Sunday’s match between the United States and Portugal was a certified hit: ESPN reported that it was the highest-rated soccer match of all time in the U.S., and that it was the “most-viewed non-football telecast” in the history of the network. (Football, in that case, meaning the American version.) This information is normally reserved for ad-sales meetings and high-fiving in executive suites—big jumps in all key demos!—not the kind of thing that fans ought to bother themselves about. Yet, when it comes to soccer, we’re used to worrying about how many Americans are watching—and, perhaps, what that number says about us. Sportswriters have spent more than a century fretting and fighting about the game and its place in the culture.

In 1912, as the United States was on the verge on being accepted into the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced the pending news with the headline “Tardy Recognition Given to American Soccer Football.” The paper’s editors volunteered “the sweeping prediction that a few years hence soccer football will be recognized in the United States as the same thing in winter, fall and spring that baseball is in the summer.”

Yet a few years later the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran this headline: “AMERICANS SHY AT SOCCER, AS WITH ALL ALIEN SPORTS.” The story described soccer’s obscurity in the U.S. as compared with England. “No game is really popular unless the spectators and followers have some vital interest in it,” the paper said. “This interest is usually the outgrowth of a liking which had its inception in the participation of the game itself.” This would become a familiar argument: soccer would grow as a spectator sport only if it grew as a participatory one.

Around the same time, J. B. Sheridan, in the Ogden (Utah) Standard, trumpeted the benefits of playing: “Soccer develops a very fine and useful type of man along the line of the infielder or outfielder in baseball, a man not too large, but fast on his feet and quick to think … A slow man has no business in soccer. It calls for speed and catlike dexterity with the feet. Beefy boys cannot play soccer.” The counterattack, he added, was “one of the most stirring and inspiring spectacles known to sport.”

Soccer was fast, purposeful, and never dull. It was only a matter of time until it became the national sport. Unless, instead, it was slow, desultory, and often boring—and would never catch on.

That’s what Walter Camp, known as the “father of American football,” told the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, in 1914. “The main trouble with soccer is that it lacks definiteness,” he began. “By that I mean that every play made in soccer does not represent a maximum of effort. You know that on the soccer field the ball is often dribbled and many short kicks are made. Now, the average American wants to see every play in a game performed as though it were the deciding one of the game.”

The rest of Camp’s analysis sets the parochial framework for the way that American critics would talk about soccer for years to come:

I once saw soccer played by amateurs in which there was a young fellow playing for all he was worth. On one occasion he threw himself in front of a man who was about to kick the ball. He received the full blow of his opponent’s foot, and in two days from that time he died from peritonitis.

Is this a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of soccer? Not exactly:

Now, an American likes that kind of a game where the players are constantly taking chances, but the Englishman does not care for it particularly. Few professional soccer players would have taken the chances that that man took. They would rather allow the man to kick the ball and make a goal than dive in where there was a chance for injury. Such a chance as the one taken by the player I have just been talking about is taken a hundred times a season by the American football player. That’s why the people like the American game and also shows why soccer is not more popular.

America’s uncertain dance with soccer continued. A circuit called the American Professional Soccer League debuted in the Northeast, in 1921, fielding teams in industrial cities with immigrant populations, including Fall River, Massachusetts; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and New York. The United States team placed third in the inaugural World Cup, which was hosted by Uruguay, in 1930, and then played again in 1934, in Italy. At the 1950 World Cup, in Brazil, the U.S. pulled off one of the great upsets of all time, beating a massively favored England in the group stage. The A.P. noted that the loss had brought Britain’s sportswriters to tears. American writers and fans were less moved. Reuters called it “a day some Englishmen consider the greatest in the annals of American sport”—the implication being that Americans would beg to differ. The Americans wouldn’t play in another World Cup for forty years.

Still, soccer was being played widely in the U.S. The North American Soccer League was formed in 1968, and flourished briefly in the seventies. In 1975, the Brazilian hero Pelé, diminished by age but still occasionally majestic, was signed by the New York Cosmos, causing a Beckham-like media frenzy. When the Cosmos won the league championship, in 1977, they returned home to a crowd at J.F.K. that Anthony Hiss described in our pages as rivalling the one that greeted the Beatles in 1964. “Girls love the Cosmos, because girls can play soccer, too,” Hiss wrote. “Sports haters love the Cosmos because they’re not sure that soccer is a sport.”