Generation Zero

Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & the Making of Soccer in America

By: Hal Phillips

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The Modern Creation Story American Soccer Didn't Know It Had

By the late 1980s, U.S. soccer had solidified its reputation as a global laughingstock, a sporting oxymoron akin to Jamaican bobsledding:

• Starting in 1950, the richest, most powerful nation on Earth had gone 0 for 9 trying to qualify for the World Cup.
• Once the North American Soccer League petered out, U.S. sporting culture proved unable/unwilling to replace it.
• Soccer on TV? Post-1984, only the odd indoor match might be found there — late at night, on content-starved cable outlets, after competitive lumberjacking.

Today, the phenomenon of U.S. soccer development is almost taken for granted:

• Live matches from Major League Soccer and a half-dozen foreign leagues are routinely beamed into American households, seven days a week.
• World Cup participation is routine, thanks to wildly popular men’s and women’s national teams. Americans don’t just compete in World Cups. We host them (the next one arrives in 2026).
• Nationwide, millions of Soccer Moms preside over the game’s grassroots, securing its growing place in the broader cultural tableau.

Generation Zero profiles this epic transformation by spotlighting the national team players and fans who made it happen. Conventional wisdom assigns American soccer progress largely to an event, World Cup ’94, but history shows the tipping point arrived five years earlier. With a single victory — against all odds, on a small Caribbean island, just as the Berlin Wall fell — soccer’s haphazard, indeterminate development in the U.S. instantly became inevitable, headlong growth. Raised on the game and tempered by hardship, Generation Zero produced both ends of the formative equation: a national team good enough to break through and an audience that would care, the country’s first legitimate soccer fan base.

Featuring rare imagery from the 1989-90 U.S. Men’s National Team photographer and candid snaps from the players themselves, Generation Zero is must-read for anyone who appreciates the fulsome futbol culture we enjoy today but wonders, “How did we get here?”

Great story, bad narrator

the narrator sounded like AI and not an actual person. Also the person/bot that read had a needless British accent that couldn't pernounce any of the ethnic team names or any of the last names that weren't Smith or Jones

Good Boon, bad performance

I thought the book was very good. Any time that there is an AI voice used, it will always get 1 star for performance. It keep mispronouncing FIFA and ADIDAS. I will never be able to read FIFA and pronounce it correctly anymore. The story was extremely interesting. Worth the listen.

How soccer almost died and came back to life in America

What an interesting thesis the author has in this book. He argues that after the fall of the major soccer sport league, the NASL, in 1981, that the sport was surviving thanks to the generation that grew up around that era, a generation little between baby boomers and gen X. It is shown how lowly the soccer scene became during the 1980s with home grown local tournaments and indoor areas with little federation support. Despite this a cast of characters is shown as having the spirit to continue and success to a large degree.

But unfortunately this title was narrated by A.I. It is a terrible narrator. The tone is the same throughout being slow calm and monotone that you can not tell when there is a break in sentence, paragraphs, or chapters. You can not even tell when people are being quoted or talking. Add the mispronunciation of words like ‘live’ and foreign words. I will not be listening to anymore A.I. narrated books anymore.