Clint Dempsey was gritty as hell - but he could also conjure moments of inspiration

After Clint Dempsey’s somewhat surprising retirement announcement on Wednesday morning, his place in the overall hierarchy of US Soccer history will be much debated.

Who was better, Dempsey or Landon Donovan, the man with whom he will be forever tied on the all-time US men’s goalscoring chart? How do you compare an outfield player with goalkeepers such as Kasey Keller, Brad Friedel and Tim Howard, each of whom also had successful club careers abroad?

Rather than setting Dempsey in some kind of fixed hierarchy, however, it’s more helpful to think of him as a mile marker on the longer arc of the growth of soccer in the United States.

Pre-Dempsey, the list of American difference-makers in top European leagues was short, and almost exclusively limited to guys standing between the posts. Along with fellow Fulham cult hero Brian McBride – and where his legacy starts to diverge with that of Donovan, with whom he was so often compared – Dempsey did more than just about anybody to alter that dynamic.

His wonder goal for Fulham in the 2010 Europa League quarter-finals against Juventus, an audacious chip from the very edge of the penalty box, was a counterpoint to the narrative of American soccer players as brutish, hustling grunt workers.

It’s possible to draw a straight line from Dempsey, who scored 57 Premier League goals in 213 appearances, and up-and-comers like Christian Pulisic (Borussia Dortmund), Weston McKinnie (Schalke) and Timothy Weah (Paris Saint-Germain), a generation of young Americans now being blooded abroad.

“It probably started with McBride, and Clint was able to really kick it up a notch,” Keller told the Guardian on Wednesday, “where not only are you a hard working squad guy, but you can actually be counted on to score goals. … Now we’re waiting on that next guy, who takes it from being the leading scorer at a club like Fulham but also takes it to the next level and gets bought by a Real Madrid and is the leading scorer in the Champions League. We’re still looking for that next guy, but there’s no question that Clint changed those perceptions.”

Dempsey altered perceptions closer to home, as well. His signing with the Seattle Sounders in the summer of 2013 remains second only to the arrival of David Beckham in terms of watershed moments in league history. The addition of the 30-year-old captain of the US national team arriving straight from Tottenham Hotspur was something close to unprecedented.

Commissioner Don Garber’s sentiments shared with Sports Illustrated in the aftermath of Dempsey’s arrival are slightly hyperbolic five years on, but the general message still rings true: “This signing ranks right at the very top,” Garber told SI. “We have been going through a process that started almost 10 years ago to try and find the players that could really make a statement about our league and our plan to be a legitimate player on the global stage … With Clint, it takes all of this to an even higher level.”

Wayne Rooney notwithstanding, MLS’s retirement league moniker has begun to fade, and the league is being treated with greater respect, and for both of those things it has Dempsey to thank.

For the Sounders, too, Dempsey’s arrival came baked-in with big-picture implications. Having grown attendance figures in leaps and bounds into the 40,000s in the years following their inaugural season of 2009, there was a general sense within the club that it was beginning to plateau. The excitement triggered by the Dempsey signing restored momentum, a pivot point at a time in franchise history when things could have trended south.

For a club that speaks often of its ambitions to become a “global brand,” Dempsey granted those aims legitimacy.

“When you’re out there scouting and you mention his name,” sporting director Chris Henderson said, “people go, ‘Oh yeah, what a fantastic player.’ That’s the first thing they always say, and they all knew Dempsey from the Premier League.”

To describe Dempsey as a mere totem for forces larger than himself is to miss part of what make him so memorable as a player.

As embodied by that Juventus goal mentioned above, his game was as creative, and as instinctual, as any American’s of this or any other generation. Nobody was more likely to drop a back heel through traffic. He tried shit, to paraphrase the immortal line of former USMNT coach Bruce Arena, and on his day, that made Dempsey irresistible to watch. His influenced trickled down.

“He’s the reason why a lot of us young Americans are playing the sport,” said 23-year-old Sounders midfielder Cristian Roldan. “As a player growing up at that time, you always wanted to be like Clint.”

That is what will last, even if his and Donovan’s joint scoring record is eventually broken: lingering memories of one audacious moment of skill or another, and the generation of players he inspired to try something similar.