{"id":575691,"date":"2026-04-01T18:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T18:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/575691\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T18:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T18:34:10","slug":"the-1999-u-s-womens-national-soccer-team-changed-global-sport-and-americas-view-of-soccer-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/575691\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1999 U.S. women\u2019s national soccer team changed global sport \u2014 and America\u2019s view of soccer \u2014 forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note: The following excerpt is from \u201cThe Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America\u2019s Quest to Conquer Global Sport,\u201d by Andr\u00e9s Martinez (April 2, 2026, Bloomsbury Publishing)<\/p>\n

Summer of 1999 (Giants Stadium, New Jersey): Julie Foudy, the gifted and thoughtful midfielder who would go on to become a gifted and thoughtful sportscaster, podcaster, and author, described the moment when she visited one of our classes at ASU and recorded one of our Great Game Lab Set Piece conversations:<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst game against Denmark of the Women\u2019s World Cup. We had been trying to sell it to big stadiums and convince FIFA like this is the way we should go. And we had journalists and FIFA representatives telling us we were crazy. You shouldn\u2019t do it. No one\u2019s going to come. It\u2019s going to be an empty stadium. So, Andr\u00e9s, you can imagine our excitement when we get stuck in traffic trying to get to that game, and we have no idea why there\u2019s traffic. Then we realize, oh my gosh! It\u2019s because they\u2019re coming to our game. What. And then we walk out of the tunnel. And it\u2019s like the perfect movie scene, you know. Tunnel. You see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is the field. You walk out, and the whole place gets on its feet, you know, and they said, it\u2019s the second largest crowd at the time, besides the pope \u2026 because, the pope.\u201d<\/p>\n

My mom and I were at the end of that tunnel, with tens of thousands of other fans, cheering our heads off. Mom had given me so many opportunities to be connected to sport, and anything else I was ever passionate about, including her country \u2014 I wouldn\u2019t have my blue passport if it weren\u2019t for her. She\u2019d always been an agent for the fulfillment of others \u2014 her husband, kids, students, charities she volunteered at; in another time and place she should have been in charge, like of everything, but throughout her life she never thought she should be at the center of things. We all have known women like that, I know, but I am just glad I was able to bring one of them to a couple of those 1999 Women\u2019s World Cup games.<\/p>\n

Oh, and I know Foudy would want me to add here that she scored the crucial second goal in the Americans\u2019 3-0 win against the Danes.<\/p>\n

Those were heady, end-of-millennium days, with Y2K barreling towards us, talk of the end of history, and an unbridled exuberance about where technology and globalization were taking us.<\/p>\n

And women, that remarkable group of women on the U.S. Women\u2019s National Team, were definitely at the center of things. That World Cup was all people talked about all summer; the team played before sellout crowds in the country\u2019s largest stadiums and their TV ratings shattered expectations, and anything previously accomplished by women athletes, or soccer of any kind, on U.S. television. Almost 20 million people watched Brandi Chastain rip her jersey off upon scoring the winning PK against China in the final at the Rose Bowl. From then on, there were always going to be 20 million reasons why anyone who suggested there wasn\u2019t an audience for women\u2019s sports was talking nonsense.<\/p>\n

That team of Foudy, Mia Hamm, Briana Scurry, Kristine Lilly, Chastain and all the others accomplished so many feats. They played amazing soccer, first and foremost, but they also took it upon themselves to promote the game \u2014 those KC Current players I saw signing autographs an hour before their kickoff were following in the footsteps of these USWNT 99ers \u2014 and to become persuasive advocates for equal pay and gender equity in our society. They were also caught up in endless cultural debates over whether they had redefined what it meant to be female and athletic, posing on magazine covers, being marketed for their attractiveness and so on. The fact that many of them were clearly brighter and more eloquent than is often the norm for professional athletes raised another set of taboos for cultural critics. The country just wasn\u2019t ready for all they had to offer.<\/p>\n

From our Great Game vantage, the greatest feat and legacy of this USWNT, and their equally remarkable successors, is that they turned soccer into a naturalized American. There was nothing foreign about the game once they were done with it. That summer of 1999 was the culmination; they\u2019d won Olympic gold three years earlier in Atlanta, too, and the explosion of girls\u2019 soccer since the passage of Title IX meant that by the time Bill Clinton was seeking re-election in 1996, pollsters and political demographers had coined the term \u201csoccer moms\u201d to represent one of the most \u201cmainstream\u201d slices of the American electorate: suburban, upper middle class, mostly white, fairly independent minivan-driving voters who weren\u2019t that entrenched in partisan politics but were driven by civility vibes and economic concerns. This showed how far soccer had come in my years in the U.S. Fifteen years earlier if you\u2019d told me American political analysts were looking to define a slice of the electorate as \u201csoccer moms,\u201d I might have guessed they were coining a term for subversive feminist voters who believed in world government.<\/p>\n

Amusingly, late night talk show host David Letterman would appropriate the term \u201cSoccer Moms\u201d for a nightly segment touting the USWNT during the 1999 World Cup.<\/p>\n

If \u201cAmericanizing\u201d the world\u2019s game was their greatest accomplishment, the second greatest feat and legacy of this USWNT, and it\u2019s a close second, is how they inspired the rest of the world to embrace women\u2019s sport more broadly. They globalized the idea and reality of successful women\u2019s sports by how they Americanized the world\u2019s game.<\/p>\n

Andr\u00e9s Martinez is co-director of the Great Game Lab at Arizona State University, where he also teaches at the Cronkite School of Journalism, and is a fellow at the New America think tank. He has been a business reporter, editorial writer, and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times. <\/p>\n

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