Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. women’s national team’s 1999 World Cup victory on home soil, and the legacy it was waiting for is just beginning to bear fruit on a global scale.
The penalty shootout victory over China in front of more than 90,000 fans at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, on July 10, 1999, remains one of the most iconic moments in American soccer and women’s sports worldwide.
Briana Scurry, the then-U.S. women’s national team goalkeeper who made a decisive save on a Chinese shot in the penalty shootout, remembers vividly the team’s mission: to win the tournament while also increasing the popularity of the sport. That dual task remained in place for generations of U.S. women’s team players.
Today, the NWSL, the league with the most American players, is seeing record investment, which is reflected in an increase in investment globally. After decades of ups and downs, women’s soccer is finally realizing its potential.
“What I would say and what I would argue is that the legacy that we left is that the money and the investment and the resources eventually found all these other great players around the world,” Scurry told ESPN. “Organizations and governing bodies that watched us do what we did here in the United States and then decided, ‘Yes, I’m going to turn on the resource spigot and give them oxygen and water and nutrients.’”
The U.S. national soccer team will celebrate the 25th anniversary of that historic World Cup victory next Saturday with a celebration centered around the current team’s friendly against Mexico at Red Bull Arena in Harrison, New Jersey. It will be the first official, formal meeting for all 20 players from that 1999 world champion squad, though many have remained in close contact over the years.
The growth of the game on and off the field will be on full display. Red Bull Arena is less than 10 miles from the Giants’ old stadium, where the U.S. women’s team opened its 1999 World Cup campaign in front of nearly 79,000 fans — at the time, the largest crowd ever for a women’s sporting event.
The team bus ride to the stadium is one of the most cited memories Scurry & Co. recall when they think about the moment they realized how big the tournament was. The USWNT bus weaved through traffic and crowds of pedestrians as it approached the stadium. The players, as the story goes, were disoriented by the hubbub, only to realize it was for them.
Even though the 1999 World Cup was such a huge success, it was just a starting point, and the team’s current popularity was not the norm at the time.
The 25,000-capacity Red Bull Arena is expected to be near capacity or even sold out on Saturday. The fact that the U.S. women’s team can now generate such interest, even for friendly matches, is a sign of the team’s progress in recent years. The farewell match to the 2011 World Cup was played at Red Bull Arena in front of just over 5,000 fans.
Saturday’s game is the first of two farewell games for the USWNT before an Olympic tournament where the Americans are not the favorites.
The U.S. team hit a historic low at the last World Cup, losing on penalties in the round of 16 to old rival Sweden. A younger U.S. team now heads to France hoping to avoid another setback: Failure to win the gold medal would mark the first cycle without a U.S. team winning a World Cup or Olympics, since those events began in the years following in 1995/96.
Spain, which won the World Cup for the first time last year, remains the world’s No. 1 seed and a favorite for the Olympics. Even making it out of the group is not a foregone conclusion for the U.S. women’s national team: Germany, Australia and Zambia each pose legitimate and unique threats.
The landscape has changed dramatically since the days when American victory seemed inevitable. Winning a World Cup has never been easier, but that was the expectation in 1999 and even more recently in 2019. Now, after decades of the world chasing the Americans, it is the USWNT program that is playing catch-up.
“That was our intention all along,” Scurry said, acknowledging that she still supports the USWNT. “But now it’s the fruit of that legacy work that you see. And basically what it’s done is it’s lifted all boats. It makes it harder for the United States to win, but that’s the bottom line. When you make that pie bigger, you’re going to have more competition. That’s a good thing. Because it’s always better to have more opportunities for everybody than not.”
Brandi Chastain, who scored the winning penalty before her iconic topless celebration in 1999, believes the team’s legacy extends beyond the world of sports. The 1999 World Cup was a huge moment for women’s sports, she acknowledges, but today’s movement is about equality in the boardroom and everywhere else off the field.
The core of the 1999 U.S. women’s national team quickly demanded better treatment and pay for themselves, and the fight has reverberated around the world over the past decade, with the latest generation of players suing U.S. Soccer for equal pay with the men’s team. The equal pay dispute reached a tipping point at the 2019 World Cup, when the U.S. women’s team became a polarizing global phenomenon as the embodiment of equality that drew the ire of then-President Donald Trump and his conservative supporters.
Like a completely different group of players did in 1999, the U.S. women’s team won the 2019 World Cup. They also felt they had to do it to validate everything they fought for off the field. Three years later, the players settled their equal pay lawsuit with U.S. Soccer.
“That’s the case now, and there’s no going back, there’s no going back,” Chastain told ESPN. “We’re never going to accept a contract that we know is inferior to us. We’re never going to tolerate that again.”
“There are still people who don’t see that as a value and you’re teaching them now to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, if I’m willing to invest money and funds in this place, I should probably do it here.’ So we’re not just influencing the women’s game, we’re changing the dynamics of business and how women are part of that equation.”
Women’s soccer is now a lucrative business. The USWNT has become a global brand in its own right, and the roots of that growth can be found in the success of the 1999 team, and the USWNT team that won the first World Cup in 1991 in relative anonymity.
Professional soccer has also grown exponentially. In 1999, there was no professional women’s soccer league in the United States. The WUSA was created from the success of this tournament, but that league and its predecessor, the WPS, each lasted only three years.
Today, the 11-year-old NWSL is one of the most exciting investments in sports. Angel City FC is close to a record sale that is expected to value the team at $300 million, 100 times what NWSL franchises sold for a few years ago.
Chastain has played in both the WUSA and WPS. She is a founding member of Bay FC, the 2024 NWSL expansion franchise backed by global investment firm Sixth Street, which set a world record transfer fee earlier this year before playing a single game.
Chastain has seen the sport grow and says she’s happy to see players no longer have to worry about the basics as much as they used to. Still, the two-time World Cup champion cautions that women’s soccer must not lose its soul by becoming a big deal.
“I think that’s why 25 years is important, because there’s been tremendous change and tremendous growth, but the heartbeat and the ethos remains and needs to continue to live on for it to live on in an authentic way that doesn’t fit with how they do other things in other sports environments,” Chastain said.
“We are the game changers, we can change the landscape. For me, I think it’s being more authentic. Staying close to the fans, instead of dividing them. I think that’s way underrated today. It’s not them and us, it’s us. I think the ‘us’ has always been a part of (us) as a team, and when you’re building something, you need leverage. I think we have to keep that at heart. And that’s really important.”
This tension between authenticity and capitalist realities is increasingly present in women’s football. A sport based on the efforts of its players and on close ties with a small group of fans is becoming a major event. It’s like the big group that everyone wants to see succeed and that finally becomes popular.
In many ways, this tension is the kind of world the 99ers imagined. It comes with tensions, but getting to this point means gaining recognition.
On Saturday, members of that 1999 team will have a reunion that Scurry described as “closing the small circle and creating a larger one.”
Joy Fawcett, who was a defender on the USWNT’s World Cup teams in 1991 and 1999, recently told ESPN she’s looking forward to something simple, something that will stand the test of time: “Seeing everybody,” she said.
“We’ll talk and chat, and we’ll see each other at different events, but just to see everyone, it’ll be fun. And to go see the United States together and send them to the Olympics, that’ll be fun to see.”