U.S. midfielder Aidan Morris could accurately be labeled a child of 1994, although his birth did not arrive until seven years later. He is part of a generation of athletes who came of age in a world rearranged by the arrival of the planet’s biggest sporting event to its most vigorous national economy. He did not need to know of the sequence of events that delivered Roberto Baggio and Romario to stadiums around the United States and made a national hero of Tony Meola. Morris has lived it every day since he was a kid.
Morris, an aspiring Olympian, grew up a soccer player in America. There was a time when that alone would have made him exceptional. Now, though, because the FIFA World Cup came to America exactly 30 years ago, a soccer player must earn that descriptor through performance, which Morris has covered.
After Morris at just 5 years old was switched from playing baseball to soccer – “I think I was coming home with too much energy, simple as that” – he soon was playing with older players and rapidly advanced until the Columbus Crew noticed his talent and invited him to join their academy at 15. Four years later, after midfield star Darlington Nagbe tested positive for COVID, Morris stepped in as the youngest starter in MLS Cup final history and drove his team toward the 2020 league championship.
Consider all this for a moment.
Not even a decade before Morris was born, none of this existed: Major League Soccer? Columbus Crew? Academy? This was America. Men playing soccer was something that happened elsewhere. Until the World Cup happened here.
“Outside of the disappointment of not being a part of the (1994 USMNT) team, I couldn’t have been happier for the way the fans, the way the country responded,” Peter Vermes told The Sporting News. “We demolished all the records from attendance to generating revenue to you name it. We showed FIFA what a World Cup could look like in a country like ours.
“That is one of the reasons we got such an uplift with Major League Soccer thereafter, because of the World Cup.”
The 1994 World Cup brought the world's most popular game and biggest sporting event to the United States and showed everyone what they'd been missing.
Vermes was among the last cuts from that U.S. team, but he’d been the athletes' representative on the U.S. Soccer board of directors when MLS was chosen from three aspirants to fulfill a promise to the sport’s world governing body, as a condition of the World Cup coming here, to launch a major professional league. For most of the 20th century, with the exception of the 16-year lifespan of the North American Soccer League, there had been none.
MLS has presented Vermes, 57, the opportunity to have a life in soccer without leaving the country. He played seven seasons in the league, including selection as the MLS defender of the year in 2000. He joined the Kansas City front office as technical director in 2006 and has been Sporting KC’s head coach since 2009.
The 1994 World Cup was followed by the 1999 Women’s World Cup captivating the nation, and Fox Sports World showing Premier League games on cable, and World Cup qualifying for the U.S. men and women becoming more accessible to viewers and the UEFA Champions League starting to make sense to Americans who’d seen these players with their national teams.
Now, South America's continental championship, Copa America, will be played in the U.S. for the second time in eight years. Americans can watch Fox networks for most of the next month from 9 a.m. to midnight to see Euro 2024 games followed by the U.S., Mexico, Argetina and Brazil in Copa America.
MORE: Full schedule for 2024 Copa America
In 2004, Americans were asked by Gallup to name their favorite sport. Soccer came in seventh. Last year, it was fourth, ahead of hockey, auto racing, tennis and golf. In 2019, 31 percent of those surveyed identified as soccer fans. In 2001, Gallup didn’t even bother to ask.
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The World Cup opened at Chicago's Soldier Field on June 17, 1994, with an elaborate ceremony with Oprah Winfrey as host and Diana Ross as featured entertainer. The first game featured reigning champion Germany against Bolivia, with Jurgen Klinsmann’s 61st-minute goal delivering an uninspired victory for the Germans.
The United States kicked off their tournament the following day in Michigan, near to the hometown of defender Alexi Lalas, and gained a 1-1 draw with Switzerland on Eric Wynalda’s blistering free kick from 30 yards. It was the first time in 14,417 days the U.S. got at least a point from a World Cup game.
Four days later, the United States entered their second Group A game before 93,869 fans at the Rose Bowl in Southern California. Colombia were among the tournament favorites, with such renowned stars as forward Faustino Asprilla and playmaker Carlos Valderrama. The U.S. were burdened with the knowledge no host nation in 14 prior World Cups had failed to advance from group play.
“We recognized there was an incredible opportunity that summer – and not just we as players, but I think everybody recognized this could propel the sport forward,” Lalas, now Fox Sports lead studio analyst for soccer coverage, told TSN.
“I tell this story: A couple weeks before the World Cup, I got on the plane with the team, I sat in my middle seat in Economy, which is what we were doing back then, and I sat down next to an older woman. And we struck up a conversation. And she turned and said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I play soccer.’ And she said, ‘What’s your job?’ I said, ‘I play soccer.’ And she said, ‘How do you make money?’
“And two weeks later, I’m in front of a billion people at the World Cup.”
There had been immense skepticism about how a World Cup in the United States would be received by the American public.
Charlie Stillitano, now president of TEG Sport and co-host of a morning soccer radio show on SiriusXM called – almost defiantly -- “The Football Show”, was the venue director for 1994 World Cup games at New Jersey's Meadowlands. No one on the business side could comfortably predict what the public response would be, in part because there'd been no high-level pro soccer in the U.S. for nearly a decade, following the collapse of the NASL in 1986.
“Everything just died. It was a wasteland for soccer,” Stillitano told TSN. “And I spent most of my time really being an apologist for soccer. Like, ‘It’s really good. You should watch it. It’s not boring. And it’s not a foreign sport.' It was almost as if we were misfits.
“And that’s so hard to explain now to people.”
Major television executives expressed hesitance or disinterest in the 1994 broadcast rights when interviewed by the Los Angeles Times following the 1990 World Cup. “Given the ratings, I don’t think anyone will go for it,” NBC Sports President Dick Ebersol said.
Eventually, ESPN and ABC did, but only after the cable network’s vice president of programming demonstrated, in that same article, underscored the attitudes of many Americans toward soccer.
“The sport suffers from the image of a very patient, low-scoring game where you go into a defensive shell with a 1-0 lead,” Loren Matthews said then. “Americans are used to more aggressive, high-scoring sports. It will take a while for the American public to appreciate the nuances of soccer.”
Not everyone involved in staging the tournament trusted the sport. Panicked about riotous fan behavior they’d read about in Europe generally and England particularly, organizers in Dallas installed a chain-link fence around the playing surface at the Cotton Bowl. That seemed to increase the heat index for spectators on a sizzling day when the on-field temperature was measured at 120 degrees and Germany completed group play with a 3-2 win against South Korea.
It didn’t matter, though.
Attorney Alan Rothenberg became president of U.S. Soccer after FIFA, the world soccer governing body, had promised the tournament to the States. He helped turn it into a smash hit. Rules changes that encouraged pursuit of victory and forward movement with the ball increased goal scoring from a record low of 2.21 per game in 1990 to 2.73 in 1994.
These numbers were less impressive, though, than those quantifying the success of the tournament. Cumulative attendance reached 3,587,538, or 68,991 per game, breaking the previous record by more than a million fans. For the July 4 U.S-Brazil round of 16 game, a record 11 million watched on television in the States, and the Brazil-Italy final had an audience of 9 million. Overall ratings, according to Rothenberg at the time, were 18 percent greater than projections. The tournament generated a $50 million surplus, which was contributed to the U.S. Soccer Foundation to help grow the game.
Had the woman sitting on Lalas’ plane turned her television to ESPN at 7:30 p.m. EDT on June 22, 1994, she’d have seen something nearly miraculous. With help from an "own goal" from Colombia and then a second from U.S. winger Earnie Stewart just after halftime on a beautiful forward move involving forward Eric Wynalda and midfielder Tab Ramos, the USMNT. earned a 2-1 victory that was their first in the World Cup since a monumental 1950 upset of England.
“It was crazy … We were almost like rock stars, to a degree, because you had the fans when you were coming out, young girls screaming all the time," midfielder Cobi Jones, now a game analyst for Fox Sports, told TSN. "We were recognized and acknowledged, to where just a year or two earlier, no one knew our names."
They were able to advance out of the group and into the round of 16, where they lost in a spirited 1-0 battle to eventual champion Brazil. They’d made their statement, though.
“It was a little bit of allowing a little kid to dream,” USMNT legend Tim Howard, who was 15 in 1994, told TSN. “Italy 1990 was like a bunch of ragtag college kids in a far-off land. I don’t even remember if I saw the games on TV. We knew that was our national team, but it was so foreign.
“So then in 1994, I think I was with the U-17 national team out in California, U.S. Soccer got us tickets and here I am, 15 years old, our shirts were off, we’re sweating in the Pasadena heat, and we’ve got USA painted on our face. And to see them parading around the field with American flags, it’s at that point when you’re 15 ... this was the realization you could play on the national team, you could play in the World Cup. That was the moment, that game in Pasadena.”
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By the time JP Dellacamera sat down to call the United States men's national team's qualifier in November 1989, it had been four decades since the U.S. had appeared in the World Cup. The U.S. needed a victory against Trinidad & Tobago to reach Italia '90.
There had been nine tournaments in the interim. El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Canada all made it at least once in that period, but American soccer was so bereft all it could manage were a few close calls. If they missed a 10th straight time just a year after FIFA announced the 1994 World Cup would be in the United States, it would have been a worldwide embarrassment.
“Ramos, putting it in … to Caliguiri. Beats the first man. A left-footed shot! PAUL CALIGUIRI HAS SCORED A GOAL! The USA lead 1-nothing!”
Caliguiri was not the only American whose legend in soccer was forged that day. It was JP Dellacamera who spoke the words that described that stunning goal and declared, as the final whistle blew on that sunny day, “The USA have realized a dream! They have qualified for the World Cup in 1990!” He has called 15 World Cups since for a variety of broadcasters, most recently Fox Sports, as well as UEFA Champions League, the Olympics and Major League Soccer.
He has made a consistent living working in the sport, something inconceivable when he was growing up in Waltham, Mass.
“When I was in high school, we didn’t even have a soccer team. We had a club team,” Dellacamera told The Sporting News. "I was a hockey fan first, and I wanted to be an NHL announcer.”
To say soccer did not exist in America is an exaggeration, but its presence was something like that of the palm tree: here and there, but certainly not everywhere.
The sport was prominent for youths in Southern California, where a young Cobi Jones would find his calling. It was important in the St. Louis area, which produced future USMNT strikers Brian McBride and Taylor Twellman. It was vital in New Jersey, where one suburb of Newark – Kearney – produced future national team stars Tony Meola, Tab Ramos and John Harkes.
“We were all part of ethnic clubs,” Stillitano, from the town of Westfield, N.J., told TSN. A first-generation American whose father immigrated from Italy, Stillitano played club soccer in his youth, was All-American at Princeton and eventually became an agent, Major League Soccer team executive and soccer promoter. “But I remember specifically youth soccer growing in leaps and bounds when I was a young adult. It was no longer my dad and his cronies, I’ll call them in a good way. This was lawyers and doctors and people in the community. They were the first and second generations, and they created youth soccer.”
According to Statista, there were 100,000 registered youth players in 1974. Forty years later, there were 3 million. The National Federation of State High School Associations archives show fewer than 11 percent of schools had soccer programs in 1969-70, the fist year such records were kept nationally, with 49,533 athletes competing. There were nearly 20 times as many athletes playing football.
The growth of soccer since has been almost unfathomable. The number of high school boys soccer players grew by 51 percent by 1994-95, by another 30 percent to 2004-05 and another 22 percent on top of that by 2014-15. There now are more than 450,000 high school soccer players, an 800 percent increase from Dellacamera’s senior year at Waltham High.
After 10 years calling minor league hockey games, Dellacamera seized the opportunity to transition to indoor soccer games in Pittsburgh and St. Louis. By the time the Major Indoor Soccer League joined the NASL in extinction, Dellacamera had established himself as an exceptional play-by-voice on any brand of soccer, which is why we now find him behind the microphone for Copa America games with Jones as his analyst – 50 years into a career in which soccer has been his primary sport for 40.
“I think 1994 kickstarted everything we’ve seen here,” Dellacamera said.
“The goal in Trinidad was the one that set up everything after that. That’s not even an opinion: You have to qualify for the first one to have momentum. But 1994 showed how big it could be in this country. It showed the world. And ever since then, everything has gone up: from the 1999 Women’s World Cup to the TV ratings at every World Cup, to the country that buys the most tickets to every World Cup outside of the host nation, it’s the U.S.”
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Soccer came to Cobi Jones suddenly, basically the impulse of an active 5-year-old, and the sport has defined his life since.
“We were driving in a station wagon with the wood side panels, and I was in the way back, looking out the back window with my brothers and seeing my cousin playing soccer,” Jones said. “Me, as a typical young kid, started screaming, ‘Hey, I want to go with Corey. I want to go out there and play with him.’ So my parents pulled the station wagon over. We hopped out. My parents asked the coach if I could play with the team and the coach said, ‘Sure, why not?’ He tossed me a jersey, I put it on and started playing.
“They could have kept driving. It was luck of the draw."
Jones never saw a future for himself in the game. He didn’t think of a college career until he was a high school senior, and even then had to walk on with coach Sigi Schmid’s UCLA Bruins. Four years after helping UCLA win their second NCAA title, he was a World Cup star. And two years later he became one of the foundational players of Major League Soccer.
He was one of numerous stars from the 1994 World Cup team -- including Wynalda, Lalas and Ramos -- who accepted the challenge and responsibility of returning home from established leagues in other countries to energize the introduction of Major League Soccer.
Stillitano, the first general manager of the New York/New Jersey MetroStars, told TSN many of the season tickets sold were to longtime believers who wanted to support soccer in America. It was an arduous journey, though. The league struggled to cope with Americans’ presumed distaste for ties. Large football stadiums, such as Giants Stadium for the MetroStars and the Rose Bowl for the LA Galaxy, became problematic venues for a new league with a developing audience.
By 2001, attendance and revenue declined to the point there were serious discussions about folding the league. Three team owners – Philip Anschutz, Lamar Hunt and Robert Kraft – essentially kept alive MLS, with the first two operating a combined nine teams between them.
A series of wise decisions followed, including more soccer-specific stadiums and better training facilities, signing David Beckham in 2007 and Lionel Messi just last year. The league responded to Columbus Crew fan pressure in 2018, after owner Anthony Precourt attempted to move the team to Austin, and worked out a deal where Precourt would get an expansion team and the Crew would remain in Ohio. The Crew won two MLS Cups since and regularly sell out their new home, Lower.com Field.
“The column I wrote during that time, I kind of looked it from someone who wasn’t a huge soccer fan,” Rob Oller of the Columbus Dispatch told TSN. “Soccer’s not what I grew up with, but I know enough, I’m aware enough to see where soccer is headed, that this would be a shame if the Crew left. I was pretty strong in: Don’t let this happen. Save the Crew. Not because I love soccer, but because a lot of people do."
In 2005, DC United created the league’s first “academy” program, something that is universal among professional teams in other countries. It's now mandated for all league teams. Some are more devoted to this pursuit, and more successful; FC Dallas produced Weston McKennie and Ricardo Pepi, and the Philadelphia Union brought along the Aaronson brothers, Brenden and Paxten, and now teenaged phenom Cavan Sullivan, who has signed with Manchester City but will remain with the Union until he’s 18.
“Manchester City knows our league very well because they own a team in our league,” MLS chief communications officer Dan Courtemanche told TSN. “They could have gone through a process and placed him at a team in Europe. And they said: You know what? We think this is the best place for him to develop.”
In recent decades, there have been soccer fans hiding in plain sight throughout the U.S. I lived in Cincinnati from 1997 through 2014, and the only hint anyone else in the region followed the sport came in 2002, when the local ABC affiliate was, at the last minute, shamed out of its plan to tape-delay the Sunday morning World Cup final from Japan in order to air paid programming.
A year after I left town, FC Cincinnati launched as a United Soccer League team and almost immediately began attracting overwhelming crowds, including 35,000 for a friendly against Premier League side Crystal Palace. That led MLS to offer the chance to join as an expansion team. FCC built TQL Stadium on the west end of the downtown area and last year ranked fifth among MLS teams in attendance.
“The biggest thing MLS has done is proved there is a community of soccer fans in every city, where you can’t deny the 20,000 people that are on TV making noise, all wearing the same colors and producing a cool atmosphere that is comparable with a lot of major clubs around the world,” Chris Wittyngham, one of the top play-by-play announcers for the MLS Season Pass package on Apple TV+. “You can’t look at that and say, ‘Nobody cares.’ ”
When Toronto FC joined the league in 2007, its owners paid a $10 million expansion fee. Forbes now values the club at $690 million. LAFC, Inter Miami, LA Galaxy and Atlanta United all are valued at more than $1 billion and among the 20 most valuable soccer clubs in the world.
There may be no greater measure of MLS’s economic growth than Inter Miami being rated by Forbes as more valuable than Inter Milan.
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When Morris was growing up in Fort Lauderdale, he reveled in watching Manchester United games at home with his family. This was a luxury unknown to soccer fans just 15 years earlier, who would have needed to find a pub with a heck of a satellite package to have any chance to see the Premier League.
The growth of soccer in America is not just about the men’s national team or MLS. It’s about the four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals won by the U.S. women. It’s about the LigaMX games that are the most popular soccer telecasts in America. It’s about the opportunity American fans of the sport have to regularly watch games from the top leagues in Germany, Italy and Spain, in addition to England.
The living-room availability of the very best leagues has made some fans here suspicious of anything or anyone in the sport perceived to be wholly American; players from MLS invited to compete with the national team become social media targets. It was true, as well, when ESPN made baseball and basketball announcer Dave O’Brien the voice of the 2006 World Cup or Fox Sports tried to introduce the spectacular Gus Johnson to the FA Cup and Champions League.
And it’s most obvious regarding USMNT coach Gregg Berhalter, who spent most of his coaching career prior to taking over the national team in MLS. Many fans make clear they’d take any coach from anywhere over someone born and raised here.
Soccer still has room to grow, obviously. And 2026, when the FIFA World Cup returns to the States for the first time in three decades, could be that moment.
“I think it’s grown for sure. A great example is my time in Columbus,” said Morris, who won a second MLS Cup with the Crew in 2023 and now has been recruited by Middlesbrough to play in England’s Championship division.
“In the city, you see people around wearing Columbus Crew jerseys everywhere. The stadium’s most of the time sold out. Messi coming into the league is awesome. The quality of the national team’s gotten so much better. A lot of the kids around the country are realizing how much of a special special sport this is.
“I think a big piece will be the World Cup coming up. That’ll be in our home country and, you think about it, a good amount of kids in that generation will be growing up watching the World Cup. They’ll be like, ‘This was amazing. What a fun time.’ And there goes a whole generation wanting to play soccer.”
