The U.S. Is the Future of Soccer, for Better or Worse

Not long ago, a small — or, if you want to get technical about it, large — indicator of American soccer culture’s 21st-century transformation appeared in the night sky above Midtown Manhattan. Just after sundown on May 31, the LED lighting system at the top of the Empire State Building snapped on, striping the tower’s upper facade and spire red and white. It was a tribute to Arsenal, the storied North London soccer club, which had clinched the English Premier League championship a dozen days earlier.

Arsenal’s first league title in 22 years touched off ecstatic celebrations in Britain’s capital and in cities around the world, from Melbourne to Jakarta to Addis Ababa. Similar scenes played out not far from the Empire State Building. When a loss by Manchester City sealed the championship for Arsenal on May 19, joyous die-hards poured out of bars in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, many wearing the club’s red and white jerseys.

The following weekend, Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an Arsenal supporter since childhood, was in the crowd at a packed Brooklyn sports bar to watch the team’s last match of the Premier League season and to cheer the ceremonial trophy-lift that followed the final whistle. Again, the party spilled into the streets, where the mayor and another celebrity Arsenal superfan, Spike Lee, joined the throng waving flags and singing terrace chants.

For decades, soccer’s place in American life was marginal and subcultural. At the turn of this century, top European clubs like Manchester United and Real Madrid had become huge global brand names — marquee attractions in what was not just the planet’s most ubiquitous sport, but arguably its dominant form of mass culture, up there with Hollywood movies and pop music.

Yet in the United States, “world football” remained a fringe obsession, shared by a hard core of expats and American fans, who faced steep challenges just to tune in games from Europe’s top leagues. To watch the weekly action in the Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and the German Bundesliga required subscriptions to specialty cable services or expertise in the internet dark arts. Some of us can recall spending our Saturday mornings hunched over a laptop, gaping helplessly at a buffering feed of a Bayer Leverkusen-Werder Bremen match on an illicit peer-to-peer streaming site. You felt like a ham radio operator trying to contact Mars.

The American press, meanwhile, was indifferent to even the biggest soccer news. The last time Arsenal won the Premier League — in the legendary “Invincibles” campaign of 2003-04, when the club went undefeated — the story barely blipped in U.S. media. In this newspaper, on the day after Arsenal’s final game, the team’s achievement garnered a three-sentence wire service write-up in a “Sports Briefing” column, sandwiched between an item about an N.F.L. running back’s violation of the league’s substance abuse policy and an update on the third-round leaderboard at a golf tournament in Franklin, Tenn.