They always say, never meet your idols. That’s kind of impossible when you’re making a movie about a seminal event in your own life.
For documentarians Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, that’s the situation they faced with Summer of ’94, their documentary about the year that soccer broke in America. It was 1994, when the USA hosted the World Cup for the first time. But their story begins two years before that, with the assembling, training, and unexpected success of the U.S. Men’s National Team.
They were both soccer kids then. Walker switched from baseball to soccer in grade school and played center-back right into college, while LaMattina – a self-described “chunky kid” – played goalie. LaMattina still has the program from the first-ever match he attended: May 29, 1994, at the Yale Bowl, where the U.S. held visiting Greece to a 1-1 draw in front of 21,317 fans. He even got it signed on the day by defender Alexi Lalas and midfielder Cobi Jones – and 30 years later he interviewed both for Summer of ’94, which premieres this week at South by Southwest.
Those interviews blew up the “never meet your heroes” myth, as LaMattina realized when he spent a day with goalie-turned-sports commentator Tony Meola.
“I’m going, ‘This is insane.’ I had pictures of this guy on my bedroom wall, in my locker at school. I made him sign my high school goalie jersey,” he said. “We’ve been really lucky in our careers that, whenever we’ve had the chance to meet our heroes, they make us feel that much stronger about the person.”
There had been soccer in America before that World Cup, LaMattina said, “flashes with the [New York] Cosmos and Pelé, but that didn’t take root. So, our question, and the heart of this film, was what was it about these guys that made them pioneers?”
One big key to unlocking the mystery of the team came in the form of an astonishing archive of previously unseen footage filmed by the players themselves. LaMattina and Walker had been in a similar situation when making their last major documentary, 2014’s I Am Big Bird, in which they explored the life of Muppeteer Caroll Spinney, the man beneath the yellow feathers. In their very first meeting, Spinney’s wife, Debra, told them she had a huge library of home movies. Walker said, “The first box Deb dropped off was never-before-seen home videos of Muppet Family Christmas, and of course we went, ‘Yeah, we’re going to want to use that stuff.’” But as they dug into the archive, they discovered the heart of the film was the love story between Caroll and Deb. “And that’s why Big Bird radiated love,” Walker said.
“With this film,” he continued, “it was that they were a close-knit family, and what came through in the archive was that it was a complicated dynamic. It was a deep bond that these guys will forever share, but they’ll tell you that when you’re in there, and you’re competing against people for a spot on this team, the idea of friendship is very complicated.”
So how did the team become a family? Of course, every good football fan knows it’s never one star, or even the players on the field. It’s always the coach, and in this case that’s Bora Milutinović, the Serbian player-turned-coach who had helped take Mexico and Costa Rica to the second round in successive World Cup appearances. LaMattina said, “He took this ragtag group of guys and unlocked that potential to defy the expectations in that World Cup.” However, to both the players that made the team and those that were cut on the path to selecting the final, he was an enigma whose martinet techniques and often seemingly obtuse style could be infuriating. To this day, LaMattina said, “They all do the Bora voice, they all talk about how much they hated one player, one ball, they all talk about how much they hated the tests, [but] the reverence with which they speak about Bora makes you sit up.”
The filmmakers got a taste of Milutinović’s idiosyncrasies and almost poetic turn of phrase when they traveled to Mexico to interview him. Walker said, “You’re asking questions, and you feel like he’s not answering them in the moment, and you’re just rolling with it. And then you get back in the edit and you go, ‘Oh my God. He’s just said this in a very poetic way, or a way that makes your brain think about things in a different way.’”
For Walker, Milutinović’s great influence is shown not simply in how the men’s team changed the trajectory of football in the U.S., but in how many players would become coaches in their own right. “So many on that team went on and followed in Bora’s footsteps.”
Summer of ’94
Documentary Spotlight, World Premiere
Saturday 14, 9:15pm, Rollins Theatre at the Long Center
Sunday 15, 2:30pm, Alamo Lamar
Wednesday 18, 9pm, AFS Cinema
This article appears in SXSW 2026 Festival Guide.