I once found myself in one of those MJ vs. Lebron arguments. Who’s the GOAT? I’m largely agnostic, but I found myself making an odd argument. I think Lebron would have beaten MJ in a game of one-on-one, and Lebron faced much stiffer competition during his career. But Michael Jordan did something that nobody else did.
Michael Jordan – and more specifically his highlight reels – popularized basketball outside the United States. Watching Air Jordan dominate the 1990s inspired a generation of Europeans and more to play basketball. Today international players are surpassing the Americans. The last six MVP awards went to international players.
Team USA cruised to Olympic Gold this year, but it may be a different story when Curry, KD and Lebron retire. When you consider the dominant talents in the NBA for the next 10 years, only one American is inarguably in the conversation (Jayson Tatum). Most pundits predict the dominant force will be a Frenchman. Others in the conversation are two Serbians and a Cameroonian.
That is Michael Jordan’s legacy: the export of basketball to the world, and the ensuing arrival of international stars. Messi has done the same with soccer in the other direction. He and his highlight reels have popularized soccer in the United States. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
When I was a boy, not only did nobody watch soccer. We didn’t know who the players were. We didn’t know the teams to watch. Hell, we didn’t know the leagues. If asked, we would have assumed MLS was the premier league. I had heard of World Cup and Pele, and not much more.
The young athletes today wear their favorite players’ jerseys. Some have Team USA jerseys, but most cheer for European clubs. Messi and Ronaldo dominate, but Mbappe is on the rise. Children of Hispanic extract wear the jerseys of their forebears’ home country. Argentina and Inter Miami together outnumber everything else combined, including the local club.
When I was a kid, this may have been true in the small world of parochial schools of St. Louis, I don’t know. But this is inner-city Philadelphia today. It’s not an all-white affair either. You see all-black teams.
I’ve heard for over a decade that we’re only a few years from Team America being a perennial contender. I’ve learned that sometimes change takes time and sometimes it happens all at once. I think we are within striking distance. I’d like to make some bold prediction for 2032 … maybe quarterfinals?
That is Messi’s legacy: popularizing soccer in the United States. His move to MLS was the icing on the cake.
There is one more talking point for Michael Jordan that even Messi won’t match. Michael Jordan is still selling shoes!
Expat Chronicles 
I’d be surprised if the United States men’s team improves much in the near future. More American parents would need to be willing to put their kids in soccer academies. These are schools focused on the game where the kids learn to read and write on the side. Sometimes they live on campus.
Understandably, American parents are less likely to do this than parents in other countries, forego the standard education-to-career path just so there’s a higher, but still unlikely, chance that their kids go pro. In soccer.
Instead in the United States, it’s club, high school, college, then maybe pro. Except even here, a lot of the university teams are stacked with foreigners these days. (Look at number 16 ranked Missouri State! I count three Americans.)
I think this is why the US women’s team is losing their dominance. More European girls are being sent to academies. Maybe by 2032 the question won’t be if the US men will make it to the quarterfinals in a World Cup, but will the women. They didn’t last time, and now they’re even losing to teams like Mexico.
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I had heard of tennis academies here, as depicted in “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace, but I didn’t know it was so common in soccer. I have never heard of them in other sports. Maybe we won’t be contenders ever, and maybe the women will lose dominance too.
Writing this from Manhattan, where I’ve passed TWO turf soccer fields in the five or six blocks from my hotel to the event venue. Things are changing…
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