America’s soccer dad has some advice for the White House

When the United States last hosted the men’s soccer World Cup, Bill Clinton was president, the country did not have a professional league and its national team had competed in the tournament only twice in the previous half-century. Just five years earlier, the sport’s governing body FIFA had snubbed an American bid to be the emergency host for the 1986 tournament.

The man at the center of the nation’s soccer breakthrough was Alan Rothenberg, an attorney at the politically well-connected Los Angeles law firm Manatt who helped organize the 1984 Olympics there. As president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, he served as chair and CEO of the 1994 World Cup and led the organization through a match four years later against Iran — a geopolitically contentious face-off that Rothenberg has called “the mother of all games.” (He was also a founder of Major League Soccer and chair of the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup.) He has since advised FIFA through multiple tournaments including the 2002 World Cup hosted by Korea and Japan, the first to be played across national borders.

Now, as the U.S. gears up to host the World Cup again, this time with matches being played in 16 cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada, Rothenberg is watching from the sidelines. The 86-year-old has written a memoir of his soccer career, entitled The Big Bounce: The Surge that Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer, to be published next year. But for now he has some advice for Andrew Giuliani, whom President Donald Trump has appointed to run the FIFA World Cup 2026 Task Force. A novel organizing structure, Rothenberg warns, could leave cities and states empty-handed.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The United States is preparing for both the World Cup next year and the Olympics two years later. You’ve been involved in staging both. What are the differences?

In the World Cup, there's always been huge numbers of fans coming from countries other than the host country. This is just going to be, frankly, a question about allocation of tickets, because the U.S. market could easily buy 100 to 200 percent of whatever the capacity is. But obviously that's not what FIFA or the host cities want. Obviously they want international fans.

In 1984, 70 percent of the people that attended events in Los Angeles were from Southern California. You are talking about 50 years ago, and globalization and intercontinental travel was definitely not the same as it is now.

Are you concerned about the effect Trump's travel ban will have? 

I'm not a doomsayer. I think that some of the fears that have been expressed are probably overblown. We're still a year away, and it's hard for me to believe that the current atmosphere will still be in place a year from now. We all know how avid and passionate soccer fans are, and I don't think the typical rabid soccer fan is going to be held back. They went to Russia, they went to Qatar, they went to Brazil. Distance, governments that might have been hostile — nothing seemed to hold them back.

You don't have to worry about countries with visa waivers. There's only a handful of countries that provide a lot of soccer fans to the World Cup that are not on visa waiver, the leading one being Colombia. The number of fans that come from the Middle East — and I'm not including North Africa — is pretty small. The Emirates and the Saudis have sufficient wealth and are sufficiently in good favor with the administration. I don't think that they're going to just arbitrarily be taking people with legitimate visas and passports and sending them home.

What were the major challenges you faced at this stage in the preparations for the 1994 tournament?

At the beginning, people didn't know anything about it. So what we decided initially was: Americans love big events, so we’ve got to make this look like a big event. We wanted people who aren't necessarily soccer fans to feel they have to be participating.

You were working under a very different structure than the one which exists now. 

In 1994, I was president of the U.S. Soccer Federation and chairman and CEO of the organizing committee. We had nine venues, but each one of them reported up to headquarters, to me. Fundraising was centralized. The organizing committee incurred costs on a local basis. We had a pretty broad scope of revenue opportunities so that could offset whatever the expenses were.

FIFA now basically has 11 different entities in the United States, each with their own different regulations, customs. They basically have given the host cities limited revenue opportunities by way of sponsorships. FIFA has taken the more attractive categories, and kept it for themselves, and then said to the cities, “You have to sell local packages only. but you can't offer a national sponsorship,” so the revenue opportunities are pretty limited. They want everybody to put on a fan festival, which is great, but they’re saying you can't commercialize it. So that's where the issue is for the host cities, a lot of risk and limited reward. Back then, we had a lot of risk but also unlimited reward.

How much did you interact with the White House? Was Bill Clinton personally involved?

He just blessed it — made an appearance when we were awarded the bid and he was great, but hands-off. I had the edge because two very important people in his administration were former law partners of mine. So it was easy to pick up a phone and make a call if we needed anything, but they were very accommodating. Clinton became a fan, went to a couple of matches, but he did not do what Trump just did in appointing a special task force.

What’s your advice for the task force’s head Andrew Giuliani?

The key one is the question of financial help for host cities. I've seen host city budgets that go from $50 million to $150 million, and so that's what has to be offset by the host committees. Some of them are structured differently, and some of them have a better chance of getting sponsorships than others. And there's hospitality and ticketing possibilities for them, but it's a lot of hard work.

My request to Giuliani is to open up the purse strings. Grant requests that exist. The $500 million in federal security is a good start.

You were advising FIFA in 2002 when Japan and South Korea co-hosted the World Cup. What sort of political alignment does it require to stage a sporting event like that across national borders?

Japan, Korea was the best kind of icebreaker for having multiple hosts, because those two countries had a long-standing and pretty current history of not being the best of friends. So it took a lot of great cooperation, but each of them were reaching out because they wanted to be successful.

In the case of 2026, you've got three adjacent countries, all of whom — notwithstanding some of the current issues, have longstanding close relationships. They've had joint tournaments back and forth cross-border, and so that's really not an issue at all.

In light of current tensions, I wanted to ask about the U.S.-Iran match that was played in Lyon, France, during the 1998 cup. Then, as now, the countries had no formal relations. What diplomacy was happening off the field? 

Any formal discussions if they took place, and I'm sure they did, would have been the French government to the Iranian government and/or equally likely FIFA brokering between the two. In my capacity as president of U.S. Soccer, we had no role.

What was the match itself like?

I was there as a spectator, and it turned out to be much more docile than I think people feared. And the interesting part is the protesters were more pro-U.S. and against Iran than there were Iranians against the United States. Once you got into the match, it was just another exciting match with the overlay of more intense rivalry. It was a different opponent, but it wasn't any more intense than when the U.S. plays Mexico.