Long before Men in Blazers, Roger Bennett was just a kid growing up in Liverpool with contradictory obsessions: soccer and America. He moved to the U.S. just in time to witness the sudden rise of the U.S. men's national team in the early 1990s. Now, Rog is teaming up with WNYC Studios to tell the tale of that team's ill-fated mission at the 1998 World Cup. Told through candid interviews with the team, it's a story for soccer fans and non-fans alike.  

Coming June 4: Join host Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers for this true tale of the U.S. men's soccer team's quest to conquer the 1998 World Cup. American Fiasco is a 12-part series based on over 30 interviews with the players, coaches, and media personalities who lived out this sporting descent into madness.

At the end of the Dark Age of Soccer in the United States, when the world’s favorite sport was a punchline, there came a ray of light: The U.S. was chosen to host the 1994 World Cup. Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers introduces the underdog American team and its Star Wars cantina of characters, as they take center stage at soccer’s biggest event.

Meet Steve Sampson: the all-American regular guy who was plucked from obscurity to become interim head coach of the national squad. From living on a couch to leading the U.S. into battle, how an unlikely placeholder coach with no international experience proved his mettle by crushing the team’s longtime rival.

What do you get when you put 22 soccer players on a plane headed to South America? A labor standoff with their bosses, and a team turning into a band of brothers. Plus: Expectations soar after the 1995 Copa América and an encounter with Argentinian soccer god Diego Maradona.

Fresh off their impressive showing at the Copa America tournament, the U.S. team was feeling ready to take on the world. Or, more specifically, the World Cup. That was coming up in 1998 and the players were primed to begin the qualification run.

“We were a confident team,” remembers defender Marcelo Balboa. “When we walked out on the field, we knew that we could beat anybody in the world.”

But exactly who would walk out on that field was the question nagging at every player. Even if the team qualified for the World Cup, not every player would make the final 22-man roster. Even fewer would get starting roles.

The yearlong qualification process, thus, became a kind of ongoing audition for the World Cup roster, with Steve Sampson serving as casting director. And with his interim-coach days now behind him, he felt confident about making decisions, even bold ones that would not make everyone happy.  

His first big move was to take the title of team captain away from the calm-under-pressure veteran Balboa and give it to the scrappy, tenacious Jersey boy, John Harkes. And this title didn’t come with “interim” before it. In fact, Harkes was known as “Captain for Life.”

The change didn’t put Balboa in the best frame of mind for the march toward the World Cup. To make it, the U.S. would have to survive an initial round of six games and qualify for a second round of 10 games, dubbed the “Hex.”

For players, this test is both physical and psychological. Stifling heat, waterlogged fields and in every city they traveled to — a stadium filled with people who truly hated them.

Balboa remembers a dummy dressed in a U.S. national team uniform that was swung from the top tier of a stadium with a noose around its neck. Jeff Agoos says a bag of urine was probably the worst thing thrown at him — though the C batteries hurt, too.

It was an added degree of difficulty for players who were battling other teams and trying to outshine one another for playing time.

The next big move by Sampson as he started to whittle the team down was to bench the team’s highest-profile player, the closest thing it had to a star, Alexi Lalas. “It sucked,” says Lalas. “Because I felt that you dance with the ones that brung you.” But the players weren’t the only ones with jobs on the line. U.S. Soccer was already courting the Portuguese coach Carlos Queiroz as a replacement for Sampson.  

By November 1997, there were just three games to go in the “Hex” and the American position was tenuous. With doubt setting in, the team arrived in Mexico City for a crucial game, knowing the U.S. had never beaten or even tied Mexico on their home turf.

Once inside The Estadio Azteca, the team would battle the triple threat of altitude, smog and the noise of 105,000 frenzied Mexican fans. The Americans played shorthanded after Jeff Agoos was sent off the field with an early red card. Yet, somehow, they tied, 0-0. Their performance was so impressive that the Mexican fans gave the American team a standing ovation as they left the field.

That game proved to the team they could win anywhere in the world. Just one week after Mexico, the U.S. qualified for the 1998 World Cup in a shutout game against Canada.

Cue: the celebration. The flowing champagne, giddy embraces and heartfelt speeches were all captured for posterity, including that moment Sampson threw an arm around his Captain for Life, John Harkes, and said to him, “Your third World Cup. Can you believe it?”

But not all the players celebrating in the locker room that day would actually get to play at the 1998 World Cup. Some of the team’s most experienced veterans would go to France, but never set foot on the field. Others wouldn’t make it there at all, including, of all people, John Harkes.

Just two months before the World Cup, the Captain for Life was captain no more.

Two months before the 1998 World Cup, captain John Harkes is abruptly kicked off the national team. The reason for Harkes’ departure is kept under wraps. Twenty years later, the team opens up about what really happened.

Does soccer deserve our love? If there’s one person host Roger Bennett has to convince, it’s Dan “Big Cat” Katz of Barstool Sports. The self-described “epitome of the American sports fan” argues, “What’s more American than hating soccer?”