Technically the Final Draw is a formal plucking of colored Ping-Pong balls to determine the matchups for the games. Twenty-four teams will be assigned rivals and sites. On the bounce of those little balls may lie the success or failure of a championship that consumes the rest of the world. Americans may have become soccer players, but they aren’t fans, let alone fanatics. Though every ticket will ultimately be sold, the World Cup needs a boost that turns sport into spectacle. That can happen only with the right teams placed in the right cities: if the Italian team gets to take Manhattan, while the Irish join their Boston brethren and the Mexican team makes its home base in California.
As if that weren’t enough, there is also a strictly American subplot. FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, plans to use the World Cup to launch a major American pro soccer league in 1995, the first since the North American Soccer League folded, back in 1985. The soccer community is convinced that the league’s chances are tied to the World Cup performance of the American home team. “At the very least we have to get through the first round,” says Bill Nuttall, general manager of the U.S. team.
That’s where Sunday’s action comes in. A favorable draw can dramatically enhance America’s chances in the first round, a round robin in which each team plays three different opponents. Get through that and the rest is single elimination. The World Cup becomes a crapshoot, where a team can be propelled by a lucky goal, a hot goaltender or a win in the rather random “shoot-out” that settles ties. Surviving the first round seems a modest enough goal, given that two thirds of the teams make it. But the United States hasn’t accomplished that since the first World Cup back in 1930. In the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the team was routed 5-1 by Czechoslovakia in its opener and then proceeded to lose its other two matches as well.
This time the United States has a few advantages it lacked in Italy. As host country, the United States receives an automatic first seed. That allows it to avoid the sport’s most illustrious teams, like Germany, Italy and Brazil, in the first round. America also got to choose its playing sites. After an opening match in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit–where grass sod will be put down indoors–the United States will play its other two first-round games in the Rose Bowl, a short bus ride from the team’s California training center. “Though we’d like to see the Americans do well,” says FIFA spokesman Guido Tognoni, “more we cannot do for them.”
Not everyone is convinced of that. The soccer world has almost as much intrigue as a John le Carre novel. Conspiracy theorists–and they are legion–believe FIFA can produce whatever draw best serves its interests. In 1990, for example, host Italy got a virtual pass through the first round, including a popular matchup with the United States in Rome. The two nations with the worst hooligan fans, England and the Netherlands, found themselves conveniently paired on the island of Sardinia.
FIFA’s Tognoni dismisses talk of manipulating the draw as “complete nonsense.” He says any shenanigans would be impossible in front of 1,000 journalists and a worldwide television audience. “We may be in Las Vegas,” says Tognoni, “but we are not making use of David Copperfield or Sigfried and Roy.” Still, Hank Steinbrecher, executive director of the U. S. Soccer Federation, smiles when he says, “We just hope the hand of God is working its mysterious way.”
It will be easy to tell if God is paying attention. There will be three teams seeded behind the Americans. But since these rankings reflect past World Cup appearances rather than current team strength, not all seeds are remotely equal. The United States would prefer to avoid the Netherlands, a title contender, and play South Korea, which has qualified for three World Cup finals without winning a game. Putting South Korea in Los Angeles would be an ethnic crowd-pleaser as well.
It’s no accident that World Cup organizers are looking at patterns of immigration. A recent poll showed that only 13 percent of Americans even know the World Cup will be played here. The odds against pro soccer in the United States? Now that’s something Las Vegas would find interesting.
