Adam Elder - New Kids in the World Cup: The Totally Late 80s and Early 90s Tale of the Team That Changed American Soccer Forever

Mens soccer in America has taken a long and winding road to get to the glitz and glamour we now see with MLS , USL , and the national team. This book is an important reminder to appreciate those who helped build the sport when nobody else cared about soccer. Every page filled me with gratitude for those who came before me.

Landon Donovan, former U.S. Mens National Team captain and co-all-time-leading scorer

A book that transports the reader back to a time when the best male footballers this nation produced toiled way below the radar. Huge love for Adam Elder, who has poured his energy into reconstructing a story that begins with shirtless dancing on a California beach with O.J. Simpson and spirals away from there. Reading this is a reminder of how far we have come, so fast, from a mens footballing perspective.

Roger Bennett, cohost of the TV show Men in Blazers

Adam Elder

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2022 by Adam Elder

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image: 1989 George Tiedemann.

Author photo Scott Draper.

All rights reserved

The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elder, Adam, author.

Title: New kids in the World Cup: the totally late 80s and early 90s tale of the team that changed American soccer forever / Adam Elder.

Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022004654

ISBN 9781496229434 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496234155 (epub)

ISBN 9781496234162 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : United States Mens National Soccer TeamHistory. | World Cup (Soccer) (1990: Italy) | SoccerUnited StatesHistory20th century. | BISAC : SPORTS & RECREATION / Soccer | SPORTS & RECREATION / History

Classification: LCC GV 944. U 5 E 54 2022 | DDC 796.334/630973dc23/eng/20220307

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022004654

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For my mom

I will either find a way, or make one.

Hannibal

To live in fear is not to live at all.

Corey Feldman, License to Drive

About a decade ago, I was reacquainted with an old rap video from 1990. I cant remember howI certainly didnt go looking for it, so I assume some algorithm is to blame. Its by no means a hip-hop classic. It was G-rated bars rapped by an obscure soccer team as they danced on a beach. But it hit the way Prousts buttery cookie crumb did: old memories, old vibes, and my old life came back into crystal-clear focus.

I was eleven years old when the 1990 World Cup started with a 10 game and finished with a 10 game. I was fairly aware of it allwhich is to say, more aware than most of America. I actually watched some matches and read about it in Sports Illustrated. I only knew three things about the American team: (1) Itd been a while since the U.S. had played in the World Cup; (2) theyd reached the tournament by scoring a goal in some small country; and (3) theyd made a novelty rap video that Id once seen on TV . But I was far more fascinated by the tournament itself and the very top level of soccer; it was nothing like AYSO . Nothing at all!

Somehow, there was so much drama, tension, and ecstasy wrapped up in twenty-two foreign athletes chasing a ball around on grass the way they did, and occasionally kicking each other. Entire books have been written elsewhere about the allure of the sport. But Ill just say that for a kid used to seeing American sports, with scoreboards that tell fans when to MAKE SOME NOISE !!!, this big-boy version of soccer was mysterious, exotic, and exciting.

The following year I gave up football and began playing soccer in earnest; you could say I came of age roughly around the same time that American soccer did. Id gaze at soccer catalogs that ran action photos from European club games and watch English Premier League games broadcast late on school nights, on a two-day tape delay. Then the 1994 World Cup came around. Id been looking forward to it for months. When it finally arrived, I was hooked; Phillip Morris could learn things from this sport.

Teenagers generally dont know shit, but I knew in the summer of 1994 that Id be a soccer fan for life. As any addict will tell you, this sort of revelation occurs not during the highswhile watching, say, Brazil 32 Holland. Its when you find yourself sitting through every minute of South Korea 00 Bolivia in the middle of a family vacation.

Anyway, having played and followed soccer in the early 90s, I was very familiar with its ignoble status in America at the time. To be a male teenage soccer player then meant hearing all sorts of emasculating insults from kids playing other sports, or not even any sport at all. You supposedly werent good enough or tough enough to play other sports. Your shorts were girly. Your socks were too long. The sport was pointless. Theres way too much running. To mainstream America, everything was off about it. Hating soccer was simply the thing to do. It was somehow comforting for people, and most obliged without thinking.

I mention this because for most of my life, Ive wondered what it was like to be an elite American soccer player in such an antagonistic era, when the sport was flatlining, nobody wanted anything to do with it, and there was probably less money in it than in Frisbee dog competitions.

So that rap video by the United States 1990 World Cup team was not only a direct link back to this time, it also seemed like one of the only remaining artifacts of this team. It was like an ancient fossil embedded in sedimentary rock that had recently eroded.

This was a team that made history and was ahead of its time in many ways but was quickly forgottenif it was ever remembered in the first place. Theyd been comprehensively overshadowed by every U.S. team that followed them.

I wrote a little story about the making of the video (dont look for it, please), and in listening to many of the players, I slowly realized I was wading into the origin story of modern American soccer. And oh man, did they have some stories!

Vignettes, summaries, and anecdotes of the team have since been captured and written on the internet by othersall of which are excellentbut Ive always thought their entire journey deserved a thorough telling. Thats what Ive attempted to do here on the following pages.

If theres anything a sports fan often lacks, its perspective. As youre about to see, soccer has come a long way in this country. If you were to go back to 1989 and look around, youd find it impossible to imagine that wed ever get to where things are now. And as I wrap up this book in spring 2022, amid World Cup qualifiers, Im experiencing a cognitive dissonance so large, I might need to be hospitalized: my minds eye is in the soccer climate of 198890, while before my eyes on the TV screen are sparkling new soccer-specific stadiums packed with loud fans who maintain a perpetual discourse around the team.

More to the point, nowadays the U.S. is expected (rightly or wrongly) to qualify for every World Cup. American soccer players are multimillionaires and household names. We have a nationwide professional league thats a quarter century old. We have a standing army of devoted fans who dissect the U.S. national teams tactics, play, and personnel in truly excruciating detail. We have access to more soccer on TV and on the internet than a centenarian could watch in their lifetime. Kids and even grownups wear soccer jerseysproudly.