After last night's Confederation Cup final, it should be clear to even the most sour, knee-jerk anti-American cynic, that the USA and their fans have a lot to be proud of in their football and their international progress.
People, eager to put them down, will point out their deficiencies but they are very well aware of the limitations of their side - a self awareness England have lacked until recently - and know that there's still a long way to go to evolve from a hard-working side to a great football team, but they are enjoying the journey. Their success should be celebrated because it is quite remarkable really.
It's often forgotten by younger fans that, while America has a long football tradition going to back to a third place finish in the 1930 World Cup, it is only in the last 20 years that the game has been organised and taken seriously enough at all levels to produce high class players capable of playing abroad in top flight teams. The 70s mini-boom fed by importing star players at the end of their careers didn't last long.
So USA is really a young country when it comes to producing high class footballers and is learning, expanding and developing every season. Imagine if England had to compete in the NFL; a sport it's largely unfamiliar with, and had reached a major final, we'd think it was a brilliant achievement for a country without much history in the game. To put down their enthusiasm and achievements in the Confederations Cup, and many do, is narrow-minded bigotry, all too often based in a snooty anti-American attitude so popular amongst some Europeans.
For a start, the patronising of Americans who call football soccer is getting very tiresome, somewhat pathetic and is seemingly ignorant of the fact that the word soccer was a slang derivation of Association (football) and was used in England as far back as the 1880s and has been ever since. It isn't some sort of New World gaff to call football soccer, no matter how much you sneeringly say the word in a mock American accent.
This snobbish attitude to USA is all the more remarkable when you consider the nature of the players who take the field for their national side. In Britain we regularly bemoan the knuckle-dragging ignorant thugs and air-headed boy-men who play our game. Yet the USA national side regularly fields men who are intelligent, articulate, interesting and culturally far more broad-minded than any of the lisping wannabe DJs England turns out. Listen to the likes of Brad Friedel, Casey Keller, Jay Demerit or Clint Dempsey; by contrast to their English counterparts these men are college professors. In short, they are the sort of people who are easy to like and admire. You want to sneer at that?
On top of that they have a tough competitive attitude that was best embodied by Brian McBride who was one of the hardest players in modern times, capable of taking a face-breaking elbow from Daniele De Rossi in the 2006 World Cup without flinching or rolling around, instead he got up, walked calmly off, had stitches put in the wound and played on. Simply magnificent. And still you want to have a pop at USA footballers?
Increasingly, it looks like the patronising of the USA side is just showing our ignorance. By playing to their strengths, being well drilled and hard working, they ground out a fantastic win against Spain that was clearly well beyond England a year ago and led Brazil 2-0. I can't understand why anyone would look down on that.
USA is all too often underestimated. They have three CONCACAF wins in the last seven years and before you're cynical about those achievements ask yourself if England could have done much better in this period regularly playing the likes of Mexico, Costa Rica and Honduras in summer heat.
And then we have the criticism of Americans who 'support' English teams such as Manchester United or Chelsea as though this is any more ludicrous than someone from Middlesbrough supporting them. Indeed, in watching them on TV, often at ungodly hours, they are doing no more or less than the vast majority of so-called fans of these sides and as such as merely part of the modern football world.
The only difference is that as well as following a Premier League club, they will also follow another European club too, especially if they are of European descent, as well as their nearest MLS team, and probably their local amateur club as well.
What are they supposed to do - ignore European football? If they did, their critics would say they were being insular and were ignorant of the game outside their own shores - a cultural accusation that Europeans love to make about Americans as though we don't breed insular stupid people in these lands.
Anyone who has spent any amount of time in America will already know that if you meet a football fan, they are almost always dedicated, passionate and well informed about the game. They feast on it all un-blinkered by club loyalties. But still this is not good enough for the snobbish European critics who would love to believe that a typical American football fan is some sort of hayseed in a pair of dungarees, chewing straw and wondering, 'Why don't he pick the ball up, bubba.'
Yes, their media articulates statistics in a different way and deploy a different kind of jargon - but that doesn't make it wrong, just different, as different as how Germans or Italians or Serbians will talk about the game to people from UK. Are you really saying because they don't talk about football like we do that makes them less serious or passionate about it? Do we really love the way our media talks about our top, top, football anyway? What exactly are we defending here?
A goalless draw or a shutout - why can't we just enjoy the language's adaptability rather than become little Englander, pent up prissy pricks about it and start sniping at them for using different terminology? It's so conservative and reactionary.
The English language is an ever evolving organism, which is why you don't talk about football as people did 100 years ago and why, in a bitter irony, so many English footballers use terminology popularised by American rap and R & B stars.
It's also worth realising that, unlike us, those who play and follow the game are sporting rebels in American culture. They are non-mainstream and they have to have a strong sense of their own selves and the game to sustain their status in the face of their mainstream media and culture's huge disinterest which often borders on mockery. Soccer is not your typical jock's game. They've already had to grow some bollocks just to nail their colours to football's mast. And yet still the boring European sneers come.
Football falls into our cultural lap in the UK, but these people have made a real effort to get into the game, and both they and their admirable national side deserve our respect as equals, not as ignorant new world interlopers.
Those who already, like me, follow USA as their 'second' international side, know why they like them so much, and find it embarrassing that so many on this side of the pond still resort to the old thinking and clichés.
Go USA!
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