Montana's Favorite Backup World Cup Team Revealed

The World Cup is off and running, and I must say, it's been wildly entertaining so far. I'm not a soccer expert by any definition, but I have had an absolute blast watching these matches.

Especially the United States' opener against Paraguay. The 4-1 shellacking got the hopes up for Americans everywhere. Do we win the whole damn tournament? No, probably not, but it does give us some hope to win some matches and make some noise.

If—or more likely when—the U.S. gets eliminated, who will we cheer for? Montana is pulling for a 4x World Cup champion, Western European team.

Montana pulls for Germany

The website Covers looked at what other countries Americans are rooting for in this year's World Cup.

Covers looked at foreign-born population data to map out America's hidden World Cup loyalties. Rather than just counting the total number of residents from a specific country, the goal was to identify over-representation. -Covers

Montana's secondary team was Germany.

Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Vermont all had Germany as their "second team."

The study says that "family heritage is a major driver here: roughly one in five Americans say ancestry is their primary reason for adopting an alternate squad, while 63 percent are more likely to support a team if they have family links."

Family ties are number one, but we're a spiteful nation. 23 percent of fans chose their second team out of spite. "They just want Team USA's rivals to lose."

There are lots of German descendants in Montana, including yours truly. I find Texas pulling for Saudi Arabia, Illinois pulling for Bosnia, and Idaho pulling for Iraq very strange. I'm sure there's something there, but it's escaping me.