As 1994 approached, the United States was on the verge of hosting the World Cup — but national soccer officials were terrified that the home team was about to humiliate itself on a global stage. They hired an internationally successful coach to transform soccer in the United States and, after a bumpy start that prompted pundits to wonder if this country and the sport the rest of the world knew as “football” would just never mesh, a (small) miracle happened.
The result, of course, was paradigm-shifting, and there are no similarities between the position Team USA soccer was in when the 1994 World Cup began and where we now stand as World Cup 2026 approaches. Nope. None at all.
As Dave Lamattina and Chad Walker’s Summer of ’94 — a documentary that’s two-thirds focused on events prior to the summer of 1994 — wants to make clear, no matter how terrified American soccer fans are of…