Soccer in America has never been treated like any other sport. In a country that can't even agree on what to call the game, it has been alternately loved like an underground band, ridiculed as a poisonous foreign import, and, for most of its history, roundly ignored.
But if the U.S. is in a position to co-host the largest ever World Cup over the course of the next five weeks, it's because of a bubbling undercurrent that has sustained the game in America for nearly a century.
Today, it boasts one of the best attended domestic leagues in the world, a men's national team that is consistently ranked in the top 15, and a vibrant soccer culture that revolves around the simple joy of Saturday-morning pints.
How it got there is not a linear story. The fits and starts of America's complicated relationship with the world's most popular game encompass a forgotten goal in the middle of Brazil, the 1990s invention of a sports league from scratch, the Hollywood arrival of an English Spice Boy, and a uniquely American brand of optimism.
Now as more than 6 million fans prepare to attend the World Cup, the country that spent so long dismissing the sport finds itself proudly at the center of the soccer universe.
