The U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team was knocked out of the World Cup Monday night after losing 3-1 to Belgium.
Despite that, supporters in Lexington said the excitement around the match points to a growing base of U.S. soccer fans.
“I think a lot of us played soccer as kids, and it's really popular elsewhere,” said Simon Boes, who attended the city’s watch party at the Kentucky Theatre. “The U.S. dominates in basketball and football, but maybe it's time to do that with soccer.”
The downtown institution hosted one of many watch parties across the city Monday. It opened its main theater to fans after they overcrowded a secondary, smaller theater during last week’s Round of 64 game against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
“We just had no idea — this was a little bit early on — we just had no idea how many people we would get, but we had to turn people away, and that theater seats 340 people,” Director Hayward Wilkirson said.
Monday’s match against Belgium nearly packed the main theater, which seats more than 800 people. Collier Porter was one of the many in attendance and is a self-described “budding soccer fan.”
“I never really understood the game that much, but I'm learning more about it, and I like the competitiveness of it,” Porter said. “It's kind of like hockey, you know, not a whole lot of scoring, but there's a lot of drama in between.”
Though the vast majority of fans were cheering forTeam USA, a small handful of Belgium fans also showed out. Fons DeClerck watched the game with his mother, who originally immigrated from Belgium in the 1980s, at West Sixth Brewing.
He said a controversial decision by FIFA to overturn American striker Folarin Balogun’s one-game red card suspension — after a request from President Donald Trump to review the play — motivated the Belgian fanbase.
“Usually (Belgium’s) not a very nationalistic country, it's very like, self-deprecation, but in this sense, Belgium's been like, ‘Alright, if we beat America, that's great for us, we’re beating all this corruption,’” DeClerck said.
DeClerck said he’s excited to root for his team moving forward, but would have also cheered for the U.S. if they advanced.
“Beating the USA was like a good victory for Belgium. It reminds us that we're still a soccer country,” he said. “But I mean, you know, obviously the ideal final would be USA versus Belgium for the World Cup.”
America hosting World Cup games this summer comes as the sport grows in popularity in Central Kentucky. Men’s soccer league USL League One expanded to Lexington in 2021. The Lexington Sporting Club held its inaugural season in 2023 and plays games in a stadium that holds 7,500 people.
“The group of girls that I used to coach, they are now all adults with their own kids,” Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton said at the Kentucky Theatre watch party Monday. “So, I have this kind of theory that we, now, in the United States, have a lot more people who have played soccer when they were growing up, so we have a bigger fan base too, who know what the game's about.”
