Andrei Markovits remembers the 1994 World Cup hosted in the United States well. He attended multiple matches and can still recall “the exact minutes, goals, everything,” he said.
Markovits is professor emeritus in the Political Science Department at the University of Michigan and he’s written extensively about global soccer and American sporting culture. What he also remembers from those games forty years ago is how hard it was to follow global soccer at that time.
There was no professional men’s league in the United States; the peak of soccer–or rather football–fandom was in Europe. Markovits, a devoted Manchester United fan, was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the time. To keep up with his favorite team, he had to call up his friend in London as soon as United’s game ended each weekend.
“We’d only speak for 10 seconds because it was still so expensive to call,” Markovits recalled. “I knew the score, but I knew absolutely nothing about the game.”
He had to wait until Thursday or Friday of the following week for the arrival of English newspapers at the Harvard Square kiosk to read more about the match.
“That’s how I experienced top-level soccer,” Markovits said. “Now, it’s all on my iPhone. There’s no distance. Zero. I can watch everything. I follow everything. Anywhere in the world, you can see it. Soccer has attained a completely different real presence in the United States.”
The World Cup returning to North America this summer has been a clear demonstration of how much soccer has grown in the U.S. since the 1994 World Cup. The American team has wowed the country with their performances, winning their second knockout stage match in the team’s history against Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday. The stadiums are full, and games are available to watch live. Scores and the latest soccer news populate iPhone apps, putting the game at the center of American pop culture.
“[But] there is a huge generational difference," said Markovits. "People under 30, this is normal. They grew up with the Premier League on Saturday.”
While teaching at the university, Markovits decided to no longer teach his large Introduction to Comparative Politics and other courses on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons because almost all the men in the class were watching the UEFA Champions League, the marquee club soccer competition, on their phones.
“To people under 35, soccer as a sports fan has become totally normal,” Markovits said. “They know it. When I started teaching [at the University of Michigan] in 1999, there was maybe one soccer jersey, Real Madrid or Manchester United. By the time I left in 2024, when I became emeritus, there were jerseys of Sporting Lisbon and Napoli and all kinds of teams that are not the premiere teams.”
The 1994 World Cup, for its part, served as a major landmark moment in soccer’s growth in the U.S. It broke the tournament record with an average of nearly 70,000 people attending each game, a high mark that still stands. That was a hint to Markovits the U.S. could embrace soccer.
Markovits calls the 1994 games “an American exception.” Not in a normative or superior sense, but as an exception to the norm. The Pontiac Silverdome in Pontiac, Michigan, hosted four games during the 1994 edition, making it the first indoor venue in World Cup history. The matches were played on newly-invented grass made by a Michigan State University turf expert John “Trey” Rogers. Markovits attended one game at the Silverdome–a match up between his birth nation of Romania and Switzerland.
“It was fascinating because there was never indoor soccer on the World Cup stage,” he said. “It was also exceptional. It was different and received as a curiosity and an American weirdness. ‘Look at this, they are constructing this indoors.’”
Markovits uses the German word “jein,” a combination of yes and no, when assessing if soccer has assimilated into American culture. In some ways, yes. Like how terms like “soccer mom” have become part of the American vernacular. Soccer leagues for kids abound–and millions of Americans play the sport. The question, Markovits said, is how Americans follow and consume soccer.
“In the United States, you have at least four that dominate the sports base: basketball, football, baseball and hockey, and you can even add NASCAR to some degree,” Markovits said. “It’s very hard to compete against that, meaning soccer has entered the American sports base, but it’s still not at the core.”
The U.S. is at the core of every other sport, Markovits added.
“Every basketball player in the world wants to play in the NBA,” he said. “But in soccer, that is not the case. The core is Western Europe.”
The best teams and players often play in Italy, England, France, Germany, or Spain. Markovits, though, does believe the U.S. can eventually enter that aforementioned “core” in soccer.
That’s in part thanks to immigrants arriving in the U.S., who have long propelled soccer’s growth in the U.S. by bringing their sport and allegiances as well as passing their passion on to future generations. But with the sport’s current popularity, having roots elsewhere is no longer a prerequisite for allegiance to a team.
“The 14-year-old kid who falls in love with Chelsea or Bayern Munich has nothing to do with the fact that he may emanate from London or Munich, or his grandfather did,” Markovits said. “The current generation is all created by the immediacy of the iPhone, the immediacy of the internet.”
