With the USA’s first World Cup match coming monday at noon, I decided to get a U.S. soccer jersey. It shouldn’t be too hard, I thought, since the U.S. is ranked fifth in FIFA’s rankings and the D.C. area has a relatively strong soccer tradition. After all, D.C. United is one of the most popular MLS teams and local colleges perform well nationally, with Maryland’s men winning the NCAA title in 2005. However, I was wrong.

The first stop was U.S. Soccer’s official webpage. The jerseys are a bit pricey, starting at $90 for a jersey with a name and number on it – because who wears a blank jersey? You don’t see people wearing Redskins jerseys with no number on them. While the price is about what basketball and football jerseys, I decided to try eBay for a cheaper one. However, most of the jerseys on eBay were either bad knockoffs or would be mailed from Asia, meaning they probably wouldn’t even arrive before the World Cup ended.

I decided to head back to U.S. Soccer’s site and fork out the $90. But unfortunately for me and other U.S. soccer fans, they’re out of stock of everything. I guess the U.S. soccer folks didn’t realize that the World Cup has been coming up for about, well, four years. Or maybe U.S. soccer is extraordinarily popular, but the rest of my quest seemed to prove that wrong.

Back to the internet for sporting good stores. This was even stranger, as apparently the major sporting goods stores have some kind of cabal — every single one I checked had the exact same thing, even organized the same way, and none of them had U.S. soccer jerseys. They did have Germany, Spain, Brazil and Sheffield Wednesday, but no USA.