Hello and welcome to We Came To Win, a collection of stories about the world cup, I'm Man

Nelson and I'm joined by Steve Saruti, hello Steve.

Matt, great to be here.

So in this series we're going to be rediscovering classic football episodes from the Gimlet

Media back catalogue and we'll also be introducing you to new shows from across the Spotify network.

For this, our first episode, we're going to hear a story about how soccer made it in

America, but it's really a story about how a rag tag bunch of scrappy kids with mullets

made it to the 1990 world cup, saving the US and by extension you, Steve, from humiliation.

Now Steve, I know you're a bit young to remember the truly dark days of US soccer, but when

you were a kid growing up did anyone take football seriously?

No, I mean, I grew up, you know, loving baseball, football, all the traditional sort of American

sports. And then right when I really started following the sport was in 2006 and it was a 2006

world cup when Italy won, but it does feel like throughout history there have been these moments

where you're like, oh, soccer is going to be a thing here. Like soccer is the next big thing.

It was the 94 world cup and it was David Beckham coming over to play for the galaxy and his

massive name and the contract that he got. So there have been a couple of 10 pole moments where

like soccer's here, guys. Yeah, it's been like the next big thing since 1986 or something. But

yeah, you know, the Premier League numbers on television here in the States are great.

Attendance in the MLS is fantastic here as well. It just feels like it's all been building

towards something massive. And then you know, you know, we have the US missing the world cup in 2018

and it feels like it robbed us of all of that momentum. It does look and feel like we might have

turned the corner again and that might have kind of been a sneaky great thing that happened because

...