#30 Why did the United States fail to qualify for the World Cup for 40 years?
Soccer 101
TSS
4.9 • 853 Ratings
🗓️ 16 October 2020
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Soccer 101, Taylor takes a trip in the way-back-machine to attempt to figure out why the United States failed to qualify for the World Cup from 1950 until 1990. How much of the blame goes to Mexico for being consistently good for a very long time? Roughly 14%.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everybody and welcome to Soccer 101. |
| 0:13.1 | My name is Taylor Rockwell, and on this episode, we're going to take a look at the dark age of American soccer that would be from 1950 until 1990, a 40-year time period in which |
| 0:23.3 | the U.S. consistently failed to make it to the World Cup until on a fateful day in November |
| 0:28.3 | 1989 in Port of Spain, Trinidad, Paul Caliguri cracked a left-footed volley from 30 yards out |
| 0:33.9 | to give the United States to win and send them to the World Cup for the first time |
| 0:38.2 | since 1950. It was a hell of a strike. You should definitely go watch it. The victory set the |
| 0:43.6 | stage for seven straight appearances at soccer's biggest event prior to the disaster in KUVA in |
| 0:48.5 | 2017, but we don't need to get into that because I do not need an immediate migraine. Instead, |
| 0:58.7 | I want to take a look back at that gap in the timeline and explore seven reasons, |
| 1:02.6 | or my seven reasons, why the United States failed to make the World Cup. |
| 1:07.1 | To do so, let's go back to 1950 or the 1950 World Cup, more specifically. |
| 1:11.5 | By the standards of most tournaments, it was not an exceptional competition for the U.S. They finished bottom of their group with a negative four goal difference. They lost three to one to |
| 1:16.0 | Spain, five two to Chile. However, they finished bottom due to that goal difference. England and |
| 1:21.5 | Chile were both level on points, and the United States handed England a shock 1-0 defeat. |
| 1:26.6 | So not exactly winning the entire tournament, |
| 1:29.2 | but the stage seemed set for the U.S. to move on to bigger and better things. Or at least, |
| 1:34.2 | that's what I always assumed. I always assumed that it was like 1950, we did okay, then we |
| 1:38.3 | built from there and it should have been great and it wasn't. Reading a bit more about that tournament, |
| 1:42.6 | I think we have our first answer for where things went |
| 1:45.0 | wrong, which is simply that qualification got much more difficult. The 1950 World Cup was the first |
| 1:50.9 | one after the end of World War II. The competition was obviously suspended as the war was raging. |
| 1:56.0 | Once it calms down, we have our first competition in 1950. There are 16 teams involved, the host Brazil, |
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