USA at World Cup 1990: Bags of urine, cans of Bud and a groundbreaking campaign

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On a Saturday evening in February 1990, many of the United States' finest footballers stepped on to A&M Studios' historic soundstage in Los Angeles.

A month before John Barnes would implore his England team-mates to "hold and give, but do it at the right time" in a studio in Berkshire, the United States team recorded their own rap - one they hoped would make the sport famous at home.

In a moment, some of Hollywood's biggest celebrities would walk through the door to them.

The plan was to record a novelty music video for a star-studded jock jam called Victory. The track celebrated the United States' first trip to the World Cup in 40 years, long before any of these players were born.

Never mind fame, though. In 1990, making football a little less hated in the United States would have counted as a runaway success.

Americans mostly considered football a fringe concern - if they even considered it at all. Baseball, American football and basketball were the "real" American sports.

For most of the 20th century, football in the States was for "the others", to put it politely: expats, cab drivers, dishwashers, exchange students, leftists, intellectuals, Euro snobs and the like.

Still the US Soccer Federation was constantly thinking about how to grow the game.

Werner Fricker, the federation's stern but visionary president, had cannily realised Fifa's desire to wring American dollars out of the world's most popular sport. By 1988, he had guided the United States to victory over Brazil and Morocco to win the right to stage the 1994 World Cup.

But Fricker knew a World Cup in the States faced scepticism. He wanted to prove the hosts had a team good enough to qualify on merit.

He put up his own money to fund a push to qualify for the 1990 event. If the United States succeeded it would be the first time they had made the World Cup since Brazil 1950, where they earned their place via a second-place finish in a three-team pool.

"Werner refused to accept that qualification wasn't doable," said Kevin Payne, former director of marketing and national for the Federation. "He knew what needed to be done, and that past attempts were amateurish."

Fricker made Bob Gansler the team's first full-time coach. A tough yet erudite German-Hungarian immigrant, Gansler's knowledge of American youth football ran deep.

The team picked by Gansler, many fresh out of college, had been raised during the North American Soccer League's Pele-led glory days and were a clean slate from past failures to reach the World Cup.

They had chips on their shoulders for all sorts of other reasons though.

Many of them were second-generation immigrants, their parents and family lives different from an 'apple pie' American ideal. They loved a sport that many around them reviled and yet there was no nationwide outdoor league for them to play in.

Instead, most of the squad either played the indoor game or on teams in the so-called ethnic leagues found in large cities.

Only three players had contracts in Europe.

The Federation decided to offer many of the rest small, centralised contracts so that they could train full-time. The result was a national team that was more like a club team, playing matches and ad-hoc tournaments against nearly any club or nation that would agree to them.

At the heart of it was the midfield duo of Tab Ramos and John Harkes, both raised on the hard, asphalt courts of Kearny, New Jersey.

The forward line featured the industrious Peter Vermes and the physically imposing Bruce Murray, a big man with little-man ball skills. John Stollmeyer, seemingly carved out of granite, was the midfield enforcer while Mike Windischmann, a -born, quiet kid from Queens and a former ball boy for the New York Cosmos, was sweeper and captain.

Midway through qualifying, a 20-year-old friend of Ramos and Harkes from Kearny became the starting goalkeeper: Tony Meola.

They didn't know it at the time, but this 1990 team would become the founding fathers of modern US football.

"None of us were alive in 1950," said defender Paul Krumpe. "And since 1990, the US has put on such a good string of qualifying for every World Cup [except for 2018]. So this absolutely was the origin group."

"We used to get out of the bus and they'd throw bags of [urine] on us," Vermes said.

"My first national-team game was in Guatemala in 1988 and I defending a corner kick and hearing 'ding! ding!' on the crossbar and post.

"The crowd was throwing size D batteries at us. You would go take a corner kick and guys in the crowd would be spitting on you. It was crazy. It was a totally different time."

The United States had to play three games in Central America during qualifying for the 1990 World Cup. Geopolitically, this was a complicated time to do so.

The Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense had been meddling in Central American countries for decades, and by the 1980s it was coming to a head.

One of the teams in the United States' five-strong qualifying pool was El Salvador, a country in which the US had propped up a right-wing government in a long civil war that had claimed 70,000 lives and displaced more than one million people.

Because of crowd trouble in El Salvador's previous World Cup qualifier, the United States' away match against the Salvadorians was staged in neighbouring Honduras, where the CIA was also active., external

The United States team bus was surrounded by commandos and equipped with a machine gun turret.

It was similar when the United States played Guatemala, in the midst of a 30-year civil war started by a US-backed coup. There the team were shadowed by plainclothes bodyguards carrying tennis racquet cases, but perhaps not racquets.

Aside from the political backdrop, games in Central America were never easy. Fans hired bands to play outside the visitors' hotel rooms or lit fireworks. The US' designated practice pitch was hardly a pitch at all. The air conditioning mysteriously stopped working the night before the game.

Over seven months of matches, it all came down to the final tie - away to Trinidad and Tobago with the 24th and final spot in the 1990 World Cup at stake.

The United States needed a win yet hadn't scored a goal in their previous two games. Trinidad and Tobago, which would become the smallest nation to ever reach the World Cup, only needed a draw.

And their 'Strike Squad', as the team were known, hadn't lost at home in nearly two years.

All week in their dingy Florida training camp, the stakes rose even higher for the United States team. A rumour emerged that if the Americans didn't win this game and reach the World Cup, Fifa might take away their hosting rights for 1994.

That meant if they lost, there'd be no more football for them to play. What little existed of football in the US would disappear. Their contracts would be gone. They would all have to get day jobs. Some players were about to get married, others had purchased homes.

The United States team was used to fighting for every scrap of publicity they could at home, so nobody was prepared for a game of this magnitude. Stepping off the plane in Port of Spain at midnight, two days before the match, thousands of locals all dressed in red greeted the team on the tarmac, in the terminal, even on the roof of the airport singing, chanting, playing drums.

As the Americans drove to their hotel, locals three-deep lined the highway, dancing and singing a catchy calypso chant that continued all night long: "T&T, we wanna goal!"

The Trinidad government had even declared the day after the match a national holiday. They were certain they were going to the World Cup.

This was totally disorientating. The Americans had left their own, powerful country where football was the least important thing on earth and landed on a tiny island where it was the only thing on earth. It was obviously intimidating to be so outnumbered. But the tone wasn't savage - it was festive. The American team fed off it. Finally they had a big game of their own, just like in the movies.

All night before the game, local policemen had run their squad-car sirens outside the Americans' hotel windows. On the way to the stadium, the Americans' bus couldn't move. A crowd of 100,000 were outside the stadium and in the streets, all dressed in red. The Trinidad and Tobago Football Association had sold two tickets for every seat, and the scenes around the stadium were total chaos.

Gansler's pre-game talk wasn't emotional, it was typically straightforward: the American plan was to attack quickly themselves and pin their opponent back, frustrating both the home team and their crowd.

They exited their dressing room with nerves like they've never felt before and lined up in the tunnel, looking into the white light ahead. Trinidad's players lined up alongside them, but something felt off.

"I looking at their guys and thinking to myself, 'they're not ready for this'," Vermes said. "You could see fear in their eyes. I knew right then we were winning. They were under so much pressure that they were scared."

The stadium looked like a carnival. The pre-game festivities featured local pop stars, a military marching band, feathered dancers, a colour guard team and a fire engine driving around the field, hosing off the crowd.

The pitch, however, resembled a car park - dry and bumpy. It was hot and windy. The sun was so intense that players had trouble seeing. The first 20 minutes were nervy.

Eventually, Trinidad and Tobago began attacking in wave after wave, their speed and dribbling having pinned back the US.

Then in the 32nd minute, from a United States throw-in, the ball found midfielder Paul Caligiuri. He prowled towards the goal, all the while trying to control a ball that wouldn't stop bouncing. He manoeuvred past one defender then - from 35 yards out and with no-one closing him down, the wind in his face and the sun at his back - the ball sat up perfectly. He lashed his foot across it and the ball sailed towards the goal in a high, looping arc.

"I thought 'there's no way he's hitting this', but he just smacked it and the ball dipped like crazy," Harkes said.

The goalkeeper's sight was blocked by his defenders and the sun was in his face. He made a late, weak leap to his side, but the ball plopped down on the other side of the goal line, past his glove.

After 239 minutes without a goal, Caligiuri - a defensive midfielder who was instructed not to attack, never mind shoot - had just scored the United States' biggest goal in decades, maybe ever. The crowd wasn't exactly silent - they were almost shrieking in horror.

Trinidad had a few close chances in the second half but the United States dug deep and defended hard.

At the final whistle, the Americans collapsed on the ground in the golden late afternoon light. They'd done it. They had reached the World Cup when almost no-one expected them to, securing their own futures and that of the game in their homeland.

"There's no doubt that Gansler prepared us really well for tough moments," Vermes said. "He knew we were going to have to survive tough moments. That's one of the biggest reasons why we won that game, because we had a tough mentality as a group."

Their locker room was small, sweaty and full of Budweiser beer - one of the federation's biggest sponsors. The staff hadn't even purchased champagne beforehand. But soon, a trolley of bubbly appeared: it was Trinidad's. They certainly were not going to drink it now, and so it was magnanimously gifted to the Americans by Jack Warner, president of the Trinidad and Tobago Football Association.

On a handmade poster listing the 23 teams who qualified for the World Cup, Meola, the goalkeeper, wrote 'USA' into the final spot. As the team celebrated, Gansler, meanwhile, sat back and quietly took it all in.

"Bob was in the corner and, I'll never forget this, kept saying 'just another game' to everyone who congratulated him," said Murray.

Yet the USA's first trip to the tournament in 40 years was hardly news at all back home. The game itself was shown on tape delay after an American football game, and only 432,000 people out of a population of 248 million watched it.

A few weeks later, at the glitzy World Cup draw in Rome, actress Sophia Loren pulled out the ping pong balls and ed them to Fifa secretary general Sepp Blatter. The United States would share a group with hosts Italy, who had won the World Cup seven years before, and two solid European sides in Czechoslovakia and Austria.

The United States team may have been anonymous to most Americans, but they had a few friends in high places. One of them was Shelli Azoff, wife of music industry mogul Irving Azoff.

Two years before, Caligiuri had wangled an invitation to an exclusive party thrown for George Michael in the Hollywood hills. Among others there, he had met Shelli, who had known other footballers. She previously tried to help Caligiuri's UCLA team-mate David Vanole get a try-out at Watford, owned at the time by the Azoffs' friend Elton John.

Azoff instantly saw the potential for this team.

"They all were good-looking. They were smart. They all were nice guys and represented the best of America, so I tried to get them some media attention," Azoff said. "Especially for the United States, the underdog, to get into the World Cup for the first time in forever, I thought would be a great opportunity."

They deserved to be famous. With some clever marketing, maybe they could be.

Caligiuri had recently recorded a rap song with his college room-mate, a trained musician, for fun.

He played it for Azoff and she began calling in favours from music video directors, record label executives, MTV executives, producers and her celebrity friends.

That night in February 1990 at A&M Studios, most of the team heard the new version of Caligiuri's song - rewritten and recorded by emerging hip-hop artist Def Jef - for the first time. It was now called Victory.

Suddenly, star athletes and celebrities began walking through the door to them, including American football's Marcus Allen, ice hockey's Luc Robitaille, TV star Cathy Lee Crosby and Nitro from American Gladiators.

OJ Simpson - the gridiron legend-turned-film star, whose subsequent arrest and acquittal on murder charges transfixed the world - was another of those to gather around the microphone with the players.

"These people just started popping up in the studio, it was like: 'We're in the big time, man!'" said defender Desmond Armstrong. "You just had to pinch yourself and say: 'Don't ask them for an autograph!'"

The next day, the team filmed additional scenes on Carbon Beach near the Azoff's Malibu home, stripping down to shorts to juggle a ball, horse around in the surf and approximate the 'running man' dance.

"Togetherness and unity means victory for you and me," rapped the squad over the top of the footage., external

The video premiered that spring on MTV and other music video channels, but seldom afterwards. They had found a way to get football into the living rooms of America, but not even the celebrities of the era could help make it popular.

"I think we thought we were going to ride a wave and people were going to follow us - but nobody cared," said Armstrong.

As their bus pulled up outside their Italian training camp for the first time, it looked more like a military base to the United States players.

A high fence, crowned with barbed wire, surrounded the complex in Tirrenia, on the outskirts of Pisa. It was an old Olympic training facility that looked like it hadn't been used for many Olympics. The living quarters were like barracks. The eating area looked like a prison canteen. The menu seemed to consist entirely of pasta.

At least the training pitch was nice.

Tirrenia had been recommended to them by Italy's World Cup host committee as the only suitable and available training base anywhere near Tuscany.

To a hungry American team overjoyed to finally reach the World Cup, staying here felt like punishment. Before their first game, against Czechoslovakia, Gansler ratcheted up the training intensity. In this setting, it felt like they were preparing for war.

Their first game, though, ended in disaster. After the United States looked lively and dangerous for the opening 20 minutes, Czechoslovakia realised how naive their opposition's tactics were - reliant on man-marking - and pulled them all out of position.

Forward Eric Wynalda, a day after his 21st birthday, was baited into a red card early in the second half.

Caligiuri scored a sensational goal on a 60-yard run, starting in his own half, but it was mostly forgotten as Czechoslovakia ran out 5-1 winners.

After 40 years away from the World Cup, the next morning's headlines were not kind to the Americans. "USA: What a Delusion," wrote Corriere della Sera. Gazzetta dello Sport noted the "century of difference" between the United States and Czechoslovakia. The Times explained that the US "were utterly exposed by such Bronze Age devices as an overlapping full-back".

Next up was Italy, in Rome. The Americans had three days to pull themselves together.

"There were a lot of deep thoughts among the players," Harkes told the Guardian of the build-up., external "'Are we really up for this">