USA 94: The World Cup that ‘changed everything'

 

It was a red-hot summer. One of sun-soaked stadiums, sell-out crowds and eye-catching kits, of individual brilliance and iconic goals, where off-field events reverberated as loudly as the drama on it. One of stars and stripes and celebrity glamour, of football’s grandest stage being handed a Hollywood glow-up.

It was the summer when ‘soccer’ landed in the United States, touching down on a runway of American glitz, welcomed by famous faces spanning every genre - from Stevie Wonder to Robin Williams, Oprah Winfrey to Diana Ross.

“We created the impression that this was a hot ticket, and you had to get involved with it,” beams Alan Rothenberg, former US Soccer president. “The way we staged the whole World Cup changed everything.”

This is the story of USA 1994, a footballing summer that awoke a continent.

The draw and a dose of Hollywood glamour

Just nine years earlier, the country’s only professional league had collapsed, ending a glamorous decade of the North American Soccer League that was kickstarted by New York Cosmos throwing a world-record salary at Brazil legend Pele to coax him out of retirement in 1975.

Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Johan Neeskens followed the Brazilian to a sold-out Giants Stadium, where Bugs Bunny was mascot and stars including Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger and Muhammad Ali mingled in dressing rooms with players and presidents.

George Best, Johan Cruyff, Gerd Muller. A stream of footballing greats voyaged across the Atlantic before over-expansion, lavish spending and dwindling crowds - coupled with the USA's failure to land the 1986 World Cup - saw the champagne era fizzle out.

It did, though, leave behind embers of a love for the sport, enough to convince football's world governing body Fifa that the USA remained fertile ground for growing the sport's popularity, worthy of being the first nation outside Europe or Latin America to stage its showpiece event.