Dear American “Soccer”,

Congratulations on your success at the recent Women’s World Cup. Your team was supremely talented, exciting to watch and, after thoroughly dismantling their closest competition within 16 minutes in the final, deserving winners.

Your women’s football team is magnificent. It’s just a shame about the baggage that you bring with them.

First of all, yes, these women should be hailed as feminist icons for their sporting success and the inspiration that they provide to young girls who dream of a career in sports. But try to stop comparing them to men’s football because that’s self-defeating. Different context, different competition. Abby Wambach has scored more international goals than any male footballer. True. And Michael Jordan has more NBA titles than any English rugby player. Abby Wambach is not an indictment on men’s football in America, she is a hero of women’s football. Not everything needs to be political.

Like we say, none of this needs fall back on the women themselves. They had a wonderful tournament. Therefore we’d ask that you refrain from trying to paint yourselves as underdogs because the rest of the world were against you. Please don’t mistake our wanting you to lose with us thinking that you actually would.

Also, American men’s football is not weak, despite what you may say. They’ve never won a World Cup but they regularly qualify for the knockout rounds of them. They are one of the 20 best nations in a sport in which every single nation in the world competes. Not quite Olympic gold, but better than almost everyone else. By the way, you can’t fall back on the population factor either because America is far better than both India and China.

Another thing: Far be it from us to tell you what to do (as if you’d listen anyway – FREEDOM!) but the USMNT/USWNT thing is dumb. Acronyms are dumb. They’re for writing and not for saying. Barack Obama should not be called POTUS, he should be called the President of the United States. A little respect, folks. Nobody calls Queen Elizabeth ‘HRM’. Calling them the US Men’s/Women’s National Team is silly in itself, everybody else competing is a national team too. That’s why it’s called the ‘World Cup’… though we can understand if you’re having trouble with that concept.

At least you stopped short of selling the naming rights for the teams.

As a nation, you have the right to play and enjoy the sport in any way you like. Nobody owns football. Just know that everyone else thinks you can get pretty obnoxious and try to consider that if you find yourselves in such a situation. That’s common courtesy is all.

Statistics are cool, they just aren’t definitive. That statement holds true in most sports but in football it does even more so. Please don’t complain about stoppage time. The game is fluid and the referee controls the clock. In most sports, the clock controls the referee. We do it differently, so what? It’s not a big deal.

And the big one. ‘Soccer’. Look, you can call it what you want. Soccer is actually an English nickname, deriving from the term ‘Association Football’ and meant as a sibling to the term ‘Rugger’ (as in ‘Rugby Football’). The issue here is not that you refer to the world’s most popular sport by a whimsical nickname, the issue is that you have then reassigned the original name to a completely different sport with only sparing semantic accuracy. Rugby Football is a similar problem, sure. Except that everyone calls it Rugby because that’s far less confusing. Common sense, really.

Again, you can do what you want with the game. In retaliation, though, we’re gonna rename some of your stuff for our own consumption. Everyone else will now use the word ‘Hip-Hop’ to refer to what you have deigned as ‘Country Music’ and what you call ‘Hip-Hop’, we now call ‘American Classical’. They’re just words, who cares? By the way, Willie Nelson is America’s finest Hip Hop songwriter and Kendrick Lamar’s latest American Classical record is the album of the year so far.

Once again, congratulations on a sterling effort at the Women’s World Cup. It was a great event, hosted by your Canadian cousins, and hopefully this brings a massive boost to the women’s side of the game.

Yours Truly,

The Rest of the World