The United States women's national soccer team claimed four FIFA World Cup trophies and four Olympic gold medals from 1991 through 2021, a three-decade run of success unmatched in international association football tournaments by any other women's or men's national team. Major League Soccer celebrated a quarter-century of continuous operation in 2020, showing that professional soccer can exist and thrive in American communities. Television networks pay billions of dollars each year for the rights to broadcast European domestic leagues and UEFA Champions League matches to American audiences. Yet the perception that the United States remains a disinterested exception among a world of soccer-mad nations, advanced most forcefully by Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman in their 2001 monograph Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, persists into the third decade of the twenty-first century.
In the two decades since Markovits and Hellerman published Offside, a growing body of scholarship has challenged...