A lot rides on the outcome, and not just of this one game. In general, World Cup 2010 is a watershed moment for soccer in the US, and billions of dollars hang in the balance. On the pitch, this American team is as capable as any we’ve had, perhaps ever. And our infrastructure is improving daily, with better youth programs, better intermediate development programs and academies, a rapidly improving pro league and more and more of our top players finding their way into European sides – and the ability to succeed in top-of-the-table sides in England, Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Holland is the real measure of where you stand in the global food chain.

So you can expect American teams to keep getting better and better, regardless of the result in South Africa.

The reason Copa 2010 is so important, though, is money. If the US gets out of the group stage (not guaranteed, but we should) and perhaps wins in the round of 16, that sends a message to the American sports fan that the US is a serious player in the world’s game. As I noted several years ago, people carp about soccer for a number of reasons (low scoring, for instance), but when push comes to shove, what really keeps us away from MLS parks and televised games is the fact that, well, a lot of pissant little countries are better than we are. And from the limited and jingoistic perspective of the typical American sports fan, if Wherethefuckistan beats you at something, that something isn’t a valid game by definition.

And make no mistake, Americans like to win. We insist on it. We’re used to being the best and at some level we probably feel it’s our right. And frankly, we don’t much trust any sport where godforsaken France is better than us.

Think about it. What sports will Americans plop down their money for? Football? You betcha – and we’re the best at it (of course, that’s pretty much by default, isn’t it?) Baseball? Our game, and we’re the best in the world at it. Hoops? Ditto, although the rest of the world is slowly catching up. Hockey? Ummm, well, we’re #2 right now, and to be honest, our fourth most popular sport draws pathetic TV ratings (which sucks, because I feel like you can’t possibly not love the game if you know a little about it).

What else? Well, to a lesser extent, tennis, golf, maybe even a little track and field. Boxing. Stock car racing. And these are all sports where if we aren’t the best at the moment, we were recently enough and fully expect to be again in the near future. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, there is pretty much no sport that Americans care enough to watch in significant numbers that we aren’t a world power in.

Lately, though, something has been changing where the American sports consciousness is concerned. A few weeks ago I woke up one morning, flipped on SportsCenter to find that the top story was … not the NBA playoffs. Not the previous evening’s MLB results. Not even – gasp! – the LeBron James free agency soap opera. Nope. It was that the injury to German captain Michael Ballack (he’d been chopped down in an egregiously dirty play in Chelsea’s FA Cup final win against Portsmouth) was going to keep him out of the Cup.

Think about that for a second. It’s SportsCenter. The top story is that the German captain has been ruled out of the World Cup. This was certainly the 7th Sign. All across America walls were bleeding, velvet Elvises were crying, storm clouds were gathering over deserted soccer fields, fallen angels were materializing in truck stop restrooms with cryptic messages for the Earth’s leaders…

Still, if you’ve been paying attention, you realize that most American media outlets have been taking futbol a lot more seriously of late, and ESPN never misses a chance to inject some goal or another into its plays of the day. ESPN’s interest is obvious – they televise MLS and have picked up the contract to carry Premiership games in the UK (some of which make their way onto ESPN2 HD), and we can probably expect more of this during the coming season.

If the US team earns some glory on the field in South Africa, then perhaps it justifies some of the hype in the mind of Joe Footballfan (who probably even played soccer as a kid, and who’ll perhaps watch a team that makes him feel good about himself before he will one that finds a way to lose to a nation he can’t even find on a map). If the Americans flame out (like they did four years ago), though, ESPN is going to realize a lot less from its investment that it might otherwise.

So best of luck to Landon and Gooch and Jozy and Tim and the Bradley family and the rest of the boys wearing those goddamned awful Nike uniforms. The fate of American marketers rests with your speed, your power and your courage.

Okay, maybe that’s a tad snide.

We all know that if soccer ever becomes the national pastime, it won’t be anytime soon. But there’s plenty of room in this country for the growth of such an engaging sport, and I can easily imagine soccer being a bigger deal in terms of revenues and ratings than hockey is (not hating on hockey here – I wish it were a bigger deal nationwide, as well).

I love the game, and don’t see any reason why you have to choose between soccer and football. We can love all of it, you know? (Isn’t that what America is about? All of it. Hell, that ought to be in the Pledge of Allegiance.) And American success in South Africa moves us a few more steps down that road.

So best of luck to our team – may they stand us all proud over the next couple of weeks…

It wasn’t the first time in this game that there were odd calls – all going against the US – in and around the Slovenan box. One play Dempsey was wrestled to the ground in the box, no call. On another, he was body check as Altidore got off a snap shot. Altidore was blocked off just outside the box by the last defender that only drew a yellow card. One earlier decision saw Altidore thrown down this time near the midway line only to find the infraction whistled on the American. You might think the ref just plain didn’t like the United States.

Its not as if this is the first time this has happened to the US team in a World Cup. We all remember the truly shocking no call in the 2002 quarterfinal against Germany when Torsten Frings made a brilliant save with his left hand. The only problem is that Torsten Frings is a midfielder, the German goalie was cleanly beaten. Penalty and red card. Except not that time. Flash forward four years to the final group game for the US against Ghana when we needed a win to go through. After another slow start the US had equalized when a poor clearance from Bocanegra at left back towards the top of the box. Gooch and a Ghanaian attacker go for the ball, the Ghanaian player goes down, penalty. Ghana covert, go up 2-1 and that is that.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that every word of that Gude describes here is accurate. The US team has been on the wrong end of its share of bad calls, and some of them have been critically damaging. These aren’t the rantings of a blind American homer, either – observers from around the world are saying the same things about the infamous disallowed third goal, and you’re going to see FIFA quietly admit it tomorrow, too, when they send the ref (Mali’s Koman Coulibaly) home.

But Gude goes a step further, suggesting that there’s something more than garden-variety bad officiating at work. He suspects a broader anti-American conspiracy, although he doesn’t phrase it quite that way.

This piece of his analysis needs a closer look. For starters, Gude isn’t some typical American football fan who just watched his first soccer game. As his bio explains, he’s an active ambassador for the game (it probably isn’t fair to hold his love of Liverpool against him in this context). So we’re dealing with an informed opinion.

Which is why I’m a little perplexed. Because if you’ve watched as much top-flight international soccer and international competition as Gude has, by now it ought to be clear that bad refs are the rule, not the exception. Yes, we got hosed, but isn’t just the US. Go ask Germany about the inexplicable red card on Miroslav Klose in the Serbia match, for instance. This tournament alone has already seen three or four examples of officiating so bad it’s hard to understand how the referees were selected for the most prestigious tournament in the world. Did I say three or four? The Bleacher Report digs even deeper.

This is the best FIFA has to offer?

Well, not exactly. You find the best refs in the countries with the highest level of play, as a rule, but in a global tournament there’s, shall we say, a political mandate to be as inclusive as possible. I saw nothing in Mr. Coulibaly’s performance to suggest that he could get a job calling rec league games in Aberdeen. So the structure of the tournament itself opens the door to a certain amount of risk – I mean, you can’t have all the games called by Brits, Italians, Spaniards and Germans. (And even if you could, you’d still have problems: the Germany-Serbia ref was Spanish and who can forget the colossal blunder of English official Graham Poll, who in the 2006 Cup issued three yellow cards to a Croatian player without sending him off?) Some of the problem is explained by the fact that soccer is a complex, fast-paced game that’s simply hard to ref (and I say this as a guy who has called more than 1,000 games in his life). Some of it, but by no means all of it. It’s hard, but it isn’t that hard.

The bottom line, for better or worse, is that tragic officiating is as much a part of the game as the goal kick. Period. As a result, it’s difficult to see that the American team has any special claim on injustice.

Now, all that said, it’s true that US soccer doesn’t get much respect from the rest of the world. Part of that owes to the fact that we haven’t earned a lot of respect with our skill (although that’s getting a little better in recent years). We’re just not as good as much of the rest of the world. This isn’t our game – around the globe kids have a soccer ball on their feet before they leave the crib, but here it’s our fifth or sixth choice. We get the same level of respect in soccer as we accord the Brits in basketball, and for the same reasons. Know what? That’s fair.

I also have no doubt that part of the dynamic is political. There are many nations around the world with no real reason to love us, and that carries over into sport. But does this indicate the existence of an anti-American bias by officials? Especially since, as noted above, it’s hard to demonstrate that we have it any worse than anybody else?

I’ve never seen the calls that have gone against us in the Cup as politically motivated (although I dread CONCACAF qualifiers – the basic level of officiating talent in this region is bad to start with and if you’re looking for places where people aren’t 100% in love with all things American, Latin America ain’t a bad place to start). There have been international matches where I knew we were going to get zero calls as a result of the where the ref was from but I’ve always chalked this up to soccer culture, not politics. And I can’t overstate the power of soccer culture – how the game is played is an expression of national identity and pride, and these things are often beyond irrational. I’ve been on the pitch with plenty of people who didn’t have anything against us politically, necessarily, but who hated our guts where the game was concerned.

Back to Gude’s suspicion that the calls against us are, shall we say, targeted. It’s possible – politics and sport don’t always play nice with each other, and those who remember our Olympic boycott and the travesty of the 1972 Olympic basketball final don’t need to have this explained to them.

But I have a basic rule when it comes to assessing conspiracy theories: never chalk up to conspiracy that which can be easily explained by basic incompetence. After all, incompetence is humanity’s greatest natural resource, and soccer refs, as a group, tend to have far more than their share. In the US-Slovenia match, all you had to do was look at Mr. Coulibaly’s face to see how utterly out of his depth he really was. He didn’t need to hate America to blow that call. Cluelessness sufficed.

Gude may be right, but for the time being I need more evidence. Please, I pray to the soccer gods, do not show it to me Wednesday in our match vs. Algeria…