UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITY.

On the steps in front of the Brauhaus Hibernia, a cheerful pub on the main square in Gelsenkirchen, a coal town in the Ruhr Valley, one woozy rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" followed another. Captain America was there in full regalia, along with Evel Knievel and a complete starting five of the Harlem Globetrotters, dribbling a basketball--with their feet, of course. The celebrants were among about five hundred American soccer fans, most of them wearing U.S. team jerseys, with the Stars and Stripes tied around their necks as capes. Soccer fans in America are evangelical in their fervor, yet cultish in their number, and a couple of hours before the United States team was to play its opening match in the first round of this year's World Cup tournament, their creed was being repeated and reaffirmed: Soccer in America is growing. Our team is a genuine world power. We made the quarter-finals last time, so this year, just maybe . . .

Over the alcoholic din, Nathaniel Max, from Riverside, California, recalled his trip to the World Cup in France, eight years ago. "All the fans from opposing teams wanted to take pictures of me," he said. "It was like, 'Look! An American soccer fan! Never seen one of them before!' This scene tells you how much things have changed."

The quality of the American team, however, still ranks with the quantity of its fans--that is, at best, in the middle of the international pack. Not six minutes into the game in Gelsenkirchen, Zdenek Grygera, of the Czech Republic, fired a cross in front of the American goal. The ball flew high and hard toward Jan Koller, the Czech striker, who resembles no American athlete. There are basketball players as tall as Koller (he is six feet seven inches), football players with backs as broad, professional wrestlers with heads as bald. But no one has quite the same combination of graceful athleticism and lurid menace, and certainly no one looks so much like Lurch, from "The Addams Family." With a couple of American defenders standing beside him like an honor guard, Koller leaned in for a header. The dull thud of his head crashing into the ball suggested a sandbag hitting a dam. It was, perhaps, a good thing that Kasey Keller, the American goalkeeper, just grazed the ball--its full impact might have hurt him. By the ten-minute mark of the game, the Czech fans were making the universal sign of spectator boredom: the wave. The Czech players, bigger, stronger, and faster than the Americans, controlled the entire game, and the final score, 3–0, was one of the worst defeats suffered by any team in the first round of the tournament.

Five days later, the U.S. team salvaged a measure of respectability in a madcap 1–1 tie with Italy. Then, last Thursday, a clearly superior team from Ghana beat the United States 2–1, condemning the Americans to last place in their four-team group. In all, the World Cup in 2006 suggested another false dawn for soccer in America. The game that captivates the rest of world--where it is a source of rapture and revenue--remains only a niche product at home. Even a better performance at the Cup probably would not have altered the sport's trajectory much. Soccer is the Canada of American sports, viewed less with contempt than with indifference.

In early June, my thirteen-year-old son, Adam, and I flew to Frankfurt for the start of the games. This was supposed to be the dodgiest of the twelve venues in Germany, because the English team, accompanied by its notoriously loutish fans, would be playing its first game there, against Paraguay. In every participating city, the German organizers put on what they called a Fan Fest for the thousands of locals and visitors who couldn't get tickets to the games. The English visitors, with their alleged tendency to riot, were perhaps, in the eyes of their highly organized hosts, most in need of diversionary Fan Festing. The Fest in Frankfurt was surely the most spectacular of the Teutonic sideshows: it featured giant double-sided video screens on stilts in the middle of the Main River. Tens of thousands lined the banks to watch England try to recapture its former glory.

In the years since the English team won its only Cup, in 1966, its supporters have come to resemble Red Sox fans circa 2003, in their amazing ability to conjure, then experience, scenarios of doom and the resultant self-pity. Perhaps that's why they drink so much. There were said to be forty thousand English fans, mostly men, in the crowd along the Main--far more than from any other country--and most of them came supplied with cases of lager and stout. (They didn't wait for kickoff to start drinking, either.) England survived its opener, ...