I go all in on the rah rah go USA stuff come Olympics or World Cup season, but people I know don’t really seem to care as much. Most everyone I know really gets excited about domestic championships, but when I mention Americans winning internationally, I get kinda mild “Oh? That’s nice.” Reactions. Maybe I’m generalizing here, but, at least among Americans I’ve met, it seems like there’s not as much rallying around international sports teams as in other countries.

41 comments

  1. Probably because most Americans don’t care about whatever sport that is being played internationally. If it’s not football, baseball, basketball, or hockey most people really don’t care that much.

  2. This year has been really great for international sports. I was super invested in the Women’s World Cup and the Track and Field Championships (Both sports I participated in and hold close to my heart). I also watched some of the FIBA World Cup, and the World Baseball Classic final was one of the best sports events I’ve seen in a long time. I get really excited about these, but people I know don’t often cheer for team USA as much as I have seen in other countries. I’ve even heard that the most popular national soccer team here is the Mexican NT. When I mention the Americans winning at the Track and Field Championships or the US dominating in FIBA (rip lol), I get kinda half hearted responses. Granted, the above examples are lower profile events or in sports the US doesn’t care as much about, but I’ve noticed the same kind of indifference towards the last World Cup and last two Olympics.

  3. I think because we have a large enough population and as a result a large enough domestic sports market that Team USA isn’t as important to Americans as national teams are in smaller countries.

  6. Our most popular sports are American football, baseball, and basketball. American football doesn’t have an international scene and baseball/basketball have limited international scenes. Olympic basketball and WBC baseball get some attention but those are only played once every 4 years. Either way, we still see MLB/NBA playoffs as the pinnacle of those respective sports.

  7. American football doesn’t extend too far outside our borders so we don’t care that much.

  8. Because College and Pro sports exist. I feel like people in the US are much more tied to their state representative teams than anything national.

  10. The Olympics usually gets a fair amount of attention, but in recent years it hasn’t. As for soccer, even if you’re a fan of the sport our men’s team doesn’t do well, and even though our women’s team usually comes out on top, this year they didn’t.

  12. Are we really that different than other nations though? Like how pumped up do people get in Slovakia because a Slovak sprinter won gold in the 200 meter dash?

  13. America is pretty much expected to get the most golds medal most of the time. I honestly feel bad for some of the other countries some times. I aggressively don’t care about soccer.

  15. the world cup is one of the few international competitions outside the Olympics that matters more to American soccer fans and players than a domestic league & it’s bc the MLS isn’t nearly as prestigious in the sport as the NBA or MLB are in theirs. the best American soccer players are in European leagues, so it’s the only time we get to see them represent us, & there’s obviously a ton of glory that comes with the soccer world cups. every American soccer fan is paying attention to the world cup when the time comes around.

    this isn’t the case for basketball, where the best American players are playing their best in the NBA & can’t even be bothered to care about FIBA, a tournament most Americans are not aware of.

  16. Well..if you’re in Europe or South America you play against other countries all the time and it’s close enough by to see the games, develop rivalries, all that kinda stuff.

    We just don’t have that regular contact with anyone but a few Canadian teams.

    So we develop interstate or intercity rivalries and care about those instead.

  18. I think for most people it depends on the sport. Personally,

    Summer Olympics, meh. Winter Olympics, yes please!

    World Cup, no thanks. Americas Cup, I’m on board!

  19. The most popular sports in the United States have not really caught on in other countries. American Football is non-existent other than some clubs for fun (the UK American Football club scene is actually a ton of fun but it’s really just blokes who play football then hang out at pubs). Baseball has caught on in in Korea and Japan, and basketball is growing in Europe.

    But the most popular sports in the world just haven’t crossed over here and ours haven’t crossed over overseas.

  21. As someone who follows figure skating, I feel like time zones are an underrated problem here.

    The sports that Americans already care about domestically are, for the most part, in reasonable time zones for people. Americans want to watch sports live and can largely already watch the sports they care about in reasonable time zones. Unless those events are in South America or Central America, time zones are terrible.

    Following an international sports enough to be invested requires navigating time zones. It’s a lot of work for people not already invested in the sport.

    Plus, again, as someone who watches figure skating, even those of us who do navigate time zones to follow an international sport aren’t necessarily diehard Team USA stans. Like, I want Team USA to do well, but at best, there will be three skaters/teams for the US per discipline—Struggling through time zones to only watch about twenty minutes of content in a four hour bloc doesn’t make sense—So most of us event up supporting multiple countries and skaters.

    Basically, it’s a lot of work for casual sports fans in the U.S. to commit to caring about international sports, outside of the Olympics and maybe the World Cups (and there’s a significant domestic drop off in interest between the Olympics and the World Cups) when we have strong domestic leagues AND those of us committed to watching international sports probably tend to end up as more than Team USA stans

  23. Because we have the best players in the world playing in leagues within our borders, at least in the sports we care about.

  24. The fifa World Cup is big in the states now. Olympics is big so not sure what you mean. It varies by your friend group and area

  26. Our Major 4 sports leagues are the pinnacles of their respective sports. So we don’t really care about international competitions because honestly it’s not as important to us as our championships. We like the Olympics plenty, but even there, I think the only major sport competition we get heated about is hockey against Canada.

    I will say though, Olympic hockey, when the NHL lets everyone play, is unbeatable. The WBC this year was also top notch because it was the first time a lot of the major MLB stars took part. USA v. Japan in the championship was a dream come true.

  27. Because USA always dominates.
    In basketball you expect them to win 90% of the time, phelps, biles, and many track and field athletes always win. As a result we don’t feel underdog/cinderella story.

  28. This is one time that the “America Big” argument holds any weight.

    Since we don’t have promotion-relegation in professional or amateur sports, teams have come to represent fairly large communities and regions, that are often larger than whole European nations, by area at least.

    We get our local/regional tribalism bug out simply by watching the NFL, NBA, MLB and college sports. We can cover the “national” sport interest with our club sports.

    They also have much more engaging and constant media presences and America has a very insular media ecosystem, especially in sports, so often global events just dont matter.

    And we also name our domestic league champions “world champions” because we believe (somewhat justifiably in some sports) that we are the best in the world.

  29. The NFL and NBA are king. People care more about their team than the national team if it isn’t the olympics. The Basketball WC didn’t have the best US players so them losing isn’t major news

  32. The last time we really cared about international sports was when the Soviet Union existed. Now, the Soviets had a policy of international Public-Relations wins for the Comintern since about 1949, and sunk (I believe) a space-program’s worth of resources into training their professional-in-any-realistic-definition soldier/athletes to be the best they could be.

    This made for some amazing sports drama. Every time it was the Soviets playing (or to be fair, we mostly used to include the whole Communist bloc, from Cuban boxers to Romanian gymnasts to Navratilova before she defected as “We’re playing The Soviets”), it was always an underdog thing for whoever played them, simply because they didn’t meet a rule they didn’t exploit, because it was for international propaganda purposes. Ask any older American about the phrase “The East-German Judge”, for instance.

    Canada vs Russia’s hockey “Summit Series” was pretty epic. The Soviet national team did a promotional tour where they pretty much demolished every NHL team they put up against them until they played the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers and the Flyers’ plan was pretty much “hospitalize the bastards”. The Miracle on Ice was a huge deal. We boycotted them because they invaded Afghanistan, they boycotted us because “nuh-*uh! you!*”…

    ….it was a whole thing. Any expression of that rivalry, Americans were all in. People got interested in international chess, *as a spectator sport*, for god’s sakes. The US wrestling team’s “last crack at getting Aleksandr Karelin” (spoilers: lol, no) was like a Moby Dick kind of thing.

    And when they went away, that was pretty much the last time Americans really invested in international sports. The fact that we could send pros, after that, kind of put a nail in that coffin. (In Barcelona, it was generally agreed that the real contest in the Basketball tournament was “who was going to get silver to the Dream Team?”. )

    To be blunt, almost no great team-sports rivalry is about the sport itself. (People individually playing solo sports, sure, but not teams) It’s about the emotional feeling toward whoever the other team’s representing. And people who don’t like watching the literal physical activity being performed generally don’t get the sort of emotional involvement from other countries.

    Once you step down from the whole “these guys are Team Evil” thing, it’s hard to follow that act. If we lost to the Soviets in track and field (not a popular audience-sport here), it ‘proved’ something. If we beat them in a sport we did care about, it was a triumph of everything we stand for and all that. And it made a sort of sense because that was our *national* teams. If it wasn’t supposed to get that kind of energy, we’d organize it along some other lines.

    By now, basically everyone else in the world are our trading partners, allies, places we go on vacation, sources of new Americans through immigration and so on, with the exception of like three countries. And ain’t none of ’em the Soviets. Even *Russia* isn’t “The Soviets”. Putting the same sort of vinegar into “hating”, say, Argentina or really investing in ‘beating Kenya’ in a footrace just kinda feels like bullying (or “punching down” as we put it now). (If we played Mexico at soccer and someone went off about “beat the fucking Mexicans!”, I’d assume he either moved from a country that had a stronger rivalry, or he was really racist.)

    PS: There might also be a biiit of a quality difference, in sports we have pro leagues for and also send international teams. I remember once there was an NHL game where each team had an just-former Olympian on it (one Canadian, one American), and the big deal was that you could take your picture with their Olympic jerseys in the lobby. One of Boston’s sports media pointed out that with the ice time they each were getting on their actual teams, you could have just put both of them in the lobby wearing them too and it wouldn’t have made a difference.

  33. I know this is in response to us losing in FIBA, but it’s harder for a lot of people to get excited about a squad that’s deliberately not our best squad. It’s a good camp for young, budding stars and doing this levels the playfield somewhat (although there is still absolutely no reason we should ever lose, considering the talent).

    Why should the fans rally if we send less recognizable stars and let them figure it out or if we send a team that clearly dominates? The tournament is basically a lose – lose for us anyway.

  35. The domestic sports market is much larger, in a way. Definitely as far as how players get paid. The “top” players won’t do national leagues because if they get injured, they’re fucked for their regular annual state/city leagues which pay way better.

  36. Who are you comparing us to? Because “club over country” is a very popular sentiment in places like England.

  37. Because the rest of the world and like 10 Americans who unfortunately are in charge of sports TV programming cannot accept Americans do not, never have, and never will give anything resembling a shit about the World Cup or soccer in general.

  38. 2 reasons:

    1. We’re large enough to have regional sport teams so there’s not really a need to focus on the Team USAs.
    2. We win a lot, and it’s boring if you know you’re gonna win. For example in the Olympics we usually get someone to have a medal in almost every event every time, and we know this. There’s something called the underdog effect, where you’re more likely to root for the underdog, someone who doesn’t have the best chance. But we do, we always win so people don’t root for us as hard.

  39. I’m the other way around personally. Incredible athletic feats like gymnastics or ice skating always fascinate and inspire me. But I can’t just sit there for hours and watch zoomed out footage of a a field (like with football), its boring to me.

  40. Because they don’t matter, The Olympics is the Three weeks every four years we let the rest of the world onto the field with us and we pummel them into paste and win the Gold medal totals every single time, home sports leagues matter more.

  41. Let’s say you are from Serbia. Any basketball player is same skin color as you, his last name is same as someone you went to school with, their face is rather similar to yours because of common DNA, as you probably have common ancestor 100 years ago.

    Random US basketball player (or any other sport) has pretty much nothing in common with another random American in terms of ancestry, his culture is not very similar unless you count him following a few of the same holidays, and there is a big chance he even grew up further away than 10 widths of Serbia. He is not very much “yours”. You just root for, say NYC against Jersey, but US vs Germany… in basketball, you might be closer to those Germans than to the players of the US team

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