LA Times · Jul 29, 2025
Americans need to focus on making World Cup 2026 a growth experience
Landon Donovan, who retired from soccer as the leading scorer in U.S. national team history, became aware of the game’s global impact while watching the 1994 World Cup.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.”