PHOENIX – Brian Dunseth grew up in the shadow of the Rose Bowl. Long before he became an MLS defender and, later, a national broadcaster, the Southern California native was just a teenager pressed up against the concrete walls of the country’s biggest soccer stage.
He was 16 when the 1994 World Cup came to Pasadena. He couldn’t afford a ticket so he stood outside the Rose Bowl just to feel the noise through those thick walls. Inside were the players who would define that summer and future generations of soccer in the United States. They became the same players with whom he would one day share the pitch.
“To be able to share a locker room, to share a meal, to share a hotel room with these guys later, it was a dream come true,” Dunseth said. “We were kind of stewards for the legacy of ’94. We were like the Dick Butkuses of soccer, the bricklayers laying the groundwork for what we always thought was the ineffable future.”
Now, as a commentator calling games for MLS alongside other major events such as the FIFA Club World Cup and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, “Dunny” sees the sport from a different vantage point.
“I find myself somewhere during the game just taking a deep breath and thinking, ‘Go——-, you actually are here,’” he said.
Thirty‑two years removed from that fateful ’94 summer, the United States is hosting the World Cup again. The Stars and Stripes face Bosnia and Herzegovina in the knockout round of 32 at 5 p.m. MST on Wednesday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California.
The 2026 team has already raised eyebrows domestically with its performance in the group stage, but the knockout rounds provide the U.S. with a chance to prove that the investment, development and cultural momentum sparked by the 1994 team can finally deliver a lasting national impact in which U.S. Soccer realizes its long-discussed potential.
An American soccer odyssey
Before 1994, American soccer existed in fits and starts. In the inaugural World Cup in 1930 in Uruguay, the United States finished third. Since then, the team has not made it past the quarterfinals and has failed to qualify for the World Cup 10 times.
Leander Schaerlaeckens, author of “The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts,” calls the decades following the 1930 World Cup “chaotic and dysfunctional.”
“After 1930, the (American Soccer League) collapses and the sport is basically relegated to ethnic regional leagues,” he said. “There’s no national coherent structure and when TV comes along and supercharges our sporting industry, soccer’s just absent.”
Jeff Crandall, U.S. Soccer’s historian, has his own special description for that era.
“I call 1951 through to Caligiuri’s goal basically the wilderness years,” he said. “We didn’t qualify for nine consecutive World Cups.”
The North American Soccer League briefly made soccer a fad in the 1970s, but it collapsed in 1984.
“It wasn’t great for the American player,” Schaerlaeckens said. “They weren’t developing the American player at all.”
By the late ’80s, the national team was held together by indoor‑soccer paychecks and college players.
“Almost none of those players were playing professionally outdoors,” Crandall said. “Very few.”
Luckily for the U.S., everything changed on a single swing of Paul Caligiuri’s left foot in Trinidad in 1989. His goal gave the U.S. a 1-0 victory against Trinidad and Tobago at the National Stadium in Port of Spain, putting the USMNT into the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy.
“(The year) 1989 is the most important goal in U.S. soccer history,” Crandall said. “If the U.S. didn’t qualify for 1990, FIFA was willing to pull the World Cup from us. If 1994 doesn’t happen, MLS doesn’t happen.”
Even so, the 1994 team entered the tournament with little pedigree and even less belief from the outside world.
“No one gave us a chance,” said Marcelo Balboa, former USMNT defender and National Soccer Hall of Famer. “Everybody was expecting us to fail. When you look at that starting 11, seven of us didn’t have club teams. Seven of us had never played pro soccer.”
U.S. soccer’s all-time appearance leader, Cobi Jones, remembers the duty they faced.
“It was a burgeoning sport still within the United States,” he said. “We knew the World Cup was always an opportunity to have exponential growth.”
They weren’t expected to get out of the group state, but they defied the odds.
“We surprised a lot of people,” Balboa said. “We opened a lot of people’s eyes, and we laid a pretty solid foundation for the next generation.”
Jones recalls how they did it.
“We were competitive in all the matches,” he said. “We won games we weren’t supposed to. And we always had our best games when we were having fun.”
The U.S. started the group stage with a 1-1 draw against Switzerland, but quickly drew the nation in after a monumental 2-1 win over heavy favorite Colombia. Despite falling to Romania 1-0 in the final game, the team’s performances were enough to propel them to the Round of 16. Matched up against Brazil, the eventual champions, in the knockout stage, the U.S lost in a narrow 1-0 result, but the implications of such a close game led to an awakening.
The country noticed, and the star-patterned denim Adidas kits, flowing locks of all lengths and colors and a roster full of loud, unfiltered characters became an instant cultural phenomenon. For a nation still figuring out what its soccer identity was, that squad gave the sport an All-American style to rally behind.
“American media was like, ‘Oh s—, who are the guys? Let’s make some guys,” Schaerlaeckens said. “They needed names to attach this to.”
Former USMNT star Earnie Stewart didn’t realize the impact of the moment at the time.
“I was young, you don’t look at it that way,” he said. “But in hindsight, yeah, we were part of some sort of history.”
The birth of a domestic league
When FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States, it came with a condition to build a first‑division league.
“Major League Soccer is the legacy of the 1994 World Cup,” said Dan Courtemanche, MLS’s executive vice president. “We started with zero soccer stadiums. Soon we’ll have 30 built specifically for MLS clubs.”
The numbers are staggering, with “$11 billion” having been “invested in stadiums, academies and training facilities,” Courtemanche said. Furthermore, he boasts that “since 2018, (MLS) has had seven new clubs, nine new stadiums, 12 new training facilities and attendance has increased 33 percent,” while the valuations of the league’s clubs are now “three times more valuable.”
On the youth development side, Courtemanche highlights the commitment leaguewide.
“Ownership is really committed to building the sport sustainably in the local communities, and part of that is certainly player development ecosystem,” he said. “All 30 of our clubs have youth academies, really starting at the under-12 level. But we also have our MLS Next League (the league’s youth development system), which goes throughout the United States and Canada and has more than 43,000 players.”
Dunseth has experienced that investment firsthand.
“I walked into Real Salt Lake’s new facility and thought, ‘Man, I’m so jealous,’” he said. “These kids get breakfast, lunch, snacks … their protein shakes are cultivated for their body. It’s a different world.”
Schaerlaeckens sees the potential of the MLS system.
“MLS democratizes the youth scene,” he said. “It circumvents the $5,000‑a‑year pay‑to‑play system. But we only have 30 academies in a country of 380 million. If we’re going to rely on MLS, we need 300.”
Meanwhile, Crandall notes the results of that development on the national team.
“I bet 75 to 80% of the current roster came through an MLS academy at some point,” he said.
The number is even higher for current national team, Courtemanche said.
“Ninety‑five percent of youth national team players are coming up through the MLS system,” he said. “Twenty‑one of the 26 players on the U.S. World Cup roster came up in the MLS ecosystem.”
With a new era of soccer growth, investment and development in the United States, a rising culture is also being cultivated, and Jones has noticed.
“You see sold‑out stadiums now,” he said. “You see people wearing soccer jerseys like they do NBA and NFL jerseys. I see it in the streets of L.A. all the time.”
He takes pride in the generational connection that has laid the foundation for many young fans today.
“You have kids wearing the (Christian) Pulisic or (Weston) McKennie jersey, and their dads or moms wearing a Jones or a Stewart jersey,” he said. “That’s important. That’s generational fans.”
Stewart also recognizes the potential cultural shift.
“People that love soccer want to represent and identify with something,” he said. “With a country this big and that many people that love the game, a lot of countries would be jealous.”
Dunseth, on the other hand, compares soccer fandom to alternative subcultures.
“I’ve always looked at soccer similar to skateboarding and punk music,” he said. “You can batter us as much as you want, but we still got our own lane, right? There are non‑negotiables when it comes to protecting our game.”
Despite all the progress, the people closest to the sport are still keen to notice what hasn’t changed, and what still threatens to hold American soccer back.
While Schaerlaeckens sees the potential, he also doesn’t sugarcoat the process thus far.
“We’ve been trying to find shortcuts for 30 years,” he said. “Project 2010, Generation Adidas, residency programs, trying to outsmart 210 other countries. It turns out the only way you can do this is properly.”
The pay‑to‑play system also casts a long shadow on the growth of the game.
“I shudder to think of the talent we missed out on,” he said. “We are the only country where soccer is the sport of the well‑off.”
Even in 2026, the World Cup comes with previously unseen roadblocks.
“U.S. soccer has been frozen out of the World Cup,” he said. “FIFA took control of the whole thing. Tickets are so expensive, it’s much harder for new people to discover the sport.”
Crandall underscored the historical consequence of these barriers.
“We’ve only ever won one knockout game in our history,” he said. “One. That’s the reality.”
And while the current roster is the most talented the U.S. has ever produced, the path to sustained success is harder than meets the eye.
“We do not yet have the luxury to only worry about how the team performs on the field,” Schaerlaeckens said. “We also have to think about how it performs in the culture, whether it starts to make a mark there.
“If they reach the quarterfinal and the country doesn’t care, that’s less successful than if they reach the round of 32 or the round of 16, but the whole country gets swept up in soccer fever.”
Balboa was a big part of that soccer fever sweeping over the nation in ‘94, and reminisces on that summer’s unexpected impact.
“Sitting here now, 32 years later, hosting the World Cup again, that shows what we did in ’94 was a big step,” he said.
The players who cultivated that summer remember the pressure of a sport still trying to carve out its place in American culture. Now they watch a golden generation built through academies and lofty investments reap the benefits of their passion and determination.
Arguably the most memorable player from the ‘94 squad, Alexi Lalas framed it in a way only he can.
“It warms the cockles of my red-headed American heart to see how far we’ve come,” Lalas said. “It’s unprecedented when you compare it to any country and culture around. We’ve still got a ways to go, but I hope that this summer is used to kind of take a step back and celebrate how far we’ve come.
“Sometimes in American soccer, we kick ourselves for what we aren’t or what we haven’t done. And I think this summer can be used to kind of celebrate how far we’ve come, how good it actually is, both on and off the field. At the end, you should say that team made me proud. Proud of American soccer culture. Proud of America.”
The 2026 World Cup has the chance to be a catalyst for the game in the United States, and while the steps taken so far have been relatively fruitful, Schaerlaeckens knows the one thing needed to take the sport to the next level.
“Soccer just has to get in the groundwater,” he said.
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