Two Teams, One Country

Every four years, the World Cup tells you something about America that no census form ever will: we’re the only country on Earth where rooting for two teams is an act of patriotism.

Here’s how the math worked in my house this summer. Team number one: the United States. Then comes the second bracket, call it the heritage bracket. My mother-in-law spent the afternoon living and dying with Norway, a country she carries in her blood if not her passport. The kids and I had Italy, obviously, and then the Azzurri did what the Azzurri sometimes do, and broke our hearts early, so we did the most American thing imaginable: we adopted a new country, England. A nation that’s been extraordinarily good to us, and one we’re proud to stand behind.

Now try explaining any of this to someone from a country with one flag, one language, one origin story. In France, you root for France. In Brazil, you root for Brazil. In America, you root for America and for the ghost of your grandfather’s village. The country your in-laws left. The place your last name comes from, even if you’ve never set foot in it. My name has four syllables and a lot of vowels. You think I don’t know where it comes from?

That’s not divided loyalty, that’s the American experiment.

America was never built to be a tribe. It was built on an idea: a bet that people from every corner of the planet could show up, pledge allegiance to a Constitution rather than a bloodline, and build something none of their old countries could build alone. My grandfather came from Italy to work the Pennsylvania coal mines. He didn’t come here to stop being Italian. He came here to become American. Turns out you can do both. That was the bet.

Two and a half centuries later, the returns show up every time an American family gathers around a TV and argues about whether it’s acceptable to root for Norway.

Walk into any American sports bar during the World Cup, and you will see a guy in the Mexico jersey, a woman in the Nigeria kit, a family in the Croatian checkerboard, all of them going absolutely nuts, together, when the US scores. Nobody sees a contradiction because there isn’t one. The hyphen in Italian-American isn’t a fault line. It’s a bridge. We don’t ask anybody to forget where they came from. We ask them to add where they’re going.

That’s America’s superpower, and we don’t say it enough. Other countries have a history. We have histories, millions of them, stitched into one improbable flag. The kid whose grandparents fled a war, the new citizen who took the oath last Tuesday, the guy whose grandfather swung a pick in a coal mine so his grandson could argue about soccer on television.

So yes, when the United States takes the field, we’re one nation, loud and undivided, and when the heritage teams play, we scatter into our tribes for ninety minutes and reassemble at the final whistle as the thing we’ve always been: the only country on Earth that contains all the others. The World Cup bills itself as a global tournament, but it's really a mirror: thirty-two nations take the pitch, and America finds a reflection of itself in nearly every jersey.

Somewhere tonight, in a country most of us couldn’t find on a map, a kid is watching this tournament and dreaming of a place where all of it fits: her faith, her language, her grandmother’s recipes, and a future she gets to write herself. That place exists; it’s noisy and imperfect and still under construction after 250 years, but it remains the only nation ever founded on the idea that where you’re from matters less than where you’re going.

We cheered for Norway, mourned for Italy, and adopted England, and through it all, we never stopped being American. That’s not a contradiction; that’s a miracle.

If you enjoyed this article, consider pre-ordering a copy of my upcoming book All The Wrong Moves out in September.