Brazil 2014 has provided a breakthrough in the US, where the younger generation, with the help of social media, have a passion for ‘soccer’ rather than the distrust of the cold war era

There’s the football, sure. But the other great joy of the World Cup is to watch the re-establishment of a new world football order. There has been much re-establishment this time around: most of all, the humbling of Brazil on home soil and the demise of Spain. More cheeringly, and no less seismically there was America’s long-coming and much-vaunted embrace of, if not necessarily soccer itself, then certainly the World Cup.

Soccer has long been America’s unloved team sport. “In America, soccer is something you pick your 10-year-old daughter up from,” the comedian John Oliver said, rightly, on his HBO show last month. But this summer, that changed. One of the most oft-quoted stats of the stats-heavy tournament was that USA’s match against Portugal was the most watched soccer game in US history, with an estimated 24.7m viewers of ESPN and its Spanish-language broadcast network Univision.

More Americans bought tickets for the World Cup than that of any other nation outside Brazil. Even though patriotism is declining among young Americans, a certain sector of these same youthful Yanks indulged between matches in an ironic kind of patriotism – tweeting jokey threats to waffle houses before USA’s game against Belgium, making the mascot Theodore Goalsevelt go viral – which tipped into actual patriotism during the matches themselves.

Such was America’s new-found enjoyment of soccer that the professional troll, Ann Coulter, wrote not one but two columns about her hatred of the sport, comparing it to the metric system, Beyoncé and – just for good measure – Hillary Clinton. She also derided it as “a sport for girls” and “third world peasants”. It’s impossible to prove that Coulter’s column made Americans love soccer more, but seeing as she never lets facts get in the way of a forced gag, it seems fair to follow her lead and claim it did.

The interest has not abated since the team was knocked out. Since returning to the US, Clint Dempsey has appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman and Tim Howard is a bona fide national hero. In a recent poll, 56% of Americans said they were still following the World Cup, up from 39% in 2010. Rumours that President Obama is considering swapping basketball for soccer to achieve such enviable polling figures have been neither confirmed nor denied.

This relationship has changed on both sides. Back in 2006, Team USA was described by several publications (including the Guardian) as “the least popular team” at the World Cup: they were dismissed as galumphing dilettantes who thought they could just swoop on in with their money and national arrogance and gazump the nobler teams.

In other words, they were too American. But that has changed, too. Along Copacabana Beach in Rio, the meeting point for all countries during the World Cup, USA fans were cheered as brothers by teams of other nationalities. When USA lost to Belgium, the BBC commentator mused admiringly: “This is a proper team. They get it.”

“There’s been lots of praise for the US here, from Brazilians and South Americans. Maybe, oddly, it was fun to root for the US as an underdog instead of the big bad wolf for a change,” suggests Andrew Das, a sports editor at the New York Times who focuses on soccer.

Younger Americans enjoyed this novelty, too: “For a generation who have watched over-confidence in American power lead to disaster, cheering for the US in a contest that we knew we wouldn’t win offers a similar existential thrill. Soccer fandom in America is speculative fiction: What if the US was just a country among countries? It’s the spectre of this humbler version of America that causes right-wing pundits like Ann Coulter to freak out about soccer,” American blogger Adrian Chen wrote.

One can point to various factors that have helped bring this long-running rom-com between soccer and America to its happy conclusion – time-zone friendly games, growing reliance on the international web for news instead of local papers – but the main reason lies with the younger generation.

“With MLS almost 20 years old, we now have a generation of players who have grown up watching the professional game here, have grown up seeing the US play in the World Cup,” says Das.

“If you’re below the age of 45 there’s no stigma with being a soccer fan, as opposed to older Americans who still view soccer as some enemy from the Cold War era,” says Grant Wahl, America’s leading soccer writer.

The changing demographics in the US play an essential part, too, with a rising Hispanic population as well as a constant influx of immigrants from football-loving countries.

“Most Americans who follow soccer now wouldn’t quibble with the idea that the United States will win – or at least play in – a World Cup final in our lifetime. That would have been a preposterous idea 20 years ago. Now it’s a good pub argument. It’s even better when you have it with an Englishman,” says Das. “Too soon?”