Is soccer too much of a “team sport” for Americans who like to see exhibitions of individual excellence? In Super Bowl XXXVIII, Tom Brady wouldn’t have exhibited much excellence if he’d been on the field alone against the Carolina Panthers.

Is soccer too “low-scoring”? Hockey outcomes are not obstacles to the mathematically impaired. And consider a baseball game where both teams pitched shut-outs and the game kept going, extra inning after extra inning, until every player had dropped dead or it rained. This would be talked about for years.

Is there not enough “physicality” in soccer? We’re a nation that, with the help of Ty Cobb, turned a form of cricket into a contact sport. Yet, even in the NHL, you’d have to watch a lot of enforcers at work before you saw something like what happened to Brazil’s Neymar during the match against Columbia.