• Player Rating: 8.0
• Stream: Paramount+
• Length: 3 episodes, 33-40 mins each
• Audience: Ages 13 and Older (there’s some cursing)
Only one of the three episodes is focused on the titular Paul Caligiuri goal to qualify the U.S. men’s national team for the 1990 World Cup, but the series still entertainingly retells the histories of some foundational events for soccer in America, with a focus on the USMNT’s decades-long struggle to return to a World Cup after 1950. The series features and is dedicated to late soccer journalist Grant Wahl, who appears throughout in what is ultimately an informative, insightful, not too serious, boring, or stuffy retelling of American soccer’s rise. It’s highly recommended for any USMNT fans, or American-soccer-history-curious fans who may not know about the ins and outs of the sport’s rocky past in the United States.
The Billion Dollar Goal, a three-part docuseries from CBS Sports that’s streaming on Paramount+, retells the decades of American soccer history leading up to the sport’s version of “The shot heard ’round the world.”
The 1989 Paul Caligiuri goal the series is named for punched the United States men’s national team’s ticket to the 1990 FIFA World Cup, ending a 40-year qualification drought for the biggest international soccer tournament on the planet. As the late, legendary soccer journalist Grant Wahl puts it in the series, “That moment alone changed the trajectory of soccer in the United States.”
Grant Wahl is front and center in The Billion Dollar Goal, as it’s subtitled as being “told by Grant Wahl and friends,” and is dedicated to the renowned soccer journalist who died while covering the World Cup in Qatar in December 2022.
Wahl helps guide each of the three episodes through what was a Dark Ages of sorts for the USMNT, beginning with the team and sport’s inability to gain traction following the 1950 World Cup, which saw the U.S. pull off a stunning upset of England, and culminating with a third and final episode largely focused on the make-or-break 1990 World Cup qualifier in Port of Spain, Trinidad that was decided by Caligiuri’s huge goal.
The series highlights a good and largely insightful mix of soccer experts, historians, ex-players, and CBS Sports on-air personalities—it doesn’t feel like overkill or a never-ending procession of new talking heads.
It’s also just genuinely refreshing to get to watch Grant Wahl talk about soccer and American soccer again, especially as he gets exasperated about the constant “is it football or soccer?” debate, and as he calls out snobbish English fans who revel in America’s collective soccer struggles by pointing out that England have still never in history beaten the United States at a men’s or women’s World Cup.
The series succeeds at breezily and entertainingly telling the stories of the most important, yet likely lesser-known events on the historic American soccer timeline between 1950 and 1990. The biggest shortcoming of The Billion Dollar Goal felt like the fact that the series didn’t actually spend enough time on the game in which said billion-dollar goal gets scored, or how it even earned the nickname of “billion-dollar goal.”
Since so much time gets spent setting the stage for the hugely important World Cup qualifier between the United States and Trinidad and Tobago that produced Caligiuri’s strike, I walked away wanting more stories from the members of that 1989-1990 USMNT, and more discussion of what came next for soccer in America beyond quickly dashing through the outcomes of the USMNT campaigns in the 1990 and 1994 World Cups.
The late-’80s-early-’90s American players who The Billion Dollar Goal featured, like Tony Meola, Tab Ramos, and Caligiuri himself, were compelling storytellers about the game, the goal, and its importance for U.S. Soccer. The Billion Dollar Goal packs a lot in to a relatively modest three-episode series, and it’s a great resource for American fans of the sport—as well as a great way to pay tribute to America’s best soccer reporter, who left too soon.
