• 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.