The US men's national soccer team is one win away from matching their best-ever run in World Cup history, playing some of the best football this country has ever produced at this stage of the tournament. And a not-insignificant chunk of Americans are sitting at home trying to decide if they're even allowed to be excited about it. This is a genuine thing that is happening in the summer of 2026.
The Permission Slip Nobody Should Need But Here We Are
Look, if you need someone to explain why Americans might feel weird wrapping themselves in a flag right now, you have clearly not been paying attention. ICE raids. Attacks on institutions. A federal government that has spent the better part of two years treating whole categories of people living in this country like they are the problem. The Guardian's Alexander Abnos lays this out plainly, and he doesn't pretend it isn't real.
But his piece, published on the Fourth of July of all days, makes a case worth sitting with: the discomfort is legitimate, and you should cheer anyway. Not because the government deserves your enthusiasm. Not because wearing red, white, and blue means you're signing off on any of it. But because what sports actually offer has very little to do with government policy, and conflating the two is a trap that mostly just robs you of joy you earned.
The US Isn't Even the Worst Example of This
Here's the thing that tends to get lost when Americans argue about whether sports and politics should mix: every country with a functioning national team has some version of this conversation. Abnos points to Germany, whose fans spent decades after World War II wrestling with what it even meant to celebrate a national team. That is not an abstract historical footnote. That is a generation of people who had to figure out how to feel about belonging to a country that had done something unforgivable.
Or look at what's happening right now in the stands at Iran's games this summer. The Guardian piece describes fans at Iran's matches in Los Angeles and Seattle booing their own national anthem, wearing protest shirts, covering the flag's central insignia. And then, when Iran scored, the same stands erupted. Because the team is not the regime. The players are not the ayatollah. The people in those seats are not confused about this. They have figured something out that some American political commentators have not.
This Team Is Actually Worth Watching, By the Way
Set aside the philosophical argument for a second, because the soccer itself is genuinely good. The USMNT just beat Bosnia and Herzegovina to push within one win of matching the best World Cup run in the modern era of American soccer. They are playing with what Abnos calls more "verve and quality" than they ever have at this stage. That is not boosterism. That is the state of the team.
And the roster itself kind of makes the counter-argument for you, if you want it. These are players who represent the actual diversity of the country, coached by a man who has described himself as 200 percent Argentinian. Weston McKennie, who apparently has strong feelings about ranch dressing, is on this team. These are not the guys at the podium signing executive orders. They are athletes who have trained their entire lives to play football at the highest level, and they happen to be doing it right now, in America, in front of American crowds.
What You're Actually Cheering For
Abnos makes his sharpest point toward the end of the piece, and it's worth quoting directly: the players, coaches, and staff are ultimately temporary. They come and go. The real thing you're rooting for isn't any of them specifically. It's the people around you in the stadium or on your couch. It's being one small part of something that thousands of people are feeling at the same moment.
He pulls up Landon Donovan's goal against Algeria at the 2010 World Cup as proof of concept. People remember Donovan's name. They might remember Tim Howard's. But what they actually remember, the thing that still lives in the body sixteen years later, is what it felt like in that moment. That feeling had nothing to do with whoever was in the White House. It never does. That's the whole point.
The Flag Was Always a Contested Object
There is something quietly radical about Abnos publishing this argument on July 4th, a holiday that has been aggressively colonized by one particular political faction who acts like patriotism is their private property. The piece doesn't let that go unremarked. It invokes images from Washington DC, contrasting genuine collective joy against what it calls a "contrived monument" sitting empty and sad nearby.
You don't have to love the government to love your neighbors. You don't have to endorse policy to feel something when a kid from your city scores in the 87th minute. These are not contradictions that need to be resolved before you're allowed to watch a soccer game. The Iranians in those LA stands have already shown you how it's done.
The Dingo Take
The impulse to refuse patriotism as a form of protest is understandable, and sometimes it's exactly right. Refusing to stand, refusing to perform enthusiasm you don't feel, refusing to let bad actors use your joy as a photo op: all of that has a long and honorable tradition. But there is a difference between principled refusal and just... sitting out something that actually belongs to you because the worst people in the room have claimed it loudly enough.
The MAGA movement has spent years trying to make the flag mean something specific and exclusive. Letting them have sports too isn't principled. It's a forfeit. The people who built this country, and who are still building it right now, and who are frankly getting the worst of what this government is dishing out, are not less American than the guys turning a World Cup into a campaign rally. They are more American. Rooting for this team, loudly and without apology, is one small, low-stakes way of saying so.
Go watch the game. Yell at your television. Feel something good for ninety minutes. The paperwork of what this country is doing to people will still be there when the final whistle blows, and it will still need your attention. But joy is not collaboration. It is not surrender. And right now, this team is giving us a genuine reason for it.
