World Cup 2026: USA pioneer Desmond Armstrong and his legacy

Football came to Armstrong, via a television set, in the suburbs.

His family moved from the southeast part of Washington, DC when Armstrong was young and later settled in a white neighborhood in Maryland, where he befriended the son of a football coach. One afternoon, the coach called Armstrong on television.

He pointed to a Brazilian in a New York Cosmos jersey.

“It was Pele,” Armstrong said.

“His movement reminded me of a lot of point guards who played basketball, but he was doing it with a ball at his feet.

“He was one of the few black players on the team, so that connected me.”

While Pele popularized a sport he learned barefoot on the streets of Brazil, the American grassroots version was largely built on privilege.

Unlike developing youth academies in Europe and South America, where clubs like Ajax and Barcelona invested in young talent, development in the United States has long run on a pay-to-play model.

Families must cover significant costs or seek sponsorships to give their children a shot at advancing — creating a system that is rarely favored by less affluent families.

“It’s kind of contradictory about this game,” said Frank Dell’Apa, who spent 40 years as a soccer columnist for the Boston Globe, covering the game since the days of the original North American Soccer League (NASL).

“It’s the easiest sport with the easiest access. Everyone plays it all over the world with no money, no soccer ball, no shoes. And here, we have the exact opposite thing going on.”

Armstrong knows how easily his story could have been different.

“If my people don’t move to the suburbs, I won’t play football,” he says.

Socio-economics was not the only obstacle.

The NASL in 1985 limited professional paths for Armstrong as college players before their careers began for him and his peers.

“For me, personally, it was crushing,” Armstrong said.

He turned to playing professionally in the Major Indoor Soccer League, where his performances led to his debut on the US Men’s National Team in 1987, followed by a spot in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

“I remember being on the field, hearing the national anthem and just thinking ‘this is where I’m supposed to be’,” he says.

That same year, world soccer’s governing body FIFA chose the United States to host the 1994 World Cup finals—the first time the tournament had gone to a country outside of Europe or Latin America.

They will be under the global spotlight.

“The United States was not a factor at all in world soccer,” Dell’Apa said.

“I remember Des playing a lot of games on artificial turf. It was tough for those guys. They had to fight to get in the lineup, to get the field, to get the stadium.”

With no elite outdoor professional league in the country, the player pool was a fragmented mix consisting mainly of college, semi-pro and indoor players like Armstrong.

The federation looked to work around it by securing a core group of them on full-time contracts, essentially turning the national team into the country’s professional set-up. Not unlike the playbook of the Eastern Bloc.

They hired a German-Hungarian head coach named Bob Gansler. Armstrong was now among a group of young players who were handed an impossible task: qualifying for the 1990 World Cup in Italy.