The Brief

The 1994 World Cup kicked off with a sold-out match. On a scorching afternoon in Chicago, some 63,000 spectators — including then-President Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey — were packed like sardines at Soldier Field to watch Germany vs. Bolivia. Their cheers and boos, as loud as thunder.

Today, it's easy to imagine a World Cup game drawing such American fanfare. But back then, it was a much different story.

"It was a big question as to how the U.S. would embrace it. Would people come to the games?" Mike Sorber, who played for the U.S. Men's National Team in 1994, told NPR.

Ahead of the 1994 World Cup, most Americans were unaware that the U.S. would be hosting the tournament. A survey from the time ranked soccer 67th among the nation's favorite sports (behind tractor pulling).

Despite this, the 1994 World Cup — the first held in the U.S. — took a surprising turn. Game after game, stadiums were filled to capacity, packed not only with tourists and die-hard fans but also with soccer novices who came out of curiosity and because tickets were relatively affordable, according to soccer historians.

Mike Sorber plays during an exhibition game at the Rose Bowl in 1994.

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" I think all the naysayers were surprised," said Sorber, who is currently an assistant coach for Major League Soccer's New York Red Bulls. "The atmosphere was electric. It was like a big party."

Soccer's momentum in the U.S. has only been growing since then, fueled by the launch of Major League Soccer and the success of the U.S. Women's National Team. When the World Cup returns to the U.S. in June, it will be greeted by a larger and more passionate fanbase than ever before.

How exactly did a sport that struggled to gain traction for decades go on to break the World Cup's record for largest attendance and win over Americans' hearts? To answer that, NPR spoke to Sorber, along with soccer journalists and fans, about the breakthrough World Cup.

Why did it take so long for the U.S. to embrace soccer?

How far back the soccer tradition in the U.S. goes depends on whom you ask and where they're from.

Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis and pockets of New York, New Jersey and New England all have deep soccer roots — often brought by European immigrants in the 19th century, according to Brian D. Bunk, who teaches the history of sports at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

As a result, the sport was largely associated with working-class and immigrant communities, Bunk added. Some also dismissed soccer over the perception that it lacked the physicality of sports like American football.

Colombian soccer fans wave their country's flag during the "Chicago Welcomes the World Cup" parade on June 15, 1994.

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"The argument that was often made against soccer is that it was an inferior form of football," Bunk said.

There were brief bursts of excitement for the sport in the late 20th century — such as when legendary Brazilian player Pelé came to play in the U.S. in the late 1970s — but they never lasted long.

By the 1980s, the future of soccer in the U.S. looked bleak. The North American Soccer League, which began in 1968, folded after the 1984 season. American soccer officials hoped a World Cup tournament at home could resuscitate interest.

" Let's face it: You need to have the product in front of you to see what the heck this is all about," said Michael Lewis, who has covered soccer for five decades. He's the editor of Front Row Soccer, a website that follows the soccer scene in New York and New Jersey.

FIFA also saw an opportunity. Soccer's global governing body viewed the U.S. "as the last and largest uncracked market for its sport," Pete Davies, who has written extensively about sports, told NPR's Fresh Air in 1994.

"And it want[ed] to get into that market," he added.

What led to the tournament's success in 1994? 

What the U.S. lacked in soccer prowess, it made up for with its ability to put on a massive sporting event (thanks to the nation's football stadiums and experience hosting the Olympics) — and a fun one at that.

" We have the sporting infrastructure — the stadiums — we have the hotels, the restaurants, the transportation systems," said Bunk, of the University of Massachusetts. "And so all of that stuff meant that the World Cup could go very smoothly."

Americans also proved they were up for a good time — and World Cup fans knew how to bring the party. Drums, whistles, trumpets, singing, dancing and face paint were the hallmarks of a World Cup game.

A Mexican fan, his face painted with Mexico's national colors, cheers in the stands at the Citrus Bowl stadium in Orlando, Fla., on June 24, 1994, prior to the start of the World Cup match between Mexico and Ireland.

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A soccer fan supporting Argentina plays a drum at the World Cup match between Argentina and Nigeria at Foxboro Stadium in Massachusetts in June 1994.

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That's what Kevin Tallec Marston, a research fellow at the International Centre for Sports Studies in Switzerland, remembers most vividly from the Belgium vs. Saudi Arabia match in Washington, D.C., which he attended as a teenager.

"It was not the kind of fandom that Americans would associate with going to an NBA game, going to an NFL game," he said. "Seeing these people from all around the world with their own cultures, their own chants, their own songs, their own instruments."

Univision played a major role in attracting both Spanish- and non-Spanish-speaking viewers alike, especially through World Cup announcer Andrés Cantor and his iconic "Goooooooooool!"

"It created this sort of mythical element of what it was to watch the World Cup," said Tallec Marston, who, along with Front Row Soccer's Lewis, is a board member of the Society for American Soccer History.

But perhaps what electrified Americans most was the strong performance of the U.S. Men's National Team. It started with a hard-fought 1-1 tie with Switzerland, followed by a stunning 2-1 upset over powerhouse Colombia. (The victory was later marred by tragedy: Colombian defender Andrés Escobar, who had accidentally knocked the ball into his own team's net, was shot and killed shortly after returning home.)

That match was the first World Cup win for the U.S. men's team since 1950. The team's victory was witnessed by more than 93,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

Sorber, a midfielder in the starting lineup, said he had played for large crowds before, but never for an audience so enthralled by the U.S. team. It was "euphoria," he said.

" All of a sudden, it really opened the eyes to the whole United States … that wow, this is what the future of soccer could be."

Steve Davis covered the 1994 games as a young sports reporter for The Dallas Morning News. "It sort of lit a fire under people," he said. "I would think some Americans became soccer fans that day."

The U.S. team went on to lose to Romania 1-0 and then to Brazil 1-0. Although the U.S. didn't win, Sorber said, the support and energy from American fans during those matches felt like a victory.

" You had a huge turnout," he said. "So again, that was a big moment in U.S. soccer history … to reestablish soccer, to build that foundation and get more awareness for the U.S. national team."

Post-1994

In total, over 3.5 million people attended the 1994 World Cup — the largest attendance in FIFA history to this day. Despite its success, soccer's American fanbase didn't grow overnight.

"Soccer's growth isn't linear," writer Davis said.

Two years later, the professional Major League Soccer (MLS) launched. Around that time, FIFA's World Cup video game franchise helped introduce soccer to an even broader audience. All the while, the U.S. Women's National Team emerged as a dominating force and accelerated the rise of women's soccer globally. Across the U.S., youth soccer exploded in popularity.

Brandi Chastain celebrates after kicking the winning penalty kick at the 1999 women's World Cup final against China on July 10, 1999.

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The arrival of international superstars to MLS, like David Beckham in 2007 and Lionel Messi in 2023, added fire to the nation's passion for the sport. MLS, which began with 10 teams, has since expanded to 30 clubs.

Together, these moments helped transform the soccer landscape in the United States. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar drew an average of 4.7 million American viewers per game, according to Nielsen. Each year, millions of Americans watch England's Premier League matches on TV and streaming platforms.

When it comes to America's favorite sports, soccer now ranks third, surpassing baseball, according to Ampere Analysis, a data firm focused on entertainment industries.

Davis, who is now the director of legacy programs for the North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee, said it's validating to see the sport he has loved and played since childhood resonate with more people at home.

"I did have some faith that it was going to grow," he said. "But I would be lying if I said I thought we'd be here in 2026, seeing how big it's become."

The challenges ahead 

Although this isn't the first time that the U.S. has hosted the World Cup, the upcoming tournament is expected to be vastly different.

"One of the key aspects of the '94 World Cup was taking football to the new horizon," said Tallec Marston, who co-wrote Inventing the Boston Game. "So it'll be interesting because we are no longer in a new frontier."

Hosted by the U.S., Canada and Mexico, this year's competition will introduce more teams and matches than ever before. It will also return to a far more diverse United States. In 1994, about 8% of the country's population was foreign-born. As of 2025, immigrants make up 15% of the nation.

Two men walk past a mural of a soccer player in Guadalajara, Mexico, on April 29. Mexico will co-host the biggest World Cup in history, along with the United States and Canada, from June 11 to July 19.

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"You're going to have a representation of countries and nations that we will have never seen before. And so that will be very exciting to see," Tallec Marston said.

The current U.S. Men's National Team has far more experience on the World Cup stage compared with the 1994 team. Since then, the team has qualified for every World Cup except one, in 2018. There's much excitement for this group of young players, many of whom are playing for top European clubs.

The controversies leading up to the games are also quite different. In 1994, the uncertainty was whether many Americans would attend the matches. This year, the question is whether they will be able to afford to — with dynamic pricing driving ticket costs sky-high.

The tournament will also take place during a politically volatile period in the United States. The ongoing war with Iran has led to questions about whether the Iranian team will participate.

The Trump administration's travel restrictions and harsh immigration crackdown have also sparked debate as to how many tourists will feel comfortable traveling to the United States. The administration is also requiring a bond of up to $15,000 for travelers from 50 countries that it deemed as having immigration risk factors, such as high overstay rates and screening and vetting deficiencies. Five nations that qualified for the World Cup — Algeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Tunisia and Cape Verde — are on the list.

For all these reasons, Lewis, who wrote Around the World Cup in 40 Years, about his experience covering eight men's World Cups, expects that "there'll be magic, but there'll be headaches too."

" I think the games themselves should be exciting and fun," he said. However, putting the problems to rest, Lewis added, will be "easier said than done."
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Hearings being held this week could decide whether California continues to have a say over what happens in federal waters off the state’s coast.

It’s part of the Trump administration’s efforts to supercharge industrial activities, including offshore drilling, rocket launches and desalination plants along California’s coast. At a hearing Monday at a Santa Monica hotel and at a news conference beforehand, speaker after speaker decried any effort that would allow the federal government to revoke California's ability to manage its coast.

A federal law called the Coastal Zone Management Act gives states with coastlines the right to review and veto projects that may conflict with state policies and economies. The law was signed by President Richard Nixon after a devastating oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara and is credited with launching the modern environmental movement.

More than 50 years later, the federal government has called for a detailed review of California's compliance with the 1972 law.

In a May social media post, the Trump administration said California is standing in the way of economic progress and called the state’s coastal management practices “obstructionist” and “environmental extremism.”

California officials, including state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, dispute that, saying the state approves federal initiatives 96% of the time.

“ Never before in the five-decade history of this federal act has this sudden baseless review taken place on any state's coastal management program, and never before in the history of this act has a coastal management program ever been revoked,” Crowfoot said at a news conference in Santa Monica on Monday.  ”This federal administration is bent on industrializing our coast.”

The hearings, which are being administered by NOAA, could result in the federal government decertifying California’s rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act. A decision to do so would almost certainly be challenged in court, experts say.

That possibility has prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to call on Californians to submit public comments on the issue.

“Give the Trump administration an earful,” Newsom said in a statement.

The hearings this week are solely for public comment. The review “seeks any new input from relevant stakeholders regarding spaceport infrastructure, offshore oil production, pipeline maintenance, desalination projects, and undersea cables,” according to a notice in the federal register. 

Such reviews have happened before — in 2024 a draft review by NOAA found the state’s coastal agencies had properly carried out the CZMA. The review, however, was not finalized due to the change in administration.

The latest review comes after the Trump administration gutted NOAA staff and funding. It has also aggressively worked to expand drilling off the California coast, while at the same time using taxpayer dollars to pay offshore wind companies to abandon their energy projects — something L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath highlighted at the Monday news conference.

“ L.A. County will soon achieve 100% renewable and reliable electricity. This is the change that we want to see,” she said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration is recklessly starting foreign wars and skyrocketing the price at the pump.”

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath also spoke Monday at the news conference ahead of the NOAA hearing in Santa Monica.

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Tina Calderon, Gabrielino Tongva and Chumash culture bearer, speaks at Monday's news conference.

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Horvath is part of a coalition of local, state, tribal, environmental, legal and business leaders who are calling the review a “takeover” of state and local rights.

Orange County resident Grant Bixby, who founded the Business Alliance for Protecting the Pacific Coast, pointed out at the news conference that offshore drilling makes up a tiny fraction of the state’s coastal economy, which generates between $44 billion and $50 billion a year, according to NOAA.

"Should we put 99% of the other employment at risk for the benefit of one dirty industry?” Bixby said.

Bixby recalled how the 2021 Huntington Beach oil spill turned the beaches into a “ghost town.”

The NOAA hearing was held in a ballroom at the Santa Monica Hilton.

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Among the speakers at the news conference and hearing, a clear theme emerged: The coast is an integral part of being a Californian, whether you’re lucky enough to live beachside or you live inland and have a favorite spot to call your own on hot summer days.

“The point is that we all love our beautiful saltwaters,” said Tina Calderon, Gabrielino Tongva and Chumash culture bearer, at the news conference. “These are sacred waters, and it's up to us to be the voice. It's up to us to cause no more human harm. We've done enough.”

Jackie, the bald eagle whose livestreamed life with her partner Shadow won the hearts of fans worldwide, has died, rescuers announced Monday.

The famous raptor, believed to be 14 years old, was receiving intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center for severe anemia. She ultimately succumbed to her condition after a team of veterinarians struggled for weeks to figure out what was causing it.

Jackie remained critically ill despite receiving oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock monitoring. 

"We know this news will be deeply felt by the many thousands of people around the world who have followed her journey, hoped alongside us, prayed for her, and supported the people caring for her,” the Ojai Raptor Center said in an Instagram post. “Our team is heartbroken. It has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her."

Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that launched the popular nest livestream in 2015, confirmed the news on social media.

“It is with great sadness and heavy hearts, to bring you the latest update from Ojai Raptor Center,” the nonprofit said to its roughly 1.3 million Facebook followers. “Please be kind to yourself, to others, to the FOBBV team and to those at the Ojai Raptor Center. Soar free Jackie…”

What happened to her?

The rescue center said on social media Sunday that she was “critically ill,” “unstable” and still in an "extremely serious” condition.

She was getting oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock care from vets and specialists across the country. But her red blood cell levels continued to drop well below normal after rebounding a bit after she was rescued.

Jackie was rescued in July by Big Bear’s Dana Point Park after a brief fight with two other eagles. Jackie was weak, vulnerable, underweight and unable to fly, according to the Ojai Raptor Center.

The center said the fight is likely what left her grounded, but her condition suggests she had been sick for some time.

How Jackie’s Big Bear saga started

Jackie was the matriarch of the famous Big Bear bald eagle nest since around 2017. She’s believed to be the first bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley in recent history, according to the nonprofit.

The pair believed to be her parents, Ricky and Lucy, left the area around 2016. The young Jackie then started hanging out in their old nest, where the livestream camera had been installed.

Jackie took on her first mate, a bald eagle known as Mr. B, and laid her first clutch of eggs in the nest the following season. Shadow came into the picture in the summer of 2018, refusing to leave until Mr. B eventually flew away from the area, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Jackie and Shadow were mates ever since. They successfully raised six chicks together — Sandy and Luna this season, Sunny and Gizmo last year, Spirit in 2022 and Simba in 2019.

Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.

A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts and instead moving toward proportional representation, a system that elects multiple representatives in a single district in rough proportion to a party's vote share.

Earlier this summer, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging members to consider proportional representation as a solution to the redistricting brinksmanship set off by President Donald Trump last year.

"There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes," they wrote. "We urge Congress to adopt a proportional system of representation, solving the gerrymandering problem at its source."

According to the poll conducted by the advocacy group Fix Our House and liberal think tank New America, half of 1,000 respondents said they support proportional representation, with nearly a quarter opposed. A third of those who participated said they were not sure whether they supported it or not.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, said he was surprised to see how much backing there is for proportional representation, despite the idea being fairly obscure in the United States.

"It really did shock me how supportive people were of the various principles of proportional representation across the board," he told NPR.

While support was highest among younger, more educated, more left-leaning voters, Drutman found that 6 in 10 Trump voters who have an opinion on proportional representation said they back it, too.

American voters want more political parties

Pollsters also walked respondents through some of the tradeoffs of proportional representation — including that it can lead to multiple parties having to find a way to work together.

"For every one of those questions, people prefer the proportional system with multiple parties," Drutman said, "even if it leads to a coalition government that is maybe not quite as efficient."

He said voters also weren't very concerned when asked about the possibility of proportional representation leading to some more extreme political parties.

"One thing people said is they already think the parties are pretty extreme right now," Drutman explained. "So that's not quite the fear that some in the political class think it would be."

Jocelyn Kiley, director of political research at the Pew Research Center, said voters writ large have been in a "prolonged period of disaffection with politics and the political system."

She said Pew has found there is a lot of openness to reform, with nearly 70% of respondents to its polls saying they wish, at least somewhat, there were more political parties to choose from.

Kiley said detailed knowledge of what any election reform would look like is rare among voters. And she said that when many reforms "move from theory to practice," they often hit some resistance.

"People want to understand exactly how that reform will impact them," she said.

Room for a national conversation

Drutman told NPR the new poll numbers mark a starting point for what could be a national conversation about how to break out of the country's two-party system.

"People are dissatisfied," he said. "People are frustrated. People don't have a language for how to talk about alternatives because they haven't really heard all that much about the alternatives, because we haven't had a national conversation about the alternatives yet. So, there's a lot of room to have that conversation."

Drutman said only about a quarter of the respondents were aware that there are alternatives to a two-party system, and even fewer people could name an alternative when pressed.

In fact, only about 2% of the participants in the poll could name proportional representation off the top of their heads, said Dustin Wahl, executive director of Fix Our House,

"But when asked about the kind of underlying values beneath it and the component parts, there was widespread support from all across the political spectrum," Wahl said. "And that's not something we would have expected to see necessarily four years ago, for instance. But as the problems grow, the desire for solutions grows, as well."

Proportional representation is currently the most widely used electoral system among the world's democracies. Wahl points out that the U.S., along with the likes of Canada and Australia, has a system that was abandoned long ago by other countries.

"Arguably the only reason we don't use proportional representation is because it wasn't used anywhere in the world at the time of [America's] founding," he said. "And we just kept doing elections the same way."

The poll also found a majority support (54%) for expanding the House, with 150 new members.

There are bills in Congress, with all Democratic co-sponsors, that would study or move the U.S. to a system of proportional representation, but Wahl said any bill that doesn't include expanding the House is "politically dead in the water" because without expansion, lawmakers have to choose to potentially vote themselves out of office.

"That [150-seat expansion] gives you enough of a cushion so that members, incumbents know that they're very likely to hold on to their seats," he said. "It wouldn't run into the problem, at all, of candidates or of sitting members of Congress thinking that they're going to lose their seats because their elections would be totally untouched."
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