Landon Donovan can’t be sure he would have played international soccer had the World Cup not come to Pasadena in 1994, but he can say with certainty he wasn’t aware what international soccer was until then.
“I went to one game,” said Donovan, who was a 12-year-old prodigy the first time the World Cup was played in the U.S. “And I knew nothing — and I mean nothing — about soccer on the global scale. It opened my eyes because there was no soccer on TV, no internet. I didn’t know anything about it.”
Eight years after watching Romania eliminate Argentina at the Rose Bowl, Donovan was scoring the U.S. team’s final goal in the 2002 World Cup, helping the Americans reach the quarterfinals for the only time in the modern era.
The tournament will be back in the U.S. in less than 11 months, with the U.S. playing two of its three group games at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. And Donovan is certain some of the people watching will be kids who, like him, will be inspired by their first up-close look at the global game.
“There’s millions of kids who maybe played a little bit, or thought about playing, or play a lot and go to a World Cup game. It changes their life forever,” he said.
“Millions” might be a bit of a stretch, but the sentiment is well-taken. And it’s not just one Donovan experienced himself, but a transformation he saw take place at the 2015 Women’s World Cup final in Vancouver as well.
“I was watching these little girls in front of me just completely fall in love with the game right in front of my eyes,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why I’m critical or passionate about our team. It’s because I understand what the opportunity is.”
The criticism and passion Donovan is referencing are comments he made last month on the Unfiltered Soccer podcast he does with former USMNT teammate Tim Howard. In discussing the decision of players such as Christian Pulisic and Yunus Musah to pass up this summer’s CONCACAF Gold Cup, the last major tournament before next year’s World Cup, Donovan said their choice to take a “vacation” angered him.
The comments seemed hypocritical since Donovan took his own well-chronicled sabbatical from the game in 2013, missing some World Cup qualifiers. And in his case the break helped, with Donovan returning to the national team that summer to get a career-high 24 points (on eight goals and eight assists) in 10 games, only one of which the U.S. lost.
Pulisic said he needed both a mental and physical break after playing a career-high 3,650 minutes in all competitions for AC Milan last season and appearing in 118 games for club and country in the last 22 months. Donovan believes in and supports that idea, he clarified in a phone interview last week.
It was the timing he didn’t like.
“That’s his decision and only he gets to make that decision,” Donovan said. “So my criticism was never with him or anyone taking a break. It was choosing when to take the break and from which team they were taking the break.”
“It was at the expense of the national team growing this summer,” he added.
When Donovan took his respite he missed five games with the national team as well as training camp and five games with the Galaxy, which cost him the armband as captain and, he says, $1 million in salary. Pulisic, he argued, could have done the same, splitting his break between his club and the national team.
“So it was never about taking a break. The break is justified,” Donovan said. “It’s about prioritizing the national team.”
The idea of AC Milan giving Pulisic time off is a nonstarter, however. The American is the fifth-best-paid player at the club, earning a reported $5.8 million a season, and he was the team leader in goals and assists last season. With Milan chasing a European tournament berth down the stretch, there was no time for rest so Pulisic started 12 games in the final 7½ weeks. He was on fumes when the final whistle sounded.
So Donovan’s comments seemed influenced more by wisdom and jealously than reality.
Wisdom because, at 43, he knows that playing for the national team is an honor that doesn’t last forever and when it’s over you regret the games you missed more than you celebrate the ones you played. And jealousy because for all that Donovan accomplished — he retired as the national team’s all-time leader in goals, assists and starts and the MLS record-holder in goals, assists and championships — he never played a World Cup game at home. Pulisic, who turns 27 next month, will get that chance.
“That would have been incredible to play a World Cup in your prime in your home country. And knowing two of the games are in L.A., that is literally a dream come true,” he said.
“There is a massive opportunity to build this thing and get this country behind our team. I just don’t want this opportunity to get wasted.”
The last World Cup in the U.S. ended with the country forming a top-tier professional league in MLS, soccer becoming a top-five sport in the U.S., and the U.S. Soccer Foundation getting the funding needed to help grow soccer at the grassroots level. It also inspired a youthful Landon Donovan to become the greatest player in the country’s history.
As a result, the tournament will return to a country with a soccer culture far advanced from 1994.
“There’s a massive, massive wealth of talent here,” said Donovan, who speaks from experience after spending part of last week at a “dream team” tryout organized by Spanish club Real Madrid and Abbott, a global leader in the healthcare industry. “Some of those kids out there — 17, 18 years old — technically are better than guys I played with.”
The top 11 players from five tryout camps will go to Spain to train at Real Madrid’s complex. The fact that the richest club in the world came to the U.S. to scout players, Donovan said, is more evidence of soccer’s growth in this country, which he believes makes next summer even more important.
“We’re at a point where we’re doing a lot of things well,” Donovan said. “The one area where we are still struggling is in our development. It was eye-opening to watch some of these kids because I think we’re missing out still on a lot of these players.”
Next summer’s World Cup can close that gap, provided we don’t waste the opportunity.
⚽ You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
