The celebrity matrix doesn't function when it comes to football in the United States, where the average professional player is a nonentity and the global superstar has to sweat like a hod carrier in a spacesuit to get his fix of recognition. David Beckham has spent the last three years waving – or more accurately, drowning – in Hollywood with little discernible impact on the American psyche, so what hope can there possibly be for the members of the US national team?
The answer is not much, although there is one member of the star-spangled starting XI to face England in Rustenburg on Saturday who might turn a head or two were he to take a stroll down Sunset Boulevard. "Everywhere I go, someone might notice me and say something but it is not like my daily life is crazy," says Landon Donovan, the undoubted star – indeed, the only star – of the USA team. "I have the best of both worlds where I kind of get all the benefits of being a celebrity or being famous, but none of the downside, like there might be in England."
Donovan is a Los Angeles Galaxy team-mate of Beckham's and spent part of last season in this country with Everton, so he is well aware of what that downside might be; the daily scrutiny, the depressing obsession with Wag culture, the Photoshopped donkey ears. Win, lose or draw, the USA forward will sleep easily on the eve of the game knowing that national ridicule does not await him and his team-mates. As he notes, the same cannot be said for Fabio Capello's boys.
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"Of course there is more pressure on the English players. If we don't do well in the World Cup, people care for a little bit. But if England doesn't do well in the World Cup, it is absolutely devastating to their country, their families, to their people. I don't know if they look at it that way, but that's the reality."
Donovan is a small man and he speaks with a quiet, controlled politeness. But his minimal stage presence should not be mistaken for a lack of self-confidence. He was identified at an early age as an outstanding footballer and his talents, like a rare plant, were lovingly nurtured and developed by his parents and, latterly, US Soccer.
Donovan was given every chance to succeed and he has, but the journey has not been without its detours. A recent profile in Sports Illustrated revealed him to have been a teenage handful, the kind of lippy kid who spoke before he thought and acted like he was the best thing that had ever happened to American "soccer".
Maybe, but when he signed for the Bundesliga team Bayer Leverkusen at the age of 17 he quickly discovered that US soccer was not a true measure of a footballer's abilities. He couldn't break into Leverkusen's first team and eventually slunk back to Major League Soccer and the San Jose Earthquakes. Over the next few years he established himself as the most potent force in the MLS but another futile spell in Germany, this time with Bayern Munich, suggested that, like US sitcoms in the post-Frasier era, he simply does not travel well.
Only when he signed for Everton last winter did the rest of the football world see what a small minority of the American public who follow the sport have fawned over for years.
"Incredible," Donovan says when asked to described his spell in the Premier League. "Before I had stepped on the field it seemed like everyone at Everton had accepted me. When you have that as a player, you just really don't want to let anyone down and it also gives you this confidence to just go express yourself and just be yourself."
He scored two goals in 13 games and was named Everton's player of the month for January. These days the mid-season transfer window has about as much noteworthy action as a Richard Curtis film but, even so, there is no argument that the American's move to Goodison was by far the best piece of new year business this side of the Harrods sale.
"When I went to Germany I just wasn't ready for it. My stint at Everton came together in the right way and at the right time. Plus, Moyes gave me a chance. I'll never forget sitting in the meeting room before the Arsenal game and he read out the team and my name was there. I just had this rush; this sense of wonder."
Donovan returned to California after his loan with a yearning for a better climate ("When you haven't seen the sun for 40 days you really miss it"), the unrequited love of the Everton fans and a heightened reverence for the elite of the English game.
"There are a lot of players in the world that are talented enough to go and play one big game in England and do all right. It is a whole other story to do it consistently week after week after week. It gave me a lot of respect for the top players in England, the Lampards and Drogbas, Gerrards – those guys are playing Champions League or Europa League or cup games, over and over again, week after week."
The corollary of such eulogising, surely, is that Donovan must also have gained an even greater respect for his own talents. After all, he didn't look out of place in such company, and that was without the benefit of any time to get used to the English climate and the English game.
Once upon a time, he might have pointed all of this out to anyone who cared to listen but he is older now, wiser and, one imagines, chastened. Three years playing alongside Beckham at the Galaxy, and one brutal experience with the master PR-manipulator's press machine after describing the Englishman as a bad team-mate, has taught him there are many different ways to say what you really, really think.
In looking forward to Saturday's contest with England, he chooses, first, to downplay the significance of the game. "In the US, everyone who knows anything about the sport knows how big the EPL is. They watch English games every week. It's a big deal. But our main hope is to qualify from our group, whatever that takes. Supposing we don't get a result against England – that doesn't mean we can't qualify. We still have games against Algeria and Slovenia."
And when it comes to assessing the England team, he is quick to praise but just as quick to point out that perhaps Capello's squad might be exhausted after a long season.
"The thing about this England team is there are no weaknesses," he says. "People go on about Rooney – and personally I think he is one of the very best players in the world – but if you spent all your time trying to shut him down, the next thing you know is that you have got Lampard and Gerrard all over you.
"Big players play a lot of games in Europe and the World Cup comes at the end of their season, so it is always an interesting dynamic, how do you balance that? Fortunately the guys that play in MLS are just now starting their season and just now getting warm so it can be good for us."
His evaluation of the USA's prospects is downbeat but, one can't help but notice, archly so. We are talking about a team ranked 14th in the world by Fifa, that last year handed Spain their first loss since 2006 – a 2-0 defeat at the Confederations Cup in South Africa – and then almost went on to win that tournament, succumbing to Brazil in the second half of the final after taking a 2-0 lead. But Donovan makes Bob Bradley's squad sound like a 21st-century version of the Wimbledon crazy gang, where the only thing they have going for them is brawn.
"We fight and we battle," he says. "If Brazil are more talented, then they are more talented. If England are more talented and they beat us, then fine. But we have got guys that can pull off some special plays and then we are always good defensively.
"We don't have a lot of egos on our team and we don't take anything for granted. We go into every game and give what we have."
Will everything that the US players have be enough to produce an early shock in this 2010 World Cup campaign? One senses that Donovan is confident enough to believe that a historic victory is possible but sensible enough to know that such belief if best left unsaid; that the only way to make it so is between the white lines of the Royal Bafokeng Stadium.