Tips from the only other U.S. men’s team to play a World Cup at home

More men have been elected president of the United States than have played for the U.S. in a World Cup game on home soil.

It is among the rarest of achievements in a country that has achieved so much.

Two dozen Americans have flown to the moon, 116 have sat on the Supreme Court, 25 have run a mile in under 3:51 and 76 have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

But just 22 men have suited up for the U.S. for a World Cup game at home — and only 15 made it on the field. More men have been engaged to “Real Housewives” star Danielle Staub.

That number will more than double this month when the World Cup is played in the U.S. for just the second time, with rosters that have been slightly expanded to 26 players. And the Boys of Summer from 1994 have a message for the men who will follow in their cleat marks: Your life and your sport are about to change forever.

“I hope,” said Alexi Lalas, a defender on the 1994 team, “they have some sense of what is coming.”

For Lalas, and for soccer in the U.S., the 1994 World Cup is the line that divides then and now, the before and the after.

The country didn’t have a first-division soccer league in 1994, European games weren’t widely available on TV, and even U.S. World Cup qualifiers weren’t broadcast live. For most Americans the sport wasn’t an afterthought; it wasn’t thought of at all.

Then came the World Cup, and for a month, a curious if somewhat bemused country sampled the world’s game up close. The tournament set records for attendance and revenue and soon gave birth to Major League Soccer.

“Nineteen ninety-four is really, for me, the rebirth of soccer this country,” midfielder Tab Ramos said. “That’s really what began putting it on the map. And all of the things that happened today go back to 1994.

“I continue to have people who have kids now who come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I got started because I saw you guys play in 1994.’ That happens all the time.”

But it had an even bigger impact on the 22 men who made up the U.S. team in that World Cup.

“There’s nothing better than a World Cup except one thing: a home World Cup,” said Lalas, whose unruly, shoulder-length hair and matching red Vandyke made him the most recognizable player on the ‘94 team. “There is a special kind of magic. And if you are able to harness it, you can do things that maybe people say can’t be done and haven’t been done before.”

In Lalas’ case, he was able to parlay four World Cup starts into a nine-year playing career, stints as president or general manager for three MLS clubs, and two decades as a soccer analyst for ESPN and Fox Sports.

“The summer of ‘94, it changed my life forever,” said Lalas, 56. “I owe it all to the ’94 World Cup.”

He is far from the only member of the team that can make that claim. Cobi Jones studied environmental law at UCLA, where he walked on to the soccer team, and says he probably would have become a lawyer if not for the 1994 World Cup. And while law is a fine profession, there are no statues of lawyers in front of Dignity Health Sports Park, but there is one of Jones, the all-time leader in appearances for both the Galaxy and the men’s national team.

“I look as it as magical, to be quite honest,” said Jones, 55, who made his World Cup debut off the bench in the U.S. opener in the Pontiac Silverdome, not far from the Detroit neighborhood where he was born. “It was absolutely incredible.”

It was also absolute pressure. Not only was part of the world coming over for a monthlong play date, but also the rest of the planet was watching on TV, with FIFA reporting that the tournament drew a cumulative global television audience of 32.1 billion viewers in 188 countries, making it the most-watched soccer event in history.

“We did not want to be the first host nation not to go through to the next round,” said Jones, who will part of the Fox Sports broadcast team this summer. “That was a huge goal for us.”

“We knew we were going to surprise a lot of people,” defender Marcelo Balboa added, “if we got out of the group.”

It was a different time for soccer in the U.S. While the majority of players on this summer’s team play for major teams in Europe, only eight players on the 1994 squad had a club affiliation. Two came straight out of college.

“We weren’t really even professional players,” said Ramos, 59, who went on to have a Hall of Fame career as a player and coach.

Before 1994, many high school football games drew bigger crowds than a national team soccer game — and sometimes they were held in the same stadiums, with the U.S. playing multiple times at El Camino College, Cal State Fullerton and Trabuco Hills High.

“When you’re saying we played in front of 3,000 and 4,000 people, that’s actually a lot,” Ramos said. “We played in front of less than that.”

In the World Cup, where Ramos started all four U.S. matches, the team averaged 86,283 fans a game.

“You do notice the difference,” he said.

There were other differences as well, said Paul Caligiuri, who famously delivered the goal that qualified the U.S. for the 1990 World Cup, the country’s first since 1950. Caligiuri was one of six men who played in both the 1990 tournament in Italy and the 1994 one in the U.S. And for the American players, there was no comparison between the two, he said.

“You could almost cry and get chills,” said Caligiuri, another Bruin playing at the Rose Bowl, who saw fans both wearing and waving American flags in 1994, when all the stadium announcements were in English.

“It was truly an American sport for that 30 days. When the U.S. team played, we had the country behind [us]. It was the first time that ever happened.”

It didn’t start that way, though. Balboa remembers a documentary made before the tournament in which a journalist traveled around New York and asked people to identify members of the World Cup team. No one could.

But when the team showed up in Detroit ahead of its World Cup opener, the players were mobbed at the airport.

“It was ridiculous,” said Balboa, 58. “As the tournament went on, you certainly realize that you were on center stage. You were the main story for a month where you have never been before. And you might not be afterward.”

None of that would have happened if the U.S. had stumbled across that big stage, though. Americans naturally are drawn to major events and probably would come out in droves to watch tiddlywinks or tetherball if you could convince them it was the most important tournament in the sport.

And the World Cup is certainly that for soccer.

But Americans don’t want to see the home team embarrassed. If the 1994 team was going to sell soccer to a wary public, it had to show it could play with the best.

“The motivator was building this game forever, cementing it in American sports,” said Caligiuri, 62.

So when the U.S. drew with Switzerland, beat Colombia and came up just 18 minutes short of taking eventual champion Brazil to extra time, it gave the team — and the sport — some legitimacy.

“It was a flagpole type of moment,” Lalas said. “We saw what we can be and a sense of not just success but, I think, credibility crept into American soccer.”

Before 1994, the U.S. had qualified for the World Cup once in four decades; it has missed the tournament just once in the 32 years since. Before 1994, it was rare to see an American playing for a major club in Europe; this summer more than two-thirds of the players on the U.S. team have that on their résumé. Before 1994, European teams rarely visited the U.S.; now the biggest clubs in the world make annual barnstorming tours across the country, regularly drawing crowds of more than 70,000.

“People looked and said ‘hey, this is, in a business sense, an emerging market. Look at this potential,’” Lalas said. “A lot of the world, and our own country, kind of extrapolated that out of 1994 and saw the potential of the what the U.S. market could be.

“It’s actually unprecedented when you look at how far as a nation, as a culture, we have come when it comes to soccer.”

Indeed, two years after the World Cup, MLS played its first game. And after some tough early sledding, it has grown into one of the top 10 leagues in the world, with five teams valued by Forbes at more than $1 billion. Youth participation has soared, soccer passing baseball to become the second-most-popular sport among teenagers, while a poll released by the Economist in January showed soccer to be America’s third-most-popular spectator sport, trailing only football and basketball.

In many ways that’s the foundation the 1994 team — and Alan Rothenberg, the former president of U.S. Soccer and the mastermind behind that World Cup — created for the 23 players who will wear the U.S. crest at home this summer. So if soccer’s original Boys of Summer had a chance to talk to the members of this team, their advice would be make sure to stop and smell the roses — but make sure you take advantage of the opportunity as well.

“I guess what I would say to them is enjoy the moment because this moment won’t come again. This is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity that not a lot of players get,” said Balboa, who played in three World Cups and made 127 appearances for the U.S., sixth-most.

He never, however, repeated the magic of 1994.

“If they do something special, which we think they can, it could turn this country on its feet,” he said. “Or on its head.”

“They may go on to play in other World Cups but they will never play in another home World Cup,” Lalas added. “There is something special and magical. Is there additional pressure? Yeah. But that’s a good thing. I hope they relish this opportunity.

“They may go on to be incredibly successful and famous and make a ton of money and do things my generation could only dream of. But they will never forget the home World Cup if they recognize the opportunity and grab ahold of it with both hands.”