Patriotic Peak: American Sporting Performance Is on a Decline

Baseball, basketball, and women’s soccer. All three are American-dominated sports. All three had world championships this year. None of them were won by Americans.

It’s not an outlier. This year is just the continuation of a trend that has been visible for a while now: the end of American domination in sports where they’ve long been considered the best. There are plenty of sports that have never been America’s strong suit, such as men’s soccer and cricket. But even in some traditionally American sports, our massive headstart over the pack has eroded over time. How is it that America isn’t the best at “America’s pastime”?

In order to analyze this trend, we must first establish that it exists. Fortunately, a wide variety of sports confirm it for us. Take basketball, for example. After finishing a lowly seventh in 2019’s FIBA World Cup, the United States failed to medal once again in this year’s edition. Sure, one can point out that American stars like small forward LeBron James, point guard Stephen Curry, and small forward Jayson Tatum didn’t participate. But it’s hard to argue with the fact that the top three NBA MVP finishers in each of the last two seasons were international players. In addition, none of those three players competed in the tournament either, so America’s “lack of star talent” excuse is weak.

A similar situation is occurring in the sport of baseball. The consensus best player in the world is Japanese phenom pitcher Shohei Ohtani, who looks set to command the second-richest contract in sports history this offseason. In terms of MLB’s MVP award, 24 percent of this century’s MVPs have been won by foreign players, compared to only seven percent last century. Ohtani and outfielder Ronald Acuña, who hails from Venezuela, are the likely winners of their respective league’s MVP this year. 

Running quickly through some other sports, we can see more regression. In tennis, no American man has won the U.S. Open in 20 years, even though Americans accounted for 19 wins between the beginning of the Open Era in 1968 and 2003. In golf, with the Ryder Cup, even though Team USA leads Team Europe 27-14 all-time, they have lost seven straight cups that took place in Europe. On October 1, Team Europe won the most recent event 16.5-11.5, with the highest-ranked player in the world, American Scottie Scheffler, finishing a measly 0-2-2. Even when the best player in a sport is American, they find a way to fail on the international stage. Next, men’s soccer has never been America’s forte, but even there, America’s humiliating failure to qualify for the 2018 FIFA World Cup broke a 32-year streak of appearances. Women’s soccer had been a strength—they had won four of eight events and had never finished below third—until this year when they lost in the round of 16 and fell out of first place in the World Rankings for the first time since 2017.

Now the question becomes: why is this happening? One clear leading cause is simply that the rest of the world is greatly improving at pretty much every sport. The United States has been ahead in a lot of sports for so long, but that obviously isn’t because they’re “naturally better.” No, it has been that way because America has long been the richest country in the world and therefore has been able to invest money in training facilities, summer camps, etc. In addition, more people gravitate toward playing sports because of the massive paychecks that professional athletes receive. Meanwhile, as the rest of the world has gotten wealthier, they too have invested more in sports, and the results are clear.

But that isn’t the only explanation. A sneakier reason is that some of the best American athletes in many sports recently retired or are near retirement. These include James, Curry, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, Michael Phelps, and Serena Williams. As this has happened, a new batch of top players has risen to take their place, many of them from other countries, like Ohtani and “The Greek Freak” Giannis Antetokounmpo. In this way, not only have American results in international competitions declined but also the faces of the best leagues in the world—which are usually American—have become foreign players.

The part about the top sports leagues in the world usually being American is crucial. Even as the rest of the world has greatly challenged America’s dominance, we remain the financial centerpiece of the sports world (we know you’re trying your best, Saudi Arabia). Athletes come from all over the world to play in our leagues. With the sole exception of European and Saudi Arabian soccer, we dole out the most money to our players. Not much has changed about the location of major sports events either; of the 54 Olympic Games, four of the first 27 were held in the U.S., and four of the most recent 27 were too. Thus, the foreseeable future of sports seems pretty clear: an erosion of American athletic performance is still centered in the United States.

But hey, American football remains a sport that we completely dominate. At least we can lead the world in concussions.