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When Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the 1994 Fifa World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, more than 94,000 people were there to watch Italian heartbreak and Brazilian ecstasy.

To this day, no other World Cup has been as well attended as the 1994 tournament. Tickets were cheap and abundant, and despite the relatively low profile of the game in the US compared to sports like baseball or basketball, people went along to see what it was all about.

Now, three decades later, as the 2026 World Cup returns to North America with games across Mexico, Canada and the US, soccer has grown a much larger and more dedicated fan base in America.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to John Sloop, a professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and historian of soccer and its fans in the United States, about what’s changed for the men’s game in the US and whether the popularity has staying power.

From Pelé to Messi

Part of the deal for Fifa choosing the US to host the 1994 World Cup was for the country to set up is own professional soccer league, Major League Soccer, which is now home to global football stars including Argentina’s Lionel Messi and Uruguay’s Luis Suárez.

But it wasn’t the first American professional league. In the 1960s, investors looking around for a new venture launched the North American Soccer League, which ran from 1968 to 1984. It originally struggled to get off the ground, but then in 1975, the New York Cosmos managed to lure Brazilian great Pelé out of retirement, reportedly for US$4 million. Other players followed, including Germany’s Franz Beckenbauer, Dutchman Johan Cruyff and England’s Bobby Moore.

“The league takes off in a very flashy way, starts getting very large viewership, not necessarily on TV, but they were selling out stadiums of 60-something thousand when Pelé shows up,” explains Sloop. But eventually the teams went bankrupt and the NASL began to fall apart. Sloop says that collapse was “somewhat heartbreaking for real international soccer fans”, who began to ask what kind of model could work in the US.

Listen to Sloop on The Conversation Weekly podcast to understand how the launch of MLS, the success of the US women’s team, and the greater availability of soccer on television, has changed views of the game in the US.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware, Katie Flood and Mend Mariwany. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from FIFA, NASL 1968-1984 Soccer History, AP Archive, TODAY and Olympics.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

John M Sloop does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.