Q&A: USMNT World Cup documentary creator explains video process, relationship with Tyler Adams, and more

After spending the early portion of his career as an insider at the NFL Network, Rand Getlin knew he needed a change.

He started Park Stories, a documentary production company, alongside Janina Pelayo in 2016. The studio’s latest project, U.S. Against The World, chronicles the U.S. men’s national team’s journey in the four years between the 2022 World Cup in Qatar and this summer’s tournament on home soil.

The first three episodes of the five-episode series are available to watch on HBO Max, with episodes debuting Tuesdays at 9 p.m.

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The Inquirer recently sat down with Getlin, who produced and directed the project, to find out what went into making the series.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A: … Janina and I started [Park Stories] in 2016 specifically to tell stories with more depth and nuance, and we were focused on sports because we had great relationships throughout professional and amateur athletics. In 2019, we met Tyler Adams on a show we were working on called Prodigy, where we were tasked with finding eight of the world’s best young athletes under the age of 21. I was in charge of identifying talent and going out and connecting with that talent and seeing if they would want to do a minidocumentary with us. … Tyler was the soccer player that we had identified. And we were very intentional about that. We wanted to get into soccer. I didn’t know anything about the sport, and neither did Janina, but we knew that it was massive, and we knew that the World Cup was coming.

We met Tyler and his family and we did this really cool mini documentary with them. Tyler’s story [is] just an unbelievable story, of resilience and faith and family. And it was like, ‘All right, man, like are all your teammates like this?’ And he was like, ‘My teammates are amazing.’ And that was it. We were hooked. …

We started talking to U.S. soccer about it in February of 2020. COVID-19 hit shortly thereafter, and so we kept the conversations going, and we kept following up. … Then around May 2022, we got a call from a VP from U.S. Soccer that said, ‘Hey, can you guys be cameras up in roughly two days in Cincinnati?’ … And that was it. We were cameras up, and we’ve been cameras up ever since. …

We wanted to tell stories that moved people, and it struck us that if we could figure out a way to tell the national team story during a home World Cup cycle, that had the potential to reach lots of people, and potentially inspire lots of people, and ultimately bring us closer together.

A: We wanted it to be a forever franchise. When we think about storytelling, it’s complicated. … It’s labor intensive, time intensive, and capital intensive. And so you can’t really afford to do one-offs. You’ve got to find these universes within which you can expand and grow, and you can build on the foundation.

… We thought the national team was so special. It was a young group of guys and we were like, ‘Man, let’s just grow with them.’ We want to tell the story through the whole ride and beyond. …

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That said, the creative was ebbing and flowing the whole way. We tried to sell the show in advance of the 2022 World Cup. We ran into, across all of Hollywood, this notion that soccer didn’t work. … It turned out that, because they all passed in 2022, we had a choice to make. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood is, once buyers say no, they don’t want to reopen it. It’s over, and you just move on. … We don’t buy that. We think that they were missing what we’d been able to gather in the two years that we’d learned about the sport.

Fortunately for us, the team went out and put on some great performances. … It was this ‘aha’ moment. Our phones started ringing. We’re in Qatar, at Al Gharrafa, and we’re on the phone with some of the biggest streamers in the world, and they were like, ‘OK, let’s talk.’ … From that point forth, it was 100% like, ‘Hey, we’re going to tell this story over this four years.’

A: One hundred percent. When we met Tyler, he was like 19 or 20 years old. … Then I started looking at the rest of the team, and I’m like, ‘Oh, there was a full wipeout in 2018.’ This is a brand-new team, and they’re really young. They were diverse [and] charismatic. … It just felt to me like a story about a group of young Americans trying to go out and make the country proud, and sacrificing tremendously in pursuit of that. Leaving home at 15, 16 years old, crossing an ocean to live by themselves. … It was the kind of story that, if we could put it in front of America, we had a really special opportunity to change the way that the game was perceived, by helping people fall in love with the humans trying to accomplish that goal.

I was blown away by how humble these guys were, how down to Earth they were, how approachable they were, how kind they were, how polished they were. … I think for Janina and I, it was so clear to us that when people got to know them, they too would fall in love with them, because it’s just impossible not to.

A: Matt Freese, you’ll see some of his backstory in episode five, which is really cool and meaningful. Brenden Aaronson is everywhere throughout the show. We’re looking forward to being able to expand his story, especially. … Mark McKenzie is represented in episode five, as well. And then Auston [Trusty], has obviously been in the squad over the last four years, but with such a short time, we’re not able to deep dive on every player.

But as it relates to Mark, Freese, and Brenden, you get to know them pretty well by the end of episode five. Much more story to tell with Brenden. We’ve got some stuff with him that hasn’t made it into the cut yet. … But we’re hopeful that this is going to continue on. One of the benefits of this being such a young squad is that this shouldn’t be their last World Cup.