On today’s episode of “Daily Variety” podcast, Rand Getlin, director-executive producer of the HBO documentary “U.S. Against the World: Four Years With the Men’s National Soccer Team,” discusses the road to the World Cup and the rising popularity of men’s and women’s soccer in America.

Getlin spent more than four years documenting the road to the World Cup tournament that runs June 11 through July 19 in cities across the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Getlin was a longtime NFL reporter for NFL Network and other outlets. A chance encounter with team member Tyler Adams in 2019 — after the U.S. men’s national team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup — led Getlin to start a production company with his wife, producer Janina Pelayo, in order to produce what became the five-part docu-series “The U.S. Against the World.” In 2022 Getlin and his partners went “cameras up” on a verite-style doc that tells a story of sacrifice, commitment and brotherhood as the team members rally in the hopes of winning the first men’s World Cup for the U.S. The U.S. women’s national team, on the other hand, has logged four World Cup wins from tournaments in 1991, 1999, 2015 and 2019.

For Getlin, the decision to quit his job and start a production venture was life-changing.

“We wanted to make sure that we pursued something worth pursuing. All of us in the business understand how hard it is to get stuff on screen. And so it was imperative to us that we found something worth pouring ourselves into, that we could feel really proud about the creative outcome and the storytelling outcome,” Getlin says.

“It’s a coming of age story. It’s an emotional onramp to the 2026 World Cup. This is a team that has never won it all. In some corners of the world of soccer, people look down their nose at them. And yet you have this group of young American guys who are giving everything they’ve got to make this country proud. And the villages around them, the moms, the sisters, the wives, the youth coaches — it’s just awesome. It’s a slice of America. And importantly, they all come from different backgrounds, different religions, different ethnicities, different places on the socioeconomic spectrum and they speak different languages. And yet when they come together, they do not discuss what divides them. They talk about all of the things that unite them and and give everything they can to make the country proud. It’s hard not to root for them,” he says.

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