When the soccer world turns to an international break, when top-level leagues (and sometimes MLS!) shut down while national teams play, American soccer discourse takes a familiar path. First, there’s the inevitable bitching and moaning about who is called into the national team or who wasn’t (oddly, this is often driven by people who don’t follow the game closely enough to, say, know that certain regular players have been injured for months). Second, there’s talk about how to actually be able to watch the game.

Figuring that out can be more complicated than it should be. The United States plays in friendlies organized by US Soccer, regional competitions and World Cup qualifiers organized by the regional body, CONCACAF, and, of course, the World Cup itself, organized by FIFA. Each organization has its own rights deal when it comes to TV, so in a given year or two the US may play in several different places. Admittedly, it can be frustrating.

It can also lead people to conjure memories of a simpler time that never actually existed. That is, some people wonder why the games played by the national team aren’t on “free” TV, rather than existing on various cable channels or streaming services. Of course, it was never that way (barring rare exceptions, like some World Cup matches), but I suspect many people who grew up in the era of “basic cable,” which included the ESPN family that showed a lot of US soccer at the time, think of that as “free” because it wasn’t something extra, like signing up for a streamlining service.

I thought about that regular complaint when I read this piece by Frances Ryan a while back:

In addition to noting the argument that streaming services are “killing cinema” (not sure I buy that), Ryan essentially argues that streaming actually makes the process of watching stuff more difficult:

the advent of streaming has made watching a movie in your own home more costly, more restricted and often incredibly annoying.

She talks about the ease of taking a “trip to your local DVD shop” where you could rent or even buy whatever you wanted. I find this a very rose-colored version of the before times, akin to the US soccer fans who think games used to be on “free” TV on a regular basis.

I didn’t really get into movies until the mid-1990s when I was in law school (same time I got into soccer, actually). Not that I didn’t go to movies growing up, but I never really sought things out based on reviews or critical buzz. I’d go to the local theater with my friends and see what was there. By the time I was exploring movies – or, hell, let’s use that word “cinema” – there were basically three ways to see something: in a theater, on TV, and via VHS (moving to DVD).

Let’s assume that theater-going was about the same as it is today. But note we’re talking theater going in Charleston, West Virginia. We weren’t exactly a one-theater town or anything (Sutton, where my parents grew up and Ben Potter now lives, had one movie theater and it was all second run), but the choices were limited to mostly mainstream blockbuster stuff. Had I known about independent films or foreign movies, I’d not have had a place to see them (this has changed, thankfully!). Definitely limited choices there.

Then there was TV. We mostly had basic cable when I was young, as I did in law school, which meant watching movies was a matter of what was on and how much it was cut up or bowdlerized from the original. There were pay channels, like HBO, but even then you were stuck with their schedule. Compared to the universe of content available today at the push of a button it’s hard to argue those were “golden days.”

Finally, there was rental, which in those days meant VHS tapes. Certainly, even your garden variety Blockbuster yielded a wider range of movies than the local theater did. I think the first thing I tracked down based on critical buzz in college was Clerks, of which Blockbuster had several copies. Years later, however, when I wanted to see Todd Solondz’s warped meditation on suburbia Happiness I had to go all the way across town to the independent video store (since the movie was unrated). And anything I got from either place had to be driven back within a few days. I thought it was great at the time, but on reflection it sort of sucks.

By comparison, I’ve got at my virtual fingertips a collection of movies (and TV shows) available for streaming larger than I could ever consume. If something new comes out, or I hear about something I’ve missed from years past, I just hop on JustWatch and see where it’s streaming. Is everything available all the time? No. Is everything available on services I have subscribed to? Also no. Is it still more convenient that hopping down to the video store, hoping they have it in the first place, then hoping it’s not already rented by somebody else? Absolutely!

This is not to say that the current streaming universe is perfect. Far from it. I don’t disagree, generally, with Ryan’s complaints in many regards. I just think her comparison is to a utopian past that, for most people, didn’t exist (nostalgia routinely does this to people). Whatever particular pains in the ass streaming brings, it brings a lot of benefits, too.

To return to my initial comments about soccer in the United States. When I first started following soccer back in that same mid-1990s time period, you simply watched what the various TV networks gave you. There was no regular coverage of the big European leagues. You got, maybe, one Champions League game a week, probably date or time shifted (forget the other competitions). The World Cup was pretty robustly covered, but not the Euros or Copa America. And, to be fair, ESPN and the like did pretty well by MLS in the early days, although, again, you were limited to whatever game was on TV at the time.

Thanks to streaming not only can I watch just about any top-flight European game I want, I can dive deeper when necessary. I was able to follow Leeds up from the Championship (and then back down and up again) easily. More time than not I can find Hearts on Paramount+ even though the Scottish Premier League is mostly overlooked. Even domestically, I can track down DC United games given the team has been so dire the past few years nobody would actually put them on TV. Could all this be smoother and cheaper? Of course. But given where we were only a few decades ago, it’s damned near a miracle.

Nostalgia can be a hell of a drug. What we had once was probably pretty good, but it wasn’t perfect. The frustrations and petty annoyances fade and only the good memories remain. Nothing current can compete, since those same things can’t be overlooked. The modern media delivery world ain’t what it could be, but it’s pretty damned good.