Business of Soccer Special: Former USMNT Captain Landon Donovan

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1:07Landon Donovan:Every four years, you know, there's this moment where the world wakes up to the incredible athletes that we have on the U.S. women's national team. There are more soccer games available to watch on television in the U.S. than any other country in the world. Soccer, or as I would call it, living in the U.K., football, is the biggest sport in the world. There's a gap in the market around women's soccer, and we're here to fill that gap. Bloomberg Business of Soccer from Bloomberg Radio. Welcome to this special edition of the Bloomberg Business of Sports podcast, The Business of Soccer. I'm Vanessa Perdomo, and I'm diving behind the scenes of the beautiful game as we get ready for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

1:44Landon Donovan:Today, we have a really special guest for you, a really awesome conversation with U.S. men's national team legend, Landon Donovan. Landon's here to talk about his biography, and he's here to give us all his insider information and details on who we should be paying attention to during this World Cup before the men take the field in the summer. Landon, thanks so much for joining the Bloomberg Business of Soccer. It's great to have you here. Less than 80 days from World Cup kickoff. But before we get to that, which we definitely want to talk about, obviously I want to talk about your book, your self-titled memoir, Landon.

2:17I want to get right into it because off the cover, you would just pick it up and maybe think it's any other memoir. It's about how you became, you know, the best player in U.S. soccer. But right off the bat, you're talking about mental health struggles and bounds of depression and missed, you know, everything going on in the soccer world. Why was this the right time to tell this part of your story? Well, the journey actually started in 2020. So we thought maybe it was going to be sooner, but it took a long time. I wanted to make sure we got it right and not just fast. I may be different than other people I wasn't trying to capitalize on a moment Or something that happened in the sport I just wanted to share my story My story is maybe common in a lot of ways But also very unique So how I grew up The struggles I had while maybe people were watching on TV What was going on on the field There was a lot going on in the background and it's not that a lot of people can relate to professional athletes because not many people become professional athletes, but a lot of people can relate to growing up with a single parent, in my case a single mom.

3:37A lot of people can relate to not having a dad in their life. A lot of people can relate to mental health issues and depression. And so there are a lot of pieces of the book that I think will resonate with people. In the book, you start off by, you know, the whole chapters are based off of minutes in soccer in a game. Right. But you don't start on zero. You started on the 84th minute, then zero. Then you go to 72 and tell this really personal story about your wife at the time. Why did you start it off like that? So the reader automatically knew that this was more than just about a soccer game.

4:12Yeah, that's right. No, you nailed it. And look, I've read a lot of sports memoirs, and I'm guessing you probably have too. What I didn't want to do, Vanessa, is just give a chronological timeline of events in my soccer career. People, if they know me, they would have watched on TV or online or anything, and they would know those things. But they didn't know what was going on behind the scenes, and they also didn't know how I ended up there. And so I wanted people to know right away that this was much more than a soccer story. Of course, there are soccer pieces in it, but I wasn't interested in writing a soccer story.

4:50To me personally, that's kind of boring. The part that I think is interesting for people and that will resonate with people is the personal story. Yeah. And I've heard you say that for you, like writing this was somewhat of an easier process than people you've talked to about writing their memoirs because you were in therapy for years. You know, tell me about going to therapy at that time, because at the time it wasn't really people weren't talking about mental health the way they're talking about it now. Yeah, it was scary. I grew up with my mom and my twin sister. And so I was, and I'm a Pisces.

5:27And I, so I was just, I'm sort of also innately more compassionate and sensitive than most men that I've come across in my life. So I was more receptive to it, but it was still very daunting. And I think for a lot of men, especially people in general, but a lot of men, especially they believe there's a lot of weakness in in admitting that you have faults and so that that is that is part of how I felt initially but I really connected with the therapist right away Juliet and I she felt like a mother figure to me and it felt easy and it wasn't she didn't press there was no stress around it it just felt like a place where I could go and talk and feel better when I was done.

6:10And that was, I mean, it was no different than going to physical rehab or going to training. I would do it, put in the effort. And then after I felt way better and I thought, why wouldn't I keep doing this? Yeah. Is it something that, how did you come to the resolution that you wanted to seek, you know, help in that way? So my first wife, um, wanted me to go to, she was like artsy actress. And so she said, I really want to go to this meditation class. And at that time, especially that was 20 years ago, it was like, why the hell am I going? I don't want to go to a meditation class. This is ridiculous.

6:48But she sort of convinced me to go. And I went and we spent an hour in this meditation class. There were like 15 other people there. And it was the first time in my life where I like really stopped, focused on the present moment on breathing and relaxing. And again, when we walked out of there, I was like, wow, I feel way better. And I also at the time, the woman running the meditation class was Juliet, who was also a therapist. And I really connected with her. My ex-wife had been going to see her a little bit for therapy. And so mostly by her urging, she must have known I had a lot of issues.

7:26By my ex-wife's urging, I decided that it was a good time to go try it. Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that one of the, you know, at the time you would have had maybe been, I don't know if you were open about it at the time, but like just had less of a struggle in general if other people were talking about mental health and, you know, in sports? if I had people I idolized or you know I grew up in LA and I was a big Laker fan Dodger fan Kings fan Major League Soccer didn't exist at the time but I was huge sports fan and if you know by way of example Wayne Gretzky or Magic Johnson were talking openly about going to therapy I absolutely would have tried it much sooner if that was just a normal part of being an elite athlete or an elite human, I would have done it.

8:17Unfortunately, at that time, that didn't exist. And so hopefully the hope is that with so many athletes now speaking about it, that it becomes much more normalized. And you'd be shocked, Vanessa, how many people I come across who say, thank you so much for talking about it. I go to therapy now all the time. And that really warms my heart. Yeah, I was going to ask, you know, having written this now and hopefully having those sorts of conversations, like what is that going to mean to you if people continue to just come up to you and say, wow, I can't believe, you know, someone like you's talking about, like, thank you so much.

8:52I'm going to have my kids read this or whatever, you know, it is for you. How impactful is that for you? The messages I've received already have been overwhelming. Today I'm in Atlanta and I'm going to be doing, you know, different appearances and things like that. I can promise you many people are going to come up and say thank you for writing about this and talking about this. I get that comment as much as I do anything about any goal I ever scored. And so that was, yeah, and that was the impetus, honestly, to write it, to share this and to help people. And I get messages across the board. Some people say, thank you so much.

9:30I'm a single mom, and it's so challenging, and I drive my kid to soccer 30 minutes there and back every day, and I'm trying to put food on the table. So thank you for talking about that. I have people who say my dad wasn't around either growing up and that really resonated with me and I'm going to reach out to him now and call him because that's what you did and you reconciled and you had an amazing relationship with him. And then tons of people say thank you for speaking openly about depression and their struggles. Yeah. I mean, that's a different kind of legacy, right, to have as well as your soccer career, right?

10:06To have that, to be able to say it wasn't just scoring goals, right? Like there's another impact that you're able to leave, which is great. I want to talk about how it coincided with your soccer career because we had spoken a little bit earlier about how soccer was the safe space. But then when you start getting to this certain level, did you ever feel like it almost became unsafe because of the pressure and all of those things? it just it it became a job at one point and the way i describe it is in my first whatever five or seven years as a pro if we started the season if i started training and playing in january and the season was going to end in november by like october november i would start to feel pretty tired from a long season as years went on that feeling would happen sooner and sooner right so So in August, I would start to feel tired.

11:05And then the next year in July, I would feel tired. And then two years later, I was pretty worn out by May already. And so it just started to feel like a slog and a job. And I think anybody who does anything for a long time and is successful at it will tell you it's not all glamorous all the time, right? And there is a weight that weighs on you. The challenge with being in the public eye is you can't have a bad day without people noticing. And that's what makes it tricky when you're in the public eye or you're an athlete is if you have a bad game, people are paying attention and they're going to let you know about it.

11:42And so that's where I think having an identity outside of the sport is really crucial. And this is, again, relevant for any human. And having an identity outside of what you do for a living, I think, is really important because many of us, unfortunately, myself included at one point, tie our identity to what we do. And we are much, much more than that. Yeah, absolutely. When you were going through therapy in that time, was there any part of it that was also helping you on the field? Like, did you talk about that? Oh, massively. Yeah. Well, the thing with me, Vanessa, and I hear a lot of people now talk about going, a lot of athletes talk to me about going to therapy or seeing someone to actually just help them with performance on the field, whether they have performance anxiety or they have issues that they're trying to deal with.

12:34for me I knew that I was going to perform at my best when my personal life was at peace and there is a absolute correlation between when I was at my best in my physical life or in my personal life and then and me being at my best in soccer and so the years I was absolutely at peace personally I played my best soccer and so for me that was the biggest hurdle I needed to overcome is when I got that piece right off the field, on the field took off. I want to talk a little bit about what you had when you were coming up and you had talked about, you know, your age group and the national team and Project 2010, that they had, you know, this idea that, you know, the 82s, as you said, would come in and you realized that it was, oh, your group that was going to come in and try and change U.S.

13:27soccer. Can you tell me about that and that pressure, but also just the journey to trying to get there and get to the 2010 World Cup, which, you know, was really great for U.S. soccer. Yeah, I think U.S. soccer wanted to set a goal to have something to shoot towards and move towards. And again, U.S. soccer at that time was, and soccer in general in this country, was just very young and immature and green. And so we were all trying to grow the sport. I didn't feel, and I don't think we felt crazy pressure from that. And I think the biggest part of it, Vanessa, is that social media didn't exist.

14:10And so we didn't, like, we were doing our job, we were playing, we were trying to help grow the sport, but we didn't have this intense scrutiny. And soccer just wasn't as popular as it is now. And so in that way, it was a lot easier. For me personally, at times it was difficult because I was asked to do the media and the appearances and the meet and greets and talk to sponsors. And so that stuff became just physically tiring and emotionally exhausting. But thank God we didn't have the added impact of social media where we were being criticized by millions of people online as well. Yeah. When you're trying to grow the game of soccer here, and obviously, I mean, you've been in the game for a long time.

14:55And when you were young, played overseas. What differences did you see there in trying to get the U.S. audience more involved and how they were trying to grow the game here? well i think the analogy is in america now nfl players nba players ml major league baseball players they don't have they're not trying to grow the sport like the sport is solidified they want to on the margins make it better and and you know get better ratings and do a little better but we were trying to in some ways keep major league soccer alive and can and actually like get one by one fans to join our sport. No different than like a politician is trying to get every vote, right?

15:42And so that is so different in Europe. In Europe, the game is the game. Like people are gonna show up, win, lose, or draw. They are gonna support you. In America, some of the things I did in my first few years in MLS are crazy. I would show up at a soccer field with 12 people, 12 kids there, and do a clinic for three hours so that the club could sell 15 tickets. You know, like it was just crazy. And so that piece of it, I think for a lot of us, was very exhausting, but that's just part of helping the sport grow. When you think about it, though, like, and you think about it now, how you helped solidify the MLS and even in those early years, you know, while they were building, it's still never really wavered and it's never broken up and obviously it's now around for 30 years.

16:33how does it feel that you were able to help solidify it into what it is today oh amazing and there are when you do something like that and you build help build it over time all the new people who come into the sport you're grateful for but you also realize they have no appreciation for what went on and that's okay that's part of life and you want the sport to grow that way. I watched for years, and I always admired this. Every time I would watch a women's national team game, I saw those women for hours walk around the stadium after the game and sign literally every little girl and boy's autograph.

17:16And I was just watching the sport grow through these television games I was watching or if I was in person. And I always remembered that, because in the beginning of my career in San Jose, we would have people lined up outside and we would, after a game, exhausted, walk around this little circle and sign autographs for two hours. And I would always think to myself, well, if the best women in the world are doing it, the World Cup champions, why can't we do it, right? And that was all part of building the sport. I want to go back a little bit and take a step back because you had talked about the women's national team there And when we're talking about the World Cup coming, obviously, the last time the World Cup was here in 94, the MLS didn't exist.

18:02Right. So when you were watching soccer at the time, did you I mean, I know in your book that you said, like, this is what you wanted to do always. But how did you know when there was not a domestic league? Yeah, I mean, I would say, as most kids say now, but they have tangible things to look forward to. I would say, like, I want to be a professional soccer player. But I had no idea what that meant. All I did was go outside and play soccer all day. The first time I ever realized that soccer existed outside of my recreational games on the weekend was at the 94 World Cup. One of my teammates took me to see his, he and his dad took me to see Romania against Argentina in the Rose Bowl.

18:46And I saw 100 ,000 people there. I saw the passion from the fans. And I saw these guys on the field doing things that I couldn't have ever envisioned. And I, for the first time, I was like, wow, that's possible. And so that's why I get so excited about this summer because the sport's already grown exponentially, but there will be tens of millions of girls and boys watching who will say, I want to do that. And that's not quantifiable. Like there will be quantifiable data that comes out of the World Cup and how successful it was and all these things. But there's also just that emotional piece for little kids watching who become fans of the sport forever.

19:27Yeah. And do you think it has even more of an impact, even if they can't be in the stadium, you know, like you were, but have an impact that it is here in the U.S.? No question. I mean, for the next it's already starting, but for the next three months, it's all you're going to see in here. It's going to be in your face everywhere. And so every soccer field, every billboard, every TV ad, it's all you're going to see. And people are going to be inundated with it. And it's why I'm hopeful and desiring of our U.S. team really, really succeeding, because I know the impact that can have on especially young people.

20:06Yeah. I mean, the 1999 World Cup is my first soccer memory and it is everything to me. I literally think about it. I could cry every time I watch the penalty kicks. Right. It's one of the most impactful things, you know, ever. But for that was, you know, they won and it was incredible. And obviously women and all that. But for you, when you're looking at this men's team and they're great. But what is success? I mean, do they have to win? for it to be successful? Yeah. Sports are all about expectations, right? So if you're expected to win and you don't, everyone thinks you're a failure. If you're expected to go out in the first round and you end up in the quarterfinals, everyone thinks it was the most amazing result ever.

20:52So my expectation and how I deem success for this team is one or both of these two things. A deep run into the tournament, And that means absolutely getting out of your group and then playing a knockout game where the nation is captivated because it's a winner goes home or loser goes home, sorry, scenario. And that will be exciting. And the more of those you can play and pile on top, the audience grows exponentially. And or iconic moments, some sort of moment. And it doesn't even have to be a goal. It could be a save. it could be in 2006 we had a bad world cup but brian mcbride our striker got elbowed in the face he blood was gushing out of his head everybody expected him to just go off the field and go to the hospital and he got wrapped back up and went back out on the field and and that was an iconic moment that i think resonated with people so american fans will respect this team and deem this successful if they see a team that represents them.

21:56And that means really, really giving every last piece of everything you have. If you lose, you lose. That's part of sports. But giving everything you have and creating some indelible memories is what I think would make it successful. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I was talking to Brianna Scurry not that long ago, and she was talking about how this is the same cycle that we saw in 94 and then with the 96 Olympics, 99 World Cup. It's the same cycle that we're going to see over the next five years. So in a quantifiable measure in five years, where do you think soccer can be after that, after seeing what happened in 94, 96, 99?

22:37Well, soccer, the term soccer you have to dissect because a study came out recently what is your favorite sport to consume, to watch in this country? And it was a poll of 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 people, but it was really interesting. The NFL was first, NBA was second, and soccer as a whole was third. Now, what does that mean? That doesn't mean just Major League Soccer. It doesn't mean just the NWSL. It means the national teams. It means English soccer. It means soccer around the world. But people are consuming and loving soccer as a whole more than they ever did. So the goal for us and the goal for the women next summer and in 2031 when the World Cup, I think, will be back here is to grow Major League Soccer and grow NWSL and grow the national teams.

23:33So how do you quantify that? I don't know exactly how you quantify it. In Major League Soccer terms, it means continuing to get better players here and improving the competition. The in-market product in Major League Soccer is amazing. The in-market product almost sells out in every stadium. NWSL is trying to do the same. And they are on a similar trajectory to MLS probably five or ten years ago where you're seeing franchise valuations skyrocket and you're seeing the league get better and better. So I think just continuing that trajectory is what we need to do. The World Cups accelerate everything.

24:12So if you do well in a World Cup, if the women win next summer, if the women win in 31 on home soil, that accelerates everything. So that's the hope. As I let you go here, one last thing. I mean, obviously, we talked about how the U.S. men are going to do. But one player for everyone to watch out for on the U.S. men's team. I'm going to give you two, so I'm cheating. one is Christian Pulisic is our is is our star and through the last year and a half he's been the best player in the Italian League and the best player in our national team he's going through a little bit of a down spell right now but if he gets going in the right way in the next two months or three months he is an absolute superstar the other who is the who's playing the best of any player in our country right now is Weston McKinney, who plays at Juventus.

25:01And he is, he's a really good player. He's a very versatile player, but he's also magnetic personality wise. And so I think if he has a good World Cup, people are absolutely going to fall in love with him. He's fun to be around. He's always smiling and he's playing the best that he's ever played in his life. So I think one or both of those two have big, big potential this summer.

25:25Landon Donovan:Absolutely. Well, we'll be on the lookout for them. Landon, thanks so much for joining the Bloomberg Business of Soccer. Really appreciate it. And I love the book. Landon was great. Thank you, Vanessa. I appreciate it. That was legendary player for the U.S. men's national team, Landon Donovan. And that does it for this edition of the Business of Soccer. It's part of a new series we're starting on the Bloomberg Business of Sports as we get ready for the FIFA World Cup this summer. I'm Vanessa Perdomo. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business of Sports from Bloomberg Radio around the world.

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