Fulham and the King of Pop, you’re not alone.

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