Should you feel guilty about rooting against the US in the World Cup?

quote:

---

After all, it’s one thing to pull for your national team when patriotism feels uncomplicated. It’s quite another when you aren’t feeling very proud to be an American.

The Cold War made it easy for many Americans to rally behind the 1980 U.S men’s hockey team in its victory over the Soviet Union in the “Miracle on Ice.” But what do you do when you don’t see your country as the “good guys”?

---

quote:

---

Patriotism doesn’t mean blind loyalty

Some fans might double down on their patriotic commitments during the tournament. They’ll use the occasion to champion America in all things, whether it’s the country’s battles in the Middle East or its national team taking on Paraguay at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

Sports have a way of fueling nationalistic passions, and I fully expect plenty of people who don’t care much about soccer to channel their patriotic sentiments into the tournament.

However, rooting for your country’s national soccer team doesn’t mean that you endorse everything your country does, any more than wanting a friend to get a promotion at work requires you to support all of their behavior. As the philosopher Eamonn Callan has argued, a proper love of country requires citizens to be clear-eyed about its faults. The true patriot highlights problems and works to correct them, independent of how much they want the national team to win their next match.

By the same token, I think a deep love of country can coexist with ambivalent feelings about how the national team performs on the field. If patriots can disapprove of their country’s military adventurism – either because they see it as flatly unjust or because it casts their country in an unfavorable light on the international stage – there is nothing fundamentally unpatriotic about not wanting the U.S. to do well in the World Cup.

Other fans might invoke the mantra that it’s important to simply keep politics out of sports – that the games should be a refuge from the controversies that plague so many other aspects of civic life.

But as I argue in my book, fully separating politics and sports is almost impossible. It requires fans to view athletes as nothing more than bodies who exist to perform on the field. It means team executives and owners do little more than sign paychecks. And it ignores the reality that sports are woven into the social, economic and political life of communities.

---