America, I give you your true national team.
Justine Zwiebel/BuzzFeed
Hoo rah, siss boom bah, USA USA USA, CLINT DEMPSEY FOREVER.
Okay. Now that that's out of the way, allow me to state a fact. It is a fact that every American who has ever watched sports knows, a simple and obvious and indisputable fact that forever tempers American soccer spectatorship. It is in back of all of our minds, a balm for our national ego every four years after Old World aristocrats and their colonial inheritors prance cruelly around our defeated national team on the World Cup pitch:
Our best athletes don't play soccer.
Another fact: Our second-best athletes don't play soccer. Our third-best athletes don't play soccer. Our fourth—you get the idea.
I mean no offense, affront, or ill-will towards American soccer players, who have been doing the most with, well, not the most for two decades now. They do us proud. But, dude, just imagine. Imagine if we, a mighty nation of 300 million, raised our very best athletes, the stars of the gridiron and the hardcourt, on soccer. Put soccer balls in their cribs. Put lil' goals in their backyards. Sent these fast-twitch, sky-high, Mountain-strong badasses to youth academies and development programs run by weird mustachioed autocrats dedicated to getting the very best from the very best, inculcating the movement, the culture, and the nuance of the world's most popular game in our greatest athletes.
Look, I like Kyle Beckerman. I think it's chill that he's going for it with his hair like that. But Kyle Beckerman should be the guy watching the World Cup at a bar in Nashville with his chill hair telling stories to his bros like "Yeah man, I played youth soccer with Kobe. He was unreal man, unreal. Even back then. Another level."
I get it. I get that our team is American because they never say die and they're scrappy and they remind us of the way things used to be, when we were just a reedy teen of a nation with a bloody nose and a gym membership. But that's not us anymore. The USA is the LeBron James of nations. We realized our potential, baby, and it's huge. And just imagine what it would look like if we poured a thick glass of that potential all over the World Cup.
So I did. I dared to dream. This is the dream lineup for the American men's national team, if our country gave one ounce of one shit about the beautiful game. It's big. It's bad. And it's glorious.
Jason Miller / Getty Images
The reality is that at 6'5", with a 42.5-inch vertical leap and the best hands in the most hand-eye heavy position in sports, Calvin Johnson would literally never allow a single goal, ever. He might not ever allow a rebound, a second chance, unless he was bored. Calvin Johnson with six days of training would be the greatest soccer goalie of all time and it wouldn't be close.