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With its run to the Confederations Cup final the U.S. national team has inched closer to shedding its liminal status – between soccer nobody and soccer somebody. It’s closer to deserving more international respect. It’s also closer to disrupting the sine curve of results that has produced infrequent upsets against superior teams (see 1930, 1950, 1998, 2002), to which we can add Spain, 2009. The tipping point won’t come with one result, and probably won’t come for a while. But the national exposure and enthusiasm that comes with the country’s recent international success undoubtedly works toward expediting a protracted molting process.

The U.S. performance in the Confederations Cup has soccer fans and non-fans in this country buzzing, looking to compare it with the most unlikely upsets in American sporting history. The win over Spain drew comparisons to the “Miracle on Ice” when an amateur U.S. hockey team defeated the U.S.S.R. in 1980. On grass, the U.S. played with similar determination and sacrifice. The team deserved all the heart-pounding adjectives lavished on it by the media. On Sunday, the U.S. continued its attempt to upset the balance of the soccer world, like a buoy jammed underwater. The U.S. almost withstood Brazil. But it didn’t. Brazil’s second-half dominance restored the balance of the global game.

I’m not glad that the U.S. lost. But in a way it might be the right result, the most natural one. Yes, a U.S. win would have further boosted the prominence of soccer in our homeland. But it also might have made us too giddy and too expectant, made the average fan too annoyingly confident in the face of foreign superiority that demands our modesty and respect. I’m not ready for the U.S. to shed its underdog mentality yet. This mentality is unifying and powerful. And I don’t think the nation is ready for anything else.

As many of the more sober analysts have already said, the U.S.’s performance doesn’t mean that the team has “arrived!” or that we can consistently compete and win against the giants of the game. Like Spanish defender Carles Puyol suggested, if the U.S. played Spain ten times, it would lose nine. Probably true. For this reason alone, the U.S. victory over Spain deserves a resounding celebration. It also deserves a re-sounding after the media’s swooning over this team dries up until next year’s World Cup. It’s easy to get carried away. Soccer serves as one of the few sporting arenas where Americans can actually be considered underdogs, where we can still route for the grit and guts of our players instead of for the superiority of factory-produced physiques and skills. This is part of what makes the sport so attractive to me in this country. It’s still raw and unpolished compared to the real article. This is also the problem. Americans aren’t as technically trained or refined as their South American and European counterparts. This is a cruel fact. They lack the suave, the guile, the natural creativity. In short, they lack the style. Despite the U.S. success in the Confederations Cup, its lack of style still represents the team’s most glaring weakness.

The team’s heart and work-ethic might lay the foundation of a larger identity, but this identity is still barely forming. Passion and bravery can take a group far – about as far as a ragged U.S. team pushed in the Confederations Cup. But In an international sport in which every team pours forth with fully stocked wells of passion, it’s the skill-level of players that makes the difference.

Lacking such skill, the U.S. needs to hang on against better teams, to pray for the right opportunities and to pounce on them. For the majority of both the Spain and Brazil games the U.S. defense dug its nails in against a wave of relentless and flowing attacks. In those two games, the U.S. got out-shot 35-12. But it played with a remarkable understanding of its own abilities. It played with intelligent and relentless defensive pressure, with measured and swift counter-attacks that punished the best teams in the world for their over-aggressiveness. Such a backs-against-the-wall survivalist mentality might force other nations to give more respect to our bite, but it won’t necessarily give us the self-belief or self-evident expression needed to carve out space on the stage of world soccer powers.

Landon Donovan summed up a lot of this in typically political fashion in comparing an emerging U.S. team to an established Brazilian one after the U.S. loss: “We’ve got the potential to be at that level. The difference is, Brazil has been there before. A lot of their players have been in games like this, and they knew how to finish it and how to win. We still have to learn that. We have a lot of guys on our team who haven’t played a lot of national team games, haven’t played a lot of high-level club games, that were starting. You can tell there’s a difference there.”

“Look, it’s Brazil,” Donovan said. “You have to expect they’re going to get chances. They’re going to keep coming. What are you going to do? They have players that are probably worth three times as much as our whole team. There’s a reason for that.”

The American players are coming, slowly. Soccer in this country is growing, in fits and starts, only some of which we can measure. Most importantly, it continues to grow at the grassroots level, as passion for the global game fills the fissures of America’s fractured sports landscape. Participation in youth soccer continues to swell. Immigrant blood continues to boost passion for the sport while eroding the sport’s stubborn stigma as white and suburban. The sport reflects glimpses of this growth at its frothing head, measured by the commercial interest and TV ratings it attracts.

As the late great Brit-American journalist Steven Wells said it in a recent interview with Richard Whittall on EPL talk: “I’d even go as far as to say that the day that soccer really succeeds in the US isn’t when the US wins the World Cup, it’s when it becomes the default sport in the nation’s playgrounds. Which—in Darwinian terms—it really should, being far better suited to that arena (and way more fun as well as being better exercise) than all the alternatives. Way to go yet though…”

I agree with Wells. I just suspect, or at least hope, that the two measurements of success that he suggests will coincide.◊

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