Soccer in America has never been treated like any other sport.
In a country that can’t even agree on what to call the game, it has been alternately loved like an underground band, ridiculed as a poisonous foreign import, and, for most of its history, roundly ignored.
But if the U.S. is in a position to co-host the largest ever World Cup over the course of the next five weeks, it’s because of a bubbling undercurrent that has sustained the game in America for nearly a century. Today, it boasts one of the best attended domestic leagues in the world, a men’s national team that is consistently ranked in the top 15, and a vibrant soccer culture that revolves around the simple joy of Saturday-morning pints.
How it got there is not a linear story. The fits and starts of America’s complicated relationship with the world’s most popular game encompass a forgotten goal in the middle of Brazil, the 1990s invention of a sports league from scratch, the Hollywood arrival of an English Spice Boy, and a uniquely American brand of optimism. Now as more than 6 million fans prepare to attend the World Cup, the country that spent so long dismissing the sport finds itself proudly at the center of the soccer universe.
The Miracle on Grass
When news of England’s 1-0 defeat to the U.S. during the opening round of the 1950 World Cup reached London from Brazil, stunned Brits assumed it must have been a typo. Surely, the inventors of the game had won 10-0—not lost to a bunch of relative amateurs. But the truth was that in Belo Horizonte, the Americans had managed a stunning upset. With a goal by Haitian-born Joe Gaetjens—who would later disappear in Port-au-Prince under the regime of François Duvalier—the U.S. secured one of the most significant victories in its soccer history. But this wasn’t exactly the start of a glorious run of World Cups. The Americans wouldn’t qualify again for 40 years.
King of New York
While the U.S. team couldn’t get anywhere near the World Cup, the closest thing to the human embodiment of the World Cup came to America. In 1975, a Brazilian named Edson Arantes do Nascimento landed in New York to sign for a short-lived team called the Cosmos. He was better known to the rest of the world as Pelé. He had come out of retirement, lured by a multimillion-dollar contract to conquer the U.S. Over his three seasons in America, he sold out Giants Stadium and routinely closed down Studio 54. But even having the most charismatic goal scorer who ever lived couldn’t make soccer stick. By the mid-1980s, the North American Soccer League had collapsed—and the U.S. was widely viewed as a soccer wasteland.
Welcome to the Pros
Back in the early 1990s, the U.S. still represented the game’s pioneer frontier. Dozens of professional teams had come and gone, fading from the American sports scene as they inevitably ran out of money. So when FIFA agreed to bring the World Cup to America for the first time, in 1994, the deal came with one crucial condition: The U.S. needed to create a professional soccer league.
So with a $5 million from the World Cup organizing committee, a handful of executives established Major League Soccer. When the league kicked off, with 10 centrally-owned teams, few expected it to be a runaway success. The goal was simply survival.
“Ninety-four was essential,” says Alan Rothenberg, who oversaw the running of the 1994 tournament. “If that had been a bust, I don’t know what would have happened. We’d have been set back a decade or more in terms of developing the sport at the highest level.”
The Shot Heard Round America
Instead of fading away, the U.S. hosted another World Cup five years later, this time for women. And in this sphere of the game, Americans were the furthest thing from underdogs. That summer, the U.S. stormed their way to the final and delivered one of the most lasting images in American sports history. Before a TV audience of 18 million viewers, Brandi Chastain buried the winning penalty kick in a final shootout against China, ripped off her shirt, and immediately turned a black Nike sports bra into a symbol of American athletic supremacy.
Spend It Like Beckham
Through its first decade of existence, MLS had done its best to attract whichever big names it could to fill a few extra seats. But in 2006, with the league now firmly established, it set its sights on a different caliber of player. It didn’t merely go for an A-list soccer star—MLS went after one of the most recognizable celebrities on Earth. Never mind that the league’s complex web of regulations would make it almost impossible to pay him what he was worth.
“Let’s go get David Beckham,” commissioner Don Garber said, “and adjust our rules.”
Beckham’s arrival in Los Angeles soon became a B.C./A.D. moment for the league—and soccer in this country. He brought legitimacy, star power, and opened the door for more stars like him to follow. It also touched off a period of aggressive expansion for the league. At the time, MLS had stabilized at 12 teams. But by 2016, it was up to 20. And today, MLS boasts 30 teams, average attendances of over 20,000 fans per match, and a 10-year broadcast deal with Apple worth $2.5 billion.
“David got us to the point where the rest of the world was paying attention,” Garber said. “If it’s good enough for David, it ought to be good enough for you as a fan.”
A World Cup Moment
After 40 years in the international soccer desert—and two more decades of underperformance—the U.S. entered the 21st century with a new generation of players who had proven themselves useful enough to cross the Atlantic to Europe. The likes of Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey had begun the unforgiving work in England of changing perceptions that American athletes could only play sports with their hands. But as a national team, the U.S. still lacked a signature moment. It took Landon Donovan, the laid-back California kid with the number 10 on his back, to change that.
With the U.S. facing elimination in the 2010 group stage, Donovan stepped up with a 91st-minute winner to keep his side in the tournament. More importantly, he gave American fans their first real taste of a World Cup Hollywood finish.
Back of the Network
The 2010 World Cup had shown that the U.S. could become a soccer nation for a few weeks every four years. But to sustain that interest in the intervening period, it would need to plug into the broader cinematic universe of European club soccer. It took a landmark $250 million deal between NBC and the English Premier League to convince them to do so.
With every single game of the 2014-15 season broadcast live, English soccer quickly carved out a small corner of the U.S. sports TV landscape all of its own. Premier League fandom became something of a status symbol for a worldly breed of sports junkie who had grown tired of slogging through three-hour football games and appreciated the convenience of a 90-minute, in-and-out format that was all over by lunch. Now, NBC’s six-year deal with the Premier League is worth more than $450 million a season, a more than five-fold increase on the initial contract.
Pretty in Pink
Sixteen years after Beckham changed soccer in America simply by arriving, he managed to do it again by finding the one player who was more of a global icon. By 2023, Beckham was an MLS co-owner after exercising an option to establish an expansion team that he’d secured when he joined the LA Galaxy as a player. And for his pink-jerseyed Inter Miami, he knew just who he wanted: the Argentine World Cup winner Lionel Messi.
Leveraging the league’s partnerships with Apple and Adidas, Beckham made Messi the highest-paid player in the history of American soccer. And overnight Messi put Inter Miami on the map. Everywhere the team traveled, ticket prices soared through the roof. His jersey was instantly the top seller in the league, worn by kids from Brooklyn to Buenos Aires. And for those who remembered America’s days as a soccer backwater, it marked the ultimate endorsement.
“This is not Messi’s league. He’s in our league, playing for Inter Miami,” said Garber. “Now we are a pure soccer nation with vibrant leagues at all levels.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com and Jonathan Clegg at Jonathan.Clegg@wsj.com
