USA: The World Cup as an American selfie

Watching the U.S. national team every four years offers the chance to not only reflect on how America looks to the world, but also how we look to ourselves.

This year's squad features a group of mixed race children of American servicemen and German mothers that remind us of America's continued global military footprint. They join a contingent of Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and white players of various backgrounds, including one who sports the World Cup's best dreadlocks. Yes, our team mirrors how America really looks rather than how Fox News imagines that it looks.

This is not new; some of our top World Cup performers over the years have been Haitian, Uruguayan, and Dutch-born. Nor is this uniquely American. Spain's No. 9 is Brazilian, while Italy's top attacking talent hails from Ghana (well, Mario Balotelli's parents do).

Player development at the local level coupled with globalization and migration flows have made the U.S. much more competitive, but we are not yet realistic contenders to lift the trophy. Being a U.S. soccer fan today is the constant duality of a lingering inferiority complex coupled with a deep-seated pride at just how far we have come in the last 24 years.

The World Cup also provides a series of personal markers of my own life in four-year cycles, offering an equivalent of Uruguayan writer (and soccer fanatic) Eduardo Galeano's description of the function of writing: "an attempt to save, in times of infamy, the voices that will testify to the fact that we were here and this is how we were." 

From watching the 1990 team of mostly college players and semi-pros getting a harsh reality check in their first World Cup since 1950, to those heady few days after the 2010 win against Algeria when soaring expectations and a favorable path toward the final crashed into Ghanaian reality, we have come far. Yet there is a much longer road to travel.  

Seeing denim kit-clad Eric Wynalda's curving free kick in the '94 opener alongside my father and 74,000 others in Detroit, not fully understanding the gravity of seeing the World Cup live, let alone the financial sacrifices he made to enable such memories. Watching John O'Brien's genius pass knock out Mexico in 2002 on a 12-inch TV salvaged from a trash heap on 115th Street in New York City. Standing room only, on a broken tibia, singing loudly at a Queens pub full of boisterous Irish rooting for the Yanks as Dempsey's strike trickled over the England line in 2010.

We were here and this is how we were.

As told to Africasacountry.