Politics & Power Quote by Claudio Reyna

Reyna’s point isn’t really about imports; it’s about infrastructure, and he’s using migration as a shortcut to name what American soccer has historically lacked. When he talks about people “brought up playing it and watching it,” he’s describing soccer as a habit you inherit, not a hobby you pick up. The double emphasis on playing and watching matters: a sport grows when it’s stitched into everyday life, when kids copy what they see on weekends and adults argue about it on weekdays. Reyna is quietly saying that the U.S. hasn’t had enough of that density.

The phrasing “bring what they know and what they play” frames newcomers as carriers of fluency. It’s emotional, but also practical: they arrive with touch, tactics, instincts, and a baseline sense of what “good” looks like. In a country where elite youth pathways can be pay-to-play and where other sports dominate the cultural oxygen, that imported fluency becomes a kind of cultural starter culture, accelerating the learning curve for everyone else.

Context matters here: Reyna came of age when American soccer was still proving it deserved space on the national sports shelf. His generation often learned the game in pockets - immigrant communities, select clubs, scattered TV coverage. So the subtext is both hopeful and slightly indicting: growth won’t come from marketing campaigns or patriotic slogans. It comes from proximity to people for whom soccer is already the default language, and from the everyday standards they drag into training sessions, pickup games, and eventually, American expectations.