The U.S. Men’s Team Is Building Something, and Marching On

Against Australia, as he had against Paraguay, Balogun posed problems for the defense. With Christian Pulisic unavailable, nursing a calf injury sustained against Paraguay, he was joined up top by Ricardo Pepi, and showed his versatility and comfort across the width of the field. Australia was said to be a physical team, with a towering backline, but what Balogun lacked in heft, he made up for in speed. Eleven minutes into the game, he flashed up the left side with the ball and sent a pass across the box to Pepi, which was so powerful that it wrong-footed an Australian defender, who scored an own goal. (It’s the summer of OGs!) Balogun had several more chances in the box during the match, though he failed to finish them, and he used his strong connection with the young defender Alex Freeman to widen the channel on the flank. His pace was enough to match—and, at times, overwhelm—even the Australian players who were known for their quickness, and he managed to play credibly enough with Pepi to keep Australia’s tough, physical backline busy.

Before the tournament, Balogun was mostly unknown to the American public, except by hard-core soccer fans. Now his jersey is in demand. In Seattle, there was a sense of the team harnessing the crowd’s energy, and of the crowd channelling the energy emanating far beyond. When the ball hit the back of Australia’s net, the roar was so percussive that the stadium press box shook. But the biggest reverberations came late that night, as the seagulls picked at scraps in the empty stadium seats. Paraguay beat Türkiye, which meant that the U.S. would be heading to Santa Clara for the round of thirty-two, assured an easier path because they’d won their group.

It’s sometimes said that a national team is a nation distilled into eleven men. Perhaps. The U.S., after all, is a nation of hyphenates and immigrants who came to the country seeking opportunity. Six of the twenty-six players on the U.S. national team were born in another country, and twelve were eligible to play for other national teams. Freeman scored the U.S.’s second goal against Australia off a deflected strike by Sergiño Dest, whose Surinamese-American father met his Dutch mother in Amsterdam on a visit from Germany, where he was stationed while serving in the U.S. Army after the Vietnam War. Dest’s superb first-half play was inextricable from the high-octane performances of Malik Tillman, who was born in Germany, and Tyler Adams, who was born and raised in Wappingers Falls, New York, but has lived in Europe as a professional soccer player since he was sixteen. The backline behind them features Antonee Robinson (born in Liverpool, England) and Chris Richards (born in Alabama, moved to Europe for soccer in 2src18). Gio Reyna, whose trivela punctuated a twenty-six-pass possession at the end of the Paraguay match, could have represented Argentina, Portugal, or England, in addition to the U.S. Timothy Weah was born in New York, but his mother is from Jamaica and his father is the former President of Liberia. Even Pulisic has a Croatian passport.

The power of the diaspora is the story of the World Cup so far. Two hundred and ninety-two of the one thousand two hundred and forty-eight players—nearly a quarter—were born outside the country they now represent. Some of the movement of players is mercenary, some is opportunistic, some is a legacy of colonialism. There are ninety-eight players born in France playing in this World Cup. Thirteen of them play for Algeria, twelve for Haiti. There are sixty-seven players born in the Netherlands, including all but one of the players on Curaçao’s team. During the second half of a draw against Brazil, all eleven players on the field for Morocco came from somewhere other than Morocco. Balogun’s primary Australian defender, the giant center-back Harry Souttar, has a brother, John, who represents Scotland, where both of them were born.

For all the nationalism on display in an event like the World Cup, it can be striking to see how fluid identities can be. Morocco’s success in 2src22, in which the team made it to the semifinals, was celebrated by Muslims across the globe. When Senegal played France, the bars of Harlem were filled with Senegalese. Senegal’s team, meanwhile, includes ten players born in France. When Cabo Verde, a Portuguese-speaking African nation, tied Spain, the Fan Fest in downtown Boston was filled with people rooting for Cabo Verde—many of them Portuguese-speaking Brazilians. The Cabo Verde defender Roberto Lopes, meanwhile, has an Irish accent; Cabo Verde officials first reached out to him over LinkedIn. Perhaps the U.S. is not quite so exceptional as it tends to think.