ABSTRACT
The United States Football Association (USFA, now US Soccer Federation) was founded in 1913 and the Americans affiliated to FIFA the following year. The history of international competition involving the USA, then, spans most of the twentieth century and, indeed, the American national team has a creditable record in the final stages of the World Cup. The USA participated in the inaugural competition in 1930, fielding a team of students that reached the semi-finals, and has been present at the final stages on six other occasions up to and including 2002, when they reached the quarter finals. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the USA men’s team had broken into the top 10 of the FIFA rankings and, therefore, constituted a force to be reckoned with, even if, somewhat paradoxically, for many Europeans there remains something incongruous about the sight of an American playing soccer, especially given the game’s extensively documented subservience to gridiron (American football), baseball and basketball in American sport as a whole (see, for instance, Markovits and Hellerman 2001). It is the aim of this chapter to examine the portrayal of the USA in a sample of the European press with a view to understanding the mechanisms at work in depictions of Americans competing in the international football arena. To what extent are readily recognizable American stereotypes communicated by the sports pages of European daily newspapers throughout the twentieth century?
