For many, the enduring image of the United States hosting the FIFA World Cup in 1994 will be the Roberto Baggio penalty that sailed over the bar and into the Pasadena sky to end an ultimately disappointing final against Brazil. The tournament itself had been a calculated gamble: taking the world’s most popular sport to a nation where American Football, basketball, and baseball dominated both the sporting arenas and the cultural imagination.
But the seeds sown that summer has since reshaped the sport’s status in the United States, changing it from a niche pastime into a rapidly expanding and passionately followed sport.
The most visible legacy of the 1994 World Cup arrived two years later with the launch of Major League Soccer (MLS). That began in 1996 with just ten teams, struggling to balance the books and attracted puny crowds in comparison to the other sports.
Yet the league survived, then grew, and ultimately redefined how the local population engaged with the game. From building their own stadiums to attracting some of the sport’s biggest names – like David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney – the MLS is now no more an afterthought when it comes to American sports.
The jewel in the crown is obviously Lionel Messi, who moved to the MLS mere months after realising his World Cup dream in Qatar. And as he has proved right through this season, while leading Inter Miami to the Eastern Conference final, Messi is far from a spent force just collecting a final pay cheque. Today, whether it’s the Sounders in Seattle, the LA clubs or relatively new Miami, there is a dedicated fan base, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and global visibility that was unthinkable in the mid-90s.
There has also been an explosion in grassroots participation, with the exploits of the women’s national team playing a big part in that. Following 1994, youth soccer became one of the largest organised sports for young kids across the country. The generation of players and supporters that started their journey then are now the torch-bearers for the sport. There are now competitive lower-level leagues as well, supplying a pipeline of talent based on the European model. Today, an American football fan can tune in to the Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, the Champions League and every major international competition, through mainstream broadcasts and streaming platforms. Even tiny Wrexham have become a household name thanks to an OTT documentary. The fan base debates tactics, follows transcontinental transfer sagas, and argues over refereeing controversies just as anywhere else.
At the time of the Baggio miss, if you’d asked most fans from elsewhere about US football, you might have got a mention of Alexei Lalas’s hairdo, at best. How times have changed.
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