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Dear International Soccer Officials

I'm doing this to help you. You're embarrassing yourselves. I mean, look at you. Did you go re-watch your performance in the USA-Brazil women's game this morning? How about the USA-Mexico men's game in the finals of the Gold Cup? You've never really given us the benefit of the doubt on any close calls, but it's like you aren't even trying any more. And people are starting to notice. It's not just us Americans any more. Did you hear the crowd at the end of the Brazil game? The German crowd got so fed up with you (and with Brazilian flopping) that they started chanting "USA! USA!" Germans!!

Look, you don't like America. I understand that, I really do. We're a bunch of fat, entitled slobs. We have no right to think that we'll ever be good at soccer, it's like our fifth favorite sport. We care less about soccer than literally almost every other country in the world, and most of our sports fans still have the nerve to complain about how boring the sport is, and how they don't get the offsides rule. We call the game "soccer", and call a sport with very little kicking involved "football". If Karma had its way, we shouldn't win very many soccer matches. Countries to whom soccer means much more than it does to us should win. That only seems fair.

But sports are supposed to be a field of even competition, no matter what, so that even underdogs have a chance. Try thinking about it this way. American soccer players don't get love and respect from their countrymen the way soccer players around the globe do. They have the biggest targets on their backs, even if they aren't the most talented or accomplished teams, just because of the "USA" on their jerseys. It seems like the least you could do is give them a fair shake. Because really, they're the underdogs.

Take the USA-Mexico game. We played awful in that match. We would have lost anyway. Our men's team isn't world class yet, and our women's team...well, they've won a couple World Cups already, and it didn't bring the entire soccer hierarchy crashing down, because women's soccer (right or wrong) only gets a fraction of the attention that men's gets. So just call it fair. The men's team won't win anything significant for the time being, you can go to sleep with a clean conscience, the game of soccer will get a boost in the integrity department, and the world won't have to witness Apocalypse-inducing events like Germans chanting "USA!"

Because nobody wants that.

Signed,

An American soccer fan

Images by eflon used in background images under a Creative Commons license. Thank you.