Nobody believed it would work. When FIFA announced in July 1988 that the United States would host the 1994 World Cup, the reaction across football’s traditional heartlands ranged from scepticism to outright mockery. A country that had no top-flight professional league, where the word “football” conjured helmets and touchdown dances, where soccer was something children played on Saturday mornings and then mostly abandoned. Europe and South America shook their heads. This, they said, was a mistake.
What unfolded across nine American cities in the summer of 1994 was not merely a successful tournament. It was a love affair, sudden and improbable and entirely genuine, between a nation and a sport it had kept at arm’s length for decades. Before the tournament, skeptics predicted empty stadiums, cultural indifference and general confusion. Instead, 3.6 million spectators filled venues from Los Angeles to New York, still the all-time World Cup attendance record, never broken since, not in France, not in Germany, not anywhere. A country that allegedly did not care about football packed its stadiums more full than any nation in the history of the sport. US stadiums were filled to approximately 96 percent capacity throughout the tournament.
FIFA had imposed one firm condition before awarding the tournament: the United States must establish a professional football league. That condition produced Major League Soccer, founded in 1993, launched in 1996, and still running today with 30 clubs across the continent. The World Cup did not just visit America. It planted something there.
But records and legacies are abstractions. What the summer of 1994 actually produced was a collection of images and moments that remain lodged in football’s collective memory more than thirty years later.
There was Maradona. Diego Armando Maradona, by then 33 and fighting the visible battles of a complicated life, arrived in the United States carrying the impossible weight of being the greatest. Against Greece in the group stage, he collected the ball on the edge of the area and drove it low into the corner with a ferocity that seemed to come from somewhere beyond football. He sprinted to the sideline camera and screamed directly into the lens, eyes wide, face contorted with something between ecstasy and fury. It is one of the most electric photographs in sporting history. It was also, as the world would soon learn, almost his farewell. Days later, Maradona tested positive for ephedrine and was sent home in disgrace. The greatest player of his generation left America not in glory but in heartbreak, and football has never quite made sense of it.
There was Nigeria, arriving at their first ever World Cup and refusing to be modest about it. Against Bulgaria in the group stage, striker Rashidi Yekini scored his country’s first ever World Cup goal and ran to the net, grabbed it with both hands, and stood there shaking it, his face pressed against the mesh, weeping openly. It was pure, unscripted and utterly unforgettable.
There was Bulgaria, a nation of eight million people, somehow reaching the semi-finals. Hristo Stoichkov, brilliant and combustible and the only player in Pasadena who seemed to carry an argument with him at all times, was their talisman and top scorer, sharing the Golden Boot. Against Germany in the quarter-finals, it was a bald midfielder named Yordan Letchkov who delivered the killing blow, meeting a cross with a diving header that looped over the goalkeeper. Bulgaria 2, Germany 1. One of the great upsets in World Cup history. But Stoichkov had been the heartbeat of it all: a left foot so dangerous it seemed almost unfair, and a personality to match.
There was Germany themselves, and it was Jurgen Klinsmann who gave them their cutting edge, a striker whose diving headers and relentless movement made him one of the tournament’s most watchable players. Klinsmann scored three goals, worked tirelessly in every match, and left America with his reputation significantly enhanced.
There was Colombia and their magnificent No.10, Carlos Valderrama, the explosion of blond curls impossible to miss from any angle of the stadium, pulling threads and creating chances in a tournament that ultimately disappointed his nation, but never let him personally down as a symbol of what football could look like when it was played with joy.
There was Dennis Bergkamp, quiet and precise and devastating for the Netherlands, a footballer of rare intelligence whose movement through the tournament hinted at what he would become. The Dutch reached the quarter-finals, where Brazil ended their journey, but Bergkamp’s performances announced him to the world’s largest audience.
There was Michel Preud’homme, Belgium’s goalkeeper, whose reflexes and commanding presence between the posts earned him the tournament’s best goalkeeper award, one of the more quietly deserved individual honours of the competition.
And hovering over all of it, adding an energy and an unmistakably American texture to the whole affair, was Alexi Lalas: a USA defender with a wild red beard and hair that belonged more to a rock concert than a football pitch, celebrating every moment as if he could not quite believe he was there. He probably could not. None of them could. The United States reaching the round of 16 was not supposed to happen. It happened anyway.
Then came the final. Brazil against Italy at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, under a hard Californian sun, in front of 94,000 people. Romario and Bebeto had carried Brazil there, a partnership so intuitive it seemed telepathic, two forwards who always seemed to know where the other would be. Bebeto had scored against the Netherlands in the quarter-final and then run to the sideline, rocking his arms as if cradling an infant, a new father celebrating the birth of his son in the only way available to him, 90,000 people watching. Romario and Mazinho joined him, three grown men swaying in the Pasadena sun. It became the most copied goal celebration in football history.
The final itself finished 0-0 after ninety minutes. It finished 0-0 after extra time. The first World Cup final in history decided by a penalty shootout came down to a single moment and a single man. Roberto Baggio had been Italy’s genius throughout, their golden ponytail, the player who had carried his team to this stage almost singlehandedly, a forward of such grace and intelligence that the tournament seemed to organise itself around him. He stepped up needing to score. He struck it clean and watched it sail over the crossbar. Brazil were champions. Baggio stood with his hands on his hips and his head bowed, and the photograph taken at that instant has been reproduced on a million walls since. There is no image in football that better captures both the beauty and the cruelty of the sport.
Romario lifted the trophy into the Pasadena sky. Brazil, for the fourth time, were world champions. And America, which had begun the summer as a reluctant and sceptical host, found itself genuinely, unexpectedly moved.
For many Americans, 1994 was the first time seeing the sport at its highest level, in person or on television. A child of eleven named Chris Wondolowski watched Brazil train through a hole in a fence that summer. He would go on to become one of the greatest scorers in MLS history. That is what 1994 did. It made believers.
Now, thirty-two years later, the World Cup returns to North American soil. Whether it recaptures that particular magic of a nation falling in love with something new, open and unguarded and entirely surprised by its own feeling, is perhaps the most interesting question of the summer ahead.
