According to an interview he gave to the New York Times in 2010, this movie was made during the middle of Wes Bentley's decade-long, extremely serious addiction to cocaine and heroin. He said in that interview that he only accepted any movie roles during that time so that he would have money to buy enough drugs.
The scene of the wedding reception of Gino Pariani and Janet Capiello had the actual St. Louis players, Frank Borghi, Gino Pariani, and Harry Keough, and their children and grandchildren, as guests attending the reception.
In 1950, London bookmakers were offering odds of 500-1 against the Americans winning. Indeed, so staggering was the upset result, that the New York Times refused to run the score, as they believed it to be a hoax.
Director David Anspaugh and Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo were unhappy with studio executives, who cut their budget from sixty-five million dollars to twenty-seven million dollars. Thus, the running time had to be reduced from almost two hours and ten minutes, to one hour and forty-one minutes. Some notable exclusions were Frank "Pee Wee" Wallace as a German P.O.W., and an emotional scene of "America as a melting pot", in which the players go to Ellis Island and look up records of their ancestors. Pizzo said that only forty-five to fifty percent of what he intended to be in the movie, actually made it into the final cut.
This movie claimed that English player Stanley Mortensen scored a hat-trick in a FA Cup Final game three years earlier, when it was not to happen for three years in the future. This was the famous "Matthews Final" of 1953 named after Mortensen's teammate Stan Matthews, despite Mortensen's hat-trick. This hat-trick is also the first Wembley FA Cup Final hat-trick.