"Nobody cared whether you're on the right or on the left, everybody was singing and enjoying the day together." That's Brian Schmetzer, head coach of the Seattle Sounders, describing the moment 66,925 fans belted out Take Me Home Country Roads after the USA beat Australia 2-0 at a sold-out Lumen Field on June 19. If you need one sentence to explain what soccer can do in this country when everything clicks, that's the one.
It wasn't a fluke. Seattle's relationship with the game stretches back to the 1890s, when European immigrants — Welsh, Italian, German — brought football to the Pacific Northwest. Lumberjacks and miners played it first. Ethnic leagues followed. Schmetzer, 63, grew up watching his German father Walter play for a team called Germania. "He played against the Hungarians or Polish or the Italians," he says. That kind of grassroots, multicultural foundation doesn't appear overnight, and it doesn't disappear easily either.
A city that actually plays, not just watches
The Sounders were founded in 1974 in the old North American Soccer League, survived its collapse in 1984, ground through indoor leagues, and finally entered MLS as an expansion franchise in 2009 — breaking attendance records in each of their first five seasons. The 1994 World Cup gave the sport oxygen in America. MLS in 1996 gave it structure. Seattle gave it soul.
Ask anyone who lives there. Bella Bonnett, who played college soccer at Seattle University, says the thing that hit her hardest after moving from California was how deeply the game is embedded in daily life — not as a niche sport, not as an event, but as something people actually do. Isaiah Harris, an 800-meter runner with the Brooks Beast Track Club who relocated from Maine, noticed it differently: every time his training group moved to a new field around the city, there was a soccer league already running. Every single time.
That's not a marketing campaign. That's infrastructure meeting culture.
Jen Barnes, a fourth-generation Seattleite and co-owner of semipro development team Salmon Bay FC, opened Rough & Tumble in 2021 — a women-focused sports bar built on the principle that women's and men's sports share the same screen time. She wasn't at the USA-Australia game, but she says watching the clips of fans singing at the final whistle "makes me cry every time." That reaction, from someone who lives and breathes this scene, tells you something about the weight of the moment.
What comes next for US soccer
Schmetzer is hoping the 2026 World Cup does for American soccer what 1994 did — but bigger. "Supercharge growth" is how he puts it. The comparison is worth sitting with. MLS didn't exist before 1994. The league now has 30 clubs, a TV deal, and genuine talent pipelines. If the sport's trajectory from 1994 to now can be replicated and accelerated, the numbers start getting interesting for everyone invested in the American game — clubs, broadcasters, and anyone with a stake in US soccer's commercial future.
The global scale of the World Cup matters here. Around 1.5 billion people are expected to watch the final. The Super Bowl draws roughly 230 million. American football doesn't have a global tournament because the rest of the world doesn't play it. Soccer does. When the USA hosts in 2026, scenes like Seattle — 66,925 people, red white and blue, a stadium shaking — won't be a single afternoon in June. They'll be everywhere, for a month.
Schmetzer's been around long enough to know how bumpy the road has been. He played in a league that folded. He watched the sport nearly disappear in this country. The afternoon at Lumen Field, he says, was "absolutely a high watermark" for him as a lifelong Seattle fan — and he's seen a lot of highs. That's the context the viral clips don't give you.
