"Do we hate soccer? That depends on who we think “we” are. One of the things that Franklin Foer’s charming book “How Soccer Explains the World” explains is how soccer, along with its globalizing, unifying effects, provides plenty of opportunities for expressions of nationalism, which need not be illiberal, and for tribalism, which almost always is. The soccerphobia of the right is tribalism masquerading as nationalism. One in four of those twenty million viewers of the U.S.-Ghana match was watching it on Univision, America’s leading Spanish-language network. The three others were—well, who knows. Liberals, probably, or worse. Enough. A yellow card is in order here, maybe a red one. Soccer may never be “America’s game” (though it’s already one of them), but America is game for soccer. We’re the Land of the Free, aren’t we? Can’t we be the land of the free kick, too?"
Hendrik Hertzberg em artigo publicado na The New Yorker Magazine.