“The United States was chosen,” the columnist George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times in 1994, “because of all the money to be made here, not because of any soccer prowess. Our country has been rented as a giant stadium and hotel and television studio.” Nobody could seriously doubt that. The USA had played in only two World Cups since the second world war and hadn’t had a national professional league for a decade. And that meant there was a great deal of skepticism from outsiders, even after Fifa made it clear there would be no wacky law changes to try to appeal to the domestic audience: Would anybody actually turn up to watch?
But there was also hostility in the United States. A piece in USA Today on the day of the draw told Americans they were right not to care* *about the World …
“The United States was chosen,” the columnist George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times in 1994, “because of all the money to be made here, not because of any soccer prowess. Our country has been rented as a giant stadium and hotel and television studio.” Nobody could seriously doubt that. The USA had played in only two World Cups since the second world war and hadn’t had a national professional league for a decade. And that meant there was a great deal of skepticism from outsiders, even after Fifa made it clear there would be no wacky law changes to try to appeal to the domestic audience: Would anybody actually turn up to watch?
But there was also hostility in the United States. A piece in USA Today on the day of the draw told Americans they were right not to care* about the World Cup, what it sneeringly described as the biggest sport in “Cameroon, Uruguay and Madagascar”. “Hating soccer,” wrote the columnist Tom Weir, “is more American than mom’s apple pie, driving a pickup or spending Saturday afternoon channel surfing with the remote *control.”
Behind both, perhaps, lay the same thought. What if hosting the World Cup turned out to be the stimulus the United States needed to embrace soccer? Foreign skeptics perhaps feared too much growth in the United States and possible domination of the global game; American skeptics worried what a soccer boom might mean for the four major US sports. Fifa just hoped there was money to be made.
What nobody doubted was that the United States would bring glitz, glamour, and razzmatazz. The draw was held in Las Vegas and starred such luminaries as Bill Clinton, Faye Dunaway, Jeff Bridges, and Jessica Lange. The opening ceremony, staged at Soldier Field in Chicago before the defending champion Germany – playing at a World Cup as a unified nation for the first time since 1938 – faced Bolivia, was a lavish, sun-drenched affair presented by Oprah Winfrey and featuring turns by Diana Ross, Daryl Hall, and The B-52’s. But the omens were terrible. Winfrey fell off the stage and twisted her ankle. Ross dragged a shot wide of an open goal from three yards. Germany won a desultory opening game 1–0. And the whole thing was overshadowed by the LAPD’s televised pursuit through Los Angeles earlier in the day of the American football star turned murder suspect, OJ Simpson.
The United States had been awarded hosting rights, appropriately enough, on 4 July 1988. Chile had withdrawn from the race and Brazil had still not installed Havelange’s son-in-law, Ricardo Teixeira, as CBF president, which effectively left a straight fight between the United States and Morocco. It was a close-run thing, the United States winning out by 10 votes to Morocco’s seven, with Brazil on two. It was the third tournament awarded by the Havelange regime and already the process was drowning in paranoia and suspicion. Had the ban Mexico received from the 1990 World Cup for fielding overage players in a youth tournament been an attempt to smooth the USA’s passage to 1994 by giving them tournament experience?
Havelange was certain the United States was a market ripe for exploitation, but even though Fifa talked boldly of hosting the World Cup as a way of stimulating interest in the game, there were plenty of doubters. Would it be possible to lay grass over the artificial surfaces at the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan and the Giants Stadium in New Jersey? What would the impact be of staging the tournament over such a vast geographical area? And how would players cope in the heat and humidity, particularly with games kicking off at noon and midafternoon to accommodate European TV markets?
More broadly, what did prioritizing potential commercial markets over traditional soccer countries suggest about the way the game was going? The Italian president of Uefa, Artemio Franchi, had been clear he could “never agree to a World Cup for multinationals” and he wasn’t the only one who disliked the overtly commercial route soccer was taking under Havelange. He was killed in a car crash in 1983 and there were enough unexplained details about his death to prompt an investigation by the journalist Alberto Ballarin, who identified two untraced foreign motorcyclists as potential suspects in a possible murder. Among the wilder theories about what happened on the road to Siena that night is the claim that elements at Fifa who had seen the USA miss out on hosting 1986 and 1990 took out a key obstacle to the success of their third bid.
Like Colombia, Italy played with a back four and zonal marking, adapting the tenets of Total Football for their own market. And like Colombia, they had a brilliant and radical coach whose rise had been vertiginous. Arrigo Sacchi had been a shoe salesman for his father’s factory when, in 1979, aged 33, he quit to devote himself fulltime to coaching. His big break came in the 1986–87 Coppa Italia, when his Parma team, then in Serie B, beat AC Milan, which had just been acquired by Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi saw in Sacchi something of himself, a disruptor unbound by convention.
Appointing Sacchi was an extraordinary risk, but one rapidly justified when Milan won the league in Sacchi’s first season and followed up with a pair of European Cups. After the first of them, in 1989, Milan faced Atlético Nacional in the Intercontinental Cup. They won 1–0 and Sacchi and Maturana, realizing how much they had in common, began to speak regularly.
Like many who plan meticulously, Sacchi was extremely superstitious. He hated people wishing him luck; to say “good luck” to Sacchi was to lay a curse upon him. The night before Italy began their World Cup campaign against Ireland, the Italian president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro rang to wish the Italy squad good luck. What followed was, to Sacchi’s mind, typical: a classic Jack Charlton victory.
One semifinal was played in New Jersey and one in California, which, with the final to be played in Pasadena, was a problem. At Giants Stadium on the East Coast, two early goals from Roberto Baggio effectively secured Italy’s win over Bulgaria. But the 2,700-mile journey cost Italy a day of preparation, which Sacchi thought decisive. In the second semi-final, Thomas Ravelli had already made a couple of fine saves before Sweden’s captain Jonas Thern was sent off for a studs-up jab on Dunga’s ankle. Romário headed the winner with 10 minutes remaining. Determined to avoid the misfortune of a good-luck message, Sacchi instructed reception in the team’s hotel in Los Angeles not to put through any calls to him. But at 4am on the morning of the final, his phone rang. It was “a girl from Bologna.” He had no idea who she was, but she uttered the fateful words: “Good luck.” Sacchi knew the game was up.
Baresi made a miraculous recovery from his knee injury to start, but it wasn’t enough. Although Sacchi said that “in the defensive phase, we played very well,” he thought they were “mediocre” going forward, for which he blamed fatigue. The game was anxious and drab, ignited only after Viola had come on for Zinho with fourteen minutes of extra time remaining. It finished 0–0 and so, for the first time, a World Cup was settled on penalties.
Roberto Baggio didn’t want to go first, so Baresi took responsibility and put his kick over the bar. Marcio Santos and Daniele Massaro both had their efforts saved, which meant that when Baggio stepped up to take Italy’s fifth kick, he had to score. He, too, shot over and Brazil had their fourth World Cup.
In Brazil, the day after the final was declared a national holiday, but the players did not return to the adulation that had greeted previous World Cup–winning squads. When customs officials at the airport in Recife tried to get them to pay import tax on goods they’d bought in the United States, the result was a five-hour standoff that was ended only when the finance minister waved them through. A subsequent poll, though, showed that 70% of Brazilians thought they should have paid the duty; players were not the national heroes they had once been.
Excerpted from The Power And The Glory by Jonathan Wilson, copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Wilson. Used with permission of Bold Type Books, an imprint of Basic Books Group, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.