Seattle Is Now a World Cup Draw: ‘Just a Great Soccer City’

For Seattle soccer fans, the ghosts of 1994 are finally being exorcised.

Long one of the nation’s most passionate soccer cities, Seattle lost out when FIFA selected game sites in 1994, the last time the United States hosted the World Cup. The snub remains a sore point for local soccer lovers, who attribute it to uncertainty over whether matches would have been played in the Kingdome or at the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium, as well as concerns about the facilities themselves.

This time around, there was little doubt that Seattle would make the cut: Lumen Field, though home to the N.F.L.’s Seahawks, was designed with soccer in mind. The Seattle Sounders have become one of Major League Soccer’s flagship franchises, routinely drawing crowds of more than 30,000. Their counterparts in the National Women’s Soccer League, the Seattle Reign, helped establish Seattle as one of the country’s leading women’s soccer markets.

And, by the 2010s, Seattle had become a destination for some of the biggest names in American soccer: Clint Dempsey retired as a Sounder, while Megan Rapinoe spent her entire N.W.S.L. career with the Reign.

“This is just a great soccer city,” said Lenny Peters, wearing a Seattle Mariners baseball jersey and hat at a pep rally near the waterfront on Friday ahead of the game between the U.S. men’s national team and Australia.

He said he had been in high school when Seattle failed to secure World Cup games in 1994, though he didn’t remember much about the communal disappointment. “But of course it’s here now,” he said.

Seattle, long an also-ran in professional athletics, is on a roll. The Seahawks won the Super Bowl in February. The Mariners were just eight outs away from reaching their first World Series last year. The city has a popular new National Hockey League team, the Seattle Kraken, and the N.B.A. is considering a return to the city. Its former team, the SuperSonics, moved to Oklahoma City in 2008, in the Puget Sound region’s other lingering sports heartbreak.