"The game is not our game yet in the U.S.," says Luchi Gonzalez, the San Jose Earthquakes academy director who served as a U.S. assistant coach at the 2022 World Cup. "But it will be our game one day." With the World Cup landing in the Bay Area this summer, that day feels closer than it ever has.
The U.S. face Bosnia in a knockout round clash in San Francisco — their third of a possible four matches in California — and the weight of expectation around that game goes far beyond 90 minutes. For a state that already runs deeper on soccer infrastructure than anywhere else in the country, hosting a genuine World Cup run on home soil is the kind of accelerant money can't buy.
California is already the country's soccer capital
The numbers back that up. No U.S. state comes close to California's footprint in national leagues: four MLS clubs, three NWSL teams, five USL sides, plus academies and university programs stacked throughout. The San Diego Wave top the NWSL. Orange County lead the USL West. And the San Jose Earthquakes sit level at the top of the MLS Western Conference — their first time there in 14 years.
That Earthquakes revival under Bruce Arena, who took the U.S. to the 2002 World Cup quarter-finals, is well-timed. They won nine of their first ten games this season — an MLS record — and January signing Timo Werner, Champions League winner with Chelsea, has four goals in seven appearances since arriving.
The cultural conditions for all this were already present. Around 40% of California's population is Latino, drawn from countries where football isn't a sport — it's infrastructure. Gonzalez describes the area as having a "soccer-rich" population, and the hope is that World Cup visibility translates into European transfers down the line, generating the kind of revenue that self-sustains a proper development pipeline.
What the World Cup can actually change
Earthquakes midfielder Niko Tsakiris put it simply: "To bring that here and for us to get a taste of that I think is massive. Because at the end of the day, that's what it's about — the passion and the joy that it brings people."
Burkina Faso international Ousseni Bouda, scouted by the Earthquakes at nearby Stanford, sees it the same way. "Already a lot of people love soccer here and watch soccer, but now it's going to get more fans involved."
For anyone tracking U.S. soccer's long-term trajectory — and the odds of it eventually competing with the NFL and NBA for mainstream American attention — California is the test case. If it's going to happen anywhere first, it's here. The World Cup isn't creating that momentum from nothing. It's arriving at exactly the right moment to turbocharge what's already moving.
