If you're old enough — what do you remember about the 1994 World Cup?

And if you're not, try to picture it. Soccer in the United States before MLS existed. Matches inside the Pontiac Silverdome, a domed football stadium in Michigan — humid, bizarre, and somehow full. The Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Record attendances that still haven't been broken. A tournament that, by most outside, European or Latin American accounts, had no business working as well as it did.

The standard story is that 1994 planted soccer in America. FIFA arrived, the world showed up, and a nation discovered the game.

Tom McCabe thinks that story gets it almost exactly backwards. He is a historian, a filmmaker, and the co-host of the podcast An American Game, and he currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame’s London Center. His documentary Soccertown USA follows Kearny, New Jersey — a small industrial town that produced three players on the same 1994 national team: Tab Ramos, John Harkes, Tony Meola. His argument is simple and unsettling: the game was already there. It had been there for a century. 1994 didn't plant anything — it just showed up late to something that immigrant communities had built long before FIFA came looking for a market.

And that matters now, in the summer of 2026, because the World Cup is back, and so this is a look back b7t just as much a prep episode for what’s about to happen here. I’m torn about this World Cup. But if we're going to understand what this tournament means — who it's for, what it reveals, what it might actually leave behind — we need a better story from then to now. And that is what this conversation is about.

Music throughout this episode are huts from 1994, some of you will feel nostalgic: Ace of Base. Weezer. Beck. Roxette. All from that year. And Bruce Springsteen, whose Streets of Philadelphia uncovered a very different side of America, in that year as well.

HELPFUL LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:

Soccertown USA (full documentary, Youtube)

An American Game (podcast)

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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind

Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/