We Came to Win

A new show from Gimlet Media that tells stories behind the games that soccer fans can never forget—and that rest of the world couldn’t ignore. Premiers April 25th.

Today, the English Premier League is the richest and most watched league in the world. But rewind to the end of the eighties, and English football was in the doldrums. The national team were crap, the stadiums were crumbling, and there was the threat of violence from football hooligans. This is the story of how one summer, and one World Cup, changed English football forever.

The year is 1989. The United States is a soccer desert, but it just won a bid to host the 1994 World Cup. If the U.S. is going to prove it deserves the honor, it’ll need to get its team to qualify for the 1990 World Cup—and they haven’t made it in nearly four decades. A coach named Bob Gansler and his gang of mulleted misfits are America's only hope. This is the story of their last-ditch attempt to...

In 1974, the first all-black team competed at the World Cup: the national team of Zaire, now known as the D.R. Congo. They were remembered for one of the strangest plays in World Cup history: a botched free kick that led some commentators to speculate that the African team didn't understand the basic rules of the game. But behind Zaire’s kick is a lesser-known story of nationhood, colonialism, and ...

The retired Argentine midfielder Diego Armando Maradona is regarded by many soccer fans as the greatest player who ever lived. They’ll say he was creative, surprising, masterful—a gift to the game. But there are others who will tell you the opposite. That Maradona was the worst: A scoundrel, a villain, a cheat. In this episode, we tell the tale of soccer’s most complicated icon.

The year is 1998. 12 years have passed since archrivals Argentina and England last met in a World Cup, but the grudges that defined that last match—most notably, the legendary Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal—are still fresh. On June 30, 1998, a young Iain MacIntosh, future football journalist, watched the two teams face off. In this Extra Time episode, he recounts the drama that unfolded during and a...

In soccer, the glory usually goes to the attacking players like Maradona, Pele, and George Best. These legends of the sport created endless highlight reels with their powerhouse performances and game-winning goals. But every so often a goalkeeper comes along that’s so good that the saves they make, and the goals they stop, become the highlight of the game. One such goalkeeper is Hope Solo. On this ...

Every Mexico fan remembers where they watched the round of 16 match between Mexico and the United States in the 2002 World Cup. This was a defining game—one that carried the weight of past World Cup defeats and the promise of the Mexican team’s future. That the match was against the U.S., Mexico’s powerful neighbor, only made the stakes higher. This is the story of how one game came to define an en...

Making it to the World Cup had long been a dream of American defender Jimmy Conrad’s, and at the age of 29, he finally got his chance. U.S. coach Bruce Arena named Jimmy to the 2006 World Cup squad. Unfortunately, he spent the first game watching from the bench. It wasn’t until deep into the second game, when the U.S. was down a man and fighting for survival against the powerful Italians, that Jimm...

Say the name Byron Moreno to any fan of Italian soccer and you’re likely to get the same response: that guy is the worst. It all stems from one game at the 2002 World Cup where Moreno was the referee. It was a match between Italy and South Korea that resulted in an unlikely upset for South Korea. Italian fans have never gotten over it, insisting Moreno was part of a huge scandal to fix the results ...

For years the Spanish women’s national team was treated like an afterthought by their coach and the Spanish Football Federation. The team’s most basic needs were ignored, they were paid almost nothing, and the coach regularly disrespected them. But when they qualified for the 2015 World Cup, they knew they had an opportunity to change that. They could harness the world’s attention and finally deman...