There is a very specific genre of email going around right now, and if you are on any official mailing list you have received it. It has the word “historic” in the subject line. It has a photo of a full stadium that the sender did not fill. It has the tone of a man accepting an award for weather.

Let the record show who actually built this summer.

The supporters groups who kept showing up through the down years, when a friendly against Paraguay in Kansas City was the whole social calendar. The players who dragged themselves through a qualifying cycle that aged all of us. The bar owners who opened at 9am for group stage matches in a timezone-friendly World Cup and discovered the demand was always there, waiting for somebody to respect it.

Gratitude is not the same as amnesia

None of this is complicated. The people now taking bows spent years treating the domestic game like a compliance obligation. The marketing showed up after the momentum did, which is the reverse of how marketing is supposed to work.

So here is the deal we are offering: do the right things with this moment, and this journal will say so, loudly. Waste it, and we will write that column too. Either way, somebody in this country is finally keeping receipts, and it might as well be us.

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