The Yanks are... Already Here

With the United States and England facing off in Group B for the men's World Cup this year, much has been made of this moment to prove that America's "Golden Generation" is ready to face the big names in the game, that the US is finally going to flex its muscles, exert its influence, and teach the world to call it "soccer." Though the game's on-field revolutions have come from every corner of the Earth, the last 30 years have seen growing influence of a footballing latecomer. Unbeknownst to most fans, the global game is already dominated by America everywhere but on the pitch.

Despite its lackluster performance at World Cups and multiple domestic soccer leagues disbanding from lack of fan interest, the world's largest sports market is unrivaled in its professionalism, business acumen, and entertainment content. It was these commercial attributes that convinced a few British football executives that they could learn something from their counterparts in American sports.

In the 1980s, English football was a travesty. Matchday attendance was declining, stadiums were crumbling, and its reputation across Europe was one of violence and vulgarity. A handful of team owners, looking across the pond at the profitability of America's National Football League (NFL), sought to remedy these ailments and make a fortune in the process by overhauling the football pyramid and turning what was a local sport into a global entertainment product. Revenues shot up exponentially as TV deals brought in money from across the country, then the continent, then the globe. The American experiment included comical flops, like sideline cheerleaders, and financial successes, such as staggering games to take place at multiple times across multiple days to reach the broadest possible TV audiences, especially American ones. Club crests were even redone to be more marketable. The borrowing of business structure goes right down to the coaching staff. The role of the football manager, once a position whose absolute power was sacred, has been split up among many jobs overseen by a head coach. Many EPL teams now have a set-piece coach, a clear imitation of the NFL's special teams coach. The American influence on the business side of soccer brought in so much money that teams were willing to try further experimenting with club structures, transfer policies, and on-field tactics that fit with that model.

The business-side revolutions that began with the founding of the Premier League in 1992 opened the door to another American import: the data science explosion of the last 15 years.

"Moneyball," as it's known in America, started in baseball as the Oakland Athletics' 2002 attempt to do more with less. Unable to compete with the game's biggest spenders, they used statistics to increase their chances of winning by focusing on a key statistic: On Base Percentage. Their success – the equivalent of taking Fulham to the Champions League on a shoestring budget – came from buying undervalued players who contributed to scoring rather than stars who scored a lot on their own. Two years later, a team with deeper pockets implemented this method and won it all.

Naturally, a game that runs with minimal stoppages for two 45-minute periods doesn't leave room for the kind of "plays" that we see in American football. However, the Beautiful Game is now more fluid positionally, yet more strictly mapped out through "automatisms" and build-up patterns, than ever before. In the world of soccer, data and technical analysis have allowed gamblers to make fortunes, stats nerds to gain a seat at the table, and the most forward-thinking clubs to mix art with science in their ambition for top spots.

Yet within a decade, those deep-pocketed owners were trying to replicate their baseball success with the new jewel in their sports empire, one of football's greatest institutions: Liverpool FC. As often happens when trying to port ideas from one arena to another, they chose the wrong metrics as soccer versions of On Base Percentage, and their dealings in the transfer market brought mixed results. However, the idea was blossoming elsewhere, and has been best exemplified by the steady rise of Brentford FC from the third tier to the Premier League after being bought by statistician and professional gambler Matthew Benham. By focusing on the Expected Goals (xG) metric, they achieved the same feat that made Oakland so revolutionary: finding undervalued players in an inefficient transfer market.

Brentford FC Performance over the Past 40 Years

Once again, these innovations developed by poorer teams are being wielded to great effect by larger ones. The football world is currently inundated with analysts, writers, and nerdy fans clamoring about xG and similar stats. The statistical likelihood that a team will score has gone from a way to describe the game, to a transfer strategy, to a prescriptive role in tactics. This statistical revolution has reduced low-certainty plays at both ends of the pitch, from shots outside the box to long defensive clearances. And though many old-fashioned pundits and fans bemoan the encroachment of nerd-dom on the sport, Moneyball is here to stay.

One result of data science finding more fertile ground in clubs' back offices than in the stands and TV studios, particularly in England, is that it has further split the interests of matchday viewers and league executives. This has paved the way for the most controversial American practice yet.

Video review has long been part of American sports, and apart from the odd blip, is seen as a pillar of sporting fairness. It catches things that weren’t apparent in real time and gives referees a chance to fix their mistakes. Video review, also known as instant replay, is used in American football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and just about everything else. The size of our country means that televised sports is the only way most fans can see their teams’ away games, and fans have been able to watch instant replays on TV since the at least the 1970s. It’s only natural that the arbiters of the game should be able to see as much as folks at home.

Soccer, however, prides itself as a game with no time-outs. The clock only stops for halftime, and refs tack time on the end of each half for whatever was lost to substitutions, injuries, and time wasting. Refereeing decisions were only reviewed after the game to dole out fines and match bans for infractions that the referees might have missed or underestimated. Now, that aversion to stoppages is being tested, and the punishment decision cycle sped-up, by the implementation of the Video Assistant Review (VAR), the biggest change to the way the game is policed since goalkeepers were banned from picking up back passes in 1992. Despite initial skepticism, VAR was used fairly well in the upper echelons of football when first rolled out at the 2018 World Cup. This good feeling has since evaporated in professional leagues, with many fans scratching their heads at the inconsistent application and unclear rules surrounding the technology. Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out over time and VAR will fulfill its promise of increasing fairness in games. Regardless, refereeing by instant replay is a fixture of the professional game, and is the closest American influence has gotten to what happens on the pitch.

Over the last 30 years, reforms in European soccer have drawn heavily from the United States, each successive change affecting what we see on the field more directly. What started with management structures and revenue streams in the 90s opened the doors for data-driven transfer policies and training regimes in the 2010s, followed by in-game video review in the last 5 years. The question of what comes next might be answered by what problems global soccer is trying to solve. There is some discussion of using a stopwatch instead of a running clock to limit the effect of simulation and time-wasting, but such a direct change to how the game is played would be so controversial as to be unpalatable to nearly all fans. The question remains, however, if executives actually care about that anymore. The ongoing controversy about having a World Cup in Qatar in the middle of a season does not portend well.

Whether American influence on the sport has been good or bad is hard to say. From a fan's point of view, it has pitted the interests of in-person fans against their TV-watching compatriots. Local viewers bemoan the odd kickoff times, but I can't pretend that I don't enjoy getting to see more than one match a day. The ludicrous amounts being spent have all but erased the possibility of smaller teams achieving glory, but they've also raised the level of the sport and created beautiful moments that will remain with fans of the big clubs for a lifetime.

Can the US men's team capitalize on all this influence? Can they escape the group ahead of England, Wales, and Iran to face down the Netherlands (the likely winners of Group A) and go farther than ever before? England's faltering form in the last international break certainly offers an opportunity, though the USMNT's own form doesn't instill much confidence; Wales, at least, ought to be excited.