The 1994 World Cup opened my eyes. Thirty-two years later, I’m still following where it pointed.

The World Cup is back in the United States. 

And I find myself more reflective than I expected — about what this tournament has meant to me, how it’s shaped the path of my career, and how I ended up dedicating my professional life to the power of sport.

I was a student at Greenhill School in the summer of 1994. I played every sport imaginable—basketball, baseball, volleyball. I was competitive and, by most accounts, a pretty good athlete. Soccer, though, was never my thing. Most photos of me playing it feature some version of me watching a ball sail comfortably over my head.

But that summer, the Nigerian national team used our school’s fields as their practice site during the World Cup. And after school, I’d walk over and watch them through the chain-link fence.

What I remember isn’t just the skill—though the way that ball never touched the ground, the athleticism and joy with which they played, made an impression I haven’t lost. What I remember is something harder to name: the feeling that these people, who spoke a different language, came from a country I knew almost nothing about, had arrived here and created something immediate and shared. Players from our school’s team were on the other side of that fence. Coaches. Kids. Nobody needed a translator. The ball was doing something language couldn’t.

I walked away from that fence with two thoughts that have never really left me. One was about the world—that it was larger and more fascinating than I understood. The other was about sport: that it might be one of the few things that could actually get people across divides to understand each other.

That instinct, half-formed as it was, pushed me toward international affairs at Georgetown where I studied at the School of Foreign Service (and was a two-time intramural wiffleball champion!). 

I ended up interning at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where my boss and I kept finding our conversations turning to sport—much to the curiosity of our colleagues. We made it official. I wrote an article for The Washington Quarterly called “Sporting Diplomacy: Boosting the Size of the Diplomatic Corps”—on ping pong diplomacy with China, wrestling with Iran, baseball in Cuba, and how soccer moved through geopolitics in ways that formal channels never could.

A few years later, I was an executive at Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit that brings together young leaders from regions of conflict—Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, kids from the Balkans. We brought NBA players to camp one summer, and ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap even did a piece on it. But the image I hold isn’t from the cameras. It’s quieter: an Israeli, a Palestinian, and an Egyptian teenager running a three-man weave together. Nobody choreographed it. Sport just created the conditions.

In 2006, I visited Robben Island with my family and met a former political prisoner who had served alongside Mandela. He told me something the Invictus movie never got to: that the story of sport and reconciliation in South Africa didn’t begin with the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It began inside the prison walls, where political prisoners organized a soccer league—wrote bylaws, formed committees, learned to govern, learned to disagree and come back to the table. The Makana Football Association taught them how to run a country before they ever had the chance to. Sport as preparation, not just inspiration.

In May 2010, I co-founded LeagueApps with Brian Litvack and Steve Parker, built around a mission: to deliver amazing sports experiences for all.

Mandela’s words about sport have been on our wall since the beginning—“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does.” 

In the sixteen years since, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with thousands of youth sports organizations—clubs, leagues, tournaments, nonprofits—that make sports happen in their communities. The organizations we work for have provided sports programming to tens of millions of participants.

Through our FundPlay Foundation, we’ve helped unlock $50 million in scholarships and subsidies for youth sports organizations, impacted nearly 500,000 kids who might otherwise have been priced out, and raised close to $1.5 million to support access directly. 

We’re only a few years into FundPlay’s life as a formal foundation, and the goal is to double the kids we’ve ever served in the next two years. Sport can’t be a platform for anything—not leadership development, not community building, certainly not the things I watched happen through that chain-link fence—if it’s only available to families who can afford it.

Now the World Cup is here again. The first time on U.S. soil since 1994. I’ve been thinking about what’s different and what isn’t.

What’s different: we are a more divided country than we were then. More sorted. More isolated—not just politically, but in the ways we encounter people unlike ourselves. AI and technology have done genuinely remarkable things, and they’ve also given us powerful tools to stay inside our own heads, our own feeds, our own confirmed views of the world.

What isn’t different: people still pack into living rooms and bars and parks to watch these games together. The group stage alone will produce matches involving 48 nations, played in cities across the United States. And for the next several weeks, people who would never otherwise find themselves in the same conversation will be sharing one. That shared language I watched through a fence in 1994 still works. It still bypasses the parts of us that want to be defended and right.

I also think about the generation of kids watching these games right now—ten, eleven, twelve years old, seeing the USMNT or Brazil or the Ivory Coast or whatever team has captured their imagination, and feeling something they don’t have words for yet. Some of them will follow that feeling. Some of them will trace a line from this summer to a career, a calling, a way of seeing the world. I got lucky enough to do that. I hope this tournament opens up more of those paths.

That’s what I want to use this platform for during the World Cup. Not just to celebrate the games—though I’ll do that—but to share what I think and learn and observe about sport’s actual power: the people doing extraordinary work in youth sports, the ways this moment can sharpen our thinking about access and infrastructure and what we build for kids, the harder questions about what it means to grow the game in a country that’s still figuring out how to run it.

The sport that I was never any good at set me on a path I wouldn’t trade. I still can’t head a ball. But I’ve spent thirty-plus years trying to understand what I felt at that fence, and trying to build something worthy of it.

That work isn’t finished. The beautiful game keeps posing a question worth spending a life on: can sport help make a more beautiful world? I believe it can. The World Cup, with 48 nations and billions of people sharing a language that needs no translation, is the best argument I know for yes.

Play Forever, Jeremy

During the World Cup, I’ll be sharing perspectives on sports, youth soccer, and what this moment means for the industry. Follow along here and on LinkedIn.