Christian Pulisic argues with referee Kevin Ortega during the Copa America 2024 match between the United States and Uruguay.

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The U.S. audience loves a good underdog.

The 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey team. Lower seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Buster Douglas vs. Mike Tyson.

Two documentary series pegged to the upcoming men’s soccer World Cup posit the U.S. team, if not the U.S. soccer community as a whole, as Rocky Balboa vs. Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago put together.

Perhaps this depiction seems obvious, but this is a team whose image has taken a battering over the last few years. Viewed in the moment, this team hasn’t lived up to its “Golden Generation” hype, showing more talent than preceding generations but not as much heart.

“You are a soccer generation that has been given everything,” Alexi Lalas said in a memorable rant during the team’s ill-fated World Cup qualifying campaign in 2017. “You are a soccer generation who’s on the verge of squandering everything.”

Can some documentarians change the narrative? Yes and no.

The broad view comes from Soccer’s American Dream, produced by VICE and narrated by Saturday Night Live alumnus Alex Moffat. It delves back into U.S. soccer history to show the breathtaking high of the NASL — think Pele and the New York Cosmos — and the doldrums that followed.

On YouTube, the title of Episode 1 is straightforward: Why Soccer Failed in America. That title isn’t hyperbole. Soccer failed in this country, then failed again, then failed again. The sport has had more failures here than a short series can even mention in detail.

A series like this could start with the collapse of the American Soccer League, which was one of the top leagues in the world in the 1920s and a black hole by the mid-30s. Producers opted to tell the stories for which they had video and firsthand sources. NASL veterans such as Rodney Marsh are still around to tell their colorful anecdotes, but there’s no one who can tell the ASL’s story.

“The postwar period gave us the strongest combination of archive, cultural resonance, and contributors who could speak firsthand about the game’s growth in America,” said Joe Ingham, Head of Development at VICE Studios, and one of the series’ creators. “Once you move back into the ASL era and the collapse of the game in the 1930s, it becomes a much harder story to tell visually and personally, even though it’s historically important.”

Through more recent decades, especially since the U.S. national teams broke into the public consciousness in 1994 (men) and 1996-99 (women), the struggle evolved. Instead of the sport fighting for respect within the United States, players fought for respect within the sport. At times, the focus on labor strife gets a bit tedious, but covering several decades and noting the men’s struggles as well as the women’s makes it more illuminating than, say, the one-sided “equal pay” documentary “LFG.” And at several points in the not-too-distant past, the sport’s survival was at stake, and players knew they had to persevere just to keep playing.

Ingham was surprised by “the genuine commitment and determination both the men’s and women’s teams, especially in the 1970s-1990s, had in making the sport work,” Ingham said. “It made me realize just how much these players sacrificed personally and professionally to establish the sport and make it a success.”