None of the local die-hard sports fans in my life back in 1994 expressed much interest in the World Cup.
I wasn’t even aware that such a tournament existed or that Chicago was among the hosts that year until an uncle from India gave me and my siblings a shoutout in a brief note written in English at the end of an Urdu-penned aerogram addressed to my mother.
The languid police chase with the white Ford Bronco carrying O.J. Simpson and Al Cowlings likely lured my attention away from the opening ceremony 32 years ago at Soldier Field, where Oprah Winfrey fell through the stage and Diana Ross missed a staged penalty kick as she sang “I’m Coming Out.”
But I also don’t remember the subsequent World Cup games played on the Bears’ home turf and at eight other stadiums across the country following the June 17, 1994, festivities and inaugural match between Germany and Bolivia.
I’m sure the soccer gods were calling all sorts of fouls on me and the majority of Americans who were oblivious or indifferent as a record 3.59 million filled the stands.
This time, I’m less clueless thanks to my soccer-loving friends and family, as well as the rising stature of the sport that has helped familiarize me with Mia Hamm, Megan Rapinoe, Mohamed Salah, Lionel Messi and other GOATs.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not glued to my cellphone and TV like two of my nephews who are watching the largest international men’s soccer competition whenever they can as it plays out in the United States, Canada and Mexico.
I’ve just come a long way from thinking my cousin was talking about the Material Girl when he was raving about the legendary Argentine midfielder Diego Maradona.
Fútbol before football
Soccer has been played in some form in the U.S. since the early 1800s — well before 1869, when a pigskin was kicked down a field in New Jersey in a game that has since evolved into American football.
But unlike the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, professional soccer has often been sidelined as secondary or a “foreign sport,” as the Sun-Times described it in an otherwise complimentary story on Chicago’s first and only live World Cup extravaganza.
A few years before that pivotal moment, soccer ranked 67th, behind tractor pulling, in a survey on the nation’s favorite spectator sports, broadcaster and author Roger Bennett has claimed.
Today, it’s a whole new ball game.
Soccer has moved past baseball and is now the third most popular sport in the U.S. behind football and basketball, per The Economist.
Another recent study released by Nielsen revealed the U.S. has the fourth-largest soccer fanbase in the world with 62.5 million supporters.
And because most of these enthusiasts skew young — 76% of U.S. soccer fans are millennials or Gen Z — I have hope the day will come when soccer is no longer “othered” by a crowd scared off by a sport that is embraced by throngs of immigrants and beloved beyond our borders.
We have a long way to go to reach that goal. Division and suspicion still reign off the field, demonstrating the limitations of sports as a unifying agent.
Discrimination from Trump administration
Many in the U.S. may no longer hate the game. Our current government just hates the players — depending on where they’re from.
Numerous World Cup participants, fans and journalists from several countries, including Haiti, Iran, Senegal and Ivory Coast, have faced tighter visa restrictions or were denied entry into the U.S. altogether due to the Trump administration’s stringent immigration policies and travel bans.
“It’s a form of segregation that doesn’t dare speak its name, but the proof is there,” Julien Kouadio Adonis, president of the Ivory Coast’s fan association group, the National Committee for the Support of the Elephants, told the BBC.
Maybe World Cup amnesia is a good thing.
I jest. I don’t want to let the actions of some “ugly Americans” turn me away from what Pelé coined “the beautiful game” — a game I was told my father religiously played as a child.
My father never mentioned participation in any athletic activity when he was alive. Nor did he talk much about soccer, except to chastise fellow Americans for not referring to it as “football,” as most of the global population does.
Zain and Elyan, my older sister’s sons, are now the ones schooling the rest of the family about proper soccer-related terminology, rules and etiquette.
My younger sister and I, who joined the brothers at the FIFA Museum in Zurich, Switzerland in 2023, always make it a point to buy them soccer jerseys from the countries we visit.
I’m forgetting if we ever told Zain and Elyan we once mistakenly grabbed a Ronaldinho Gaúcho shirt in Brazil to fulfill our brother’s — their uncle’s — request for a Cristiano Ronaldo jersey.
I need to first come clean that it took a relative living 8,000 miles away to tell me what was up in my own city three decades ago.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and leads the opinion coverage at the Sun-Times.