No, this is not about Gov. Scott Walker’s chances of being reelected in 2018.

The soccer World Cup ended, from the U.S. perspective, yesterday with Team USA’s 2–1 extra-time loss to Belgium.

Keith Olbermann was his usual snarky self on ESPN2 last night, but if you ignore the snarkiness, he makes some valid points about how to increase Americans’ interest in soccer. Click here for the video, but here is the outline:

1. Stop imitating the British and their incorrect grammar — for instance, “Belgium are,” which everyone knows should be either “Belgium is” or “the Belgians are.”
2. Find an American play-by-play voice, even though Brit Ian Darke does an excellent job:

   Olbermann’s point is that soccer needs an American voice, as Vin Scully for baseball or Mike Emrick for hockey. He’s correct. The problem is that ESPN’s previous American soccer announcers, Dave O’Brien and Jack Edwards, were, in order, bland and not from soccer, and ridiculously jingoistic. (Anyone who has heard Edwards on Boston Bruins hockey can agree with the latter point.)
   ESPN Radio’s announcer, JP Dellacamera, is great …

   … but seems to not meet ESPN TV standards, or something.

3. “Lay off the elitism,” or “stop trying to build soccer by tearing down other sports.”
4. “Calm down,” which is based on a soccer referee’s tweet yesterday, “Soccer belongs to the world, and is not ours to do as we please.” A statement like that makes me want to never watch soccer again, at any level.
5. More U.S.-appropriate Major League Soccer team names, instead of names that are “embarrassingly derivative” of international club names, such as FC Dallas, D.C. United, Sporting Kansas City, Toronto FC, Chivas USA (which is based not in Chivas, but in Los Angeles) and Real Salt Lake. (Of course, that runs into the danger of nicknames that generate offense in our perpetually offended society — Redskins anyone? — though I’m a bit surprised there haven’t been protests against Chivas by the anti-alcohol crowd.)
6. “Stay away from FIFA,” the international soccer organization so corrupt that it “makes the IOC look like Doctors Without Borders.” (Lines like that are why Olbermann is in fact worth watching, maddening though he can be.) Olbermann suggests staging an American version of the World Cup here, which would generate an American Football League vs. National Football League rumble, which must have been fun to watch in the ’60s. Of course, the event that started soccer to becoming kinda-sorta popular in the U.S. was when the 1994 World Cup was held in the U.S., without requiring construction of new stadiums and stadium worker deaths, unlike Qatar now.
7. Olbermann quoted surveys of 12- to 17-year-old boys that suggest they prefer soccer to baseball, concluding, “What kids really love is soccer video games.” He suggests figuring out a way to tap into that, which I think is a task for a demographic younger than Olbermann’s, or mine.

One unfortunate thing about Tuesday’s loss is that it may well be the final World Cup match for Tim Howard, who might have been the only reason the U.S. was in the game. Howard made a World Cup-record 16 saves, and his work in goal prevented a bloodbath. Howard is 35, and it’s not clear that a goalkeeper pushing 40 is likely to be in the 2018 plans, though finding a goalie as good as Howard seems unlikely, at least today.

The loss suggests that the U.S. remains far, far away from being a World Cup contender. In hockey, teams occasionally decide to be hyperaggressive on offense, and leave their goalie to be essentially the entire defense. That’s how goalies sometimes accumulate a huge number of saves, and sometimes give up a lot of goals; it’s a tradeoff to try to generate more offense, and it’s certainly fun for fans to watch. That’s not what the U.S. did — their offense is anemic, and so they played a defensive style, and yet Howard was still required to singlehandedly save the American bacon for the 90 minutes of regulation.

So for one game, the Americans were bad on defense, and for the entire World Cup, they weren’t very good on offense. Yes, they scored five goals in four games, but that’s in a World Cup that had a record number of goals in group play, and goal number four came after the U.S. was in desperation mode.

So how does Team USA get better than this? Or is this the best that can be expected of Team USA?