The United States will host the men’s World Cup in a little under one year. The vibe around the program could not possibly be worse, and enthusiasm levels could not possibly be lower.
Some of this funk can be explained by the U.S. team getting embarrassed on the field. Until they hung five goals on poor Trinidad and Tobago over the weekend, the USMNT had lost four straight games by an aggregate score of 9-2. Two of those were competitive games against CONCACAF rivals and two were friendly losses to legit European teams, though there’s little point in drawing a distinction between the pairs of matches, because the stakes in both were the same: nothing. Losing is one thing. The larger and thornier issue is that if the team were winning, all they could win would be a reprieve from people paying attention to the program’s structural bustedness.
Unless they are qualifying for or playing in the World Cup, every U.S. match is a either an actual friendly or a primped-up one in the guise of a match that matters. The Gold Cup, which is happening now, and the Nations League, which apparently happened in the spring, have occasionally played host to great, interesting matches, though neither tournament is capable of being anything more than a place for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to have something to do while the major soccer nations in the world are engaged in (more or less) meaningful continental competition. By their nature, they cannot be real tests.
One could make a counterargument that even fake tournaments give the team and its players time to develop chemistry. Rather, one could make that argument if the real team was playing in these fake tournaments. Maybe two of the starters in the T&T game would feature in the national team’s actual best XI. Several of the other nine would-be starters are hurt, yet a handful, including the team’s best player, have made the correct choice to prioritize their club careers over playing for their country in a fake tournament. Christian Pulisic is coming off of two of perhaps the best-ever seasons by an American player in Europe, and he is justifiably spending his summer recuperating rather than thrashing his body around some more. He is the poster boy for an uncomfortable reality for U.S. national team hardcores: no matter how much he succeeds in Europe, only the World Cup truly matters.
Pulisic’s absence has not gone over well with said hardcores. Landon Donovan said Pulisic skipping the Gold Cup pissed him off, which got Pulisic’s father to escalate the dust-up by calling Donovan out for taking a break from the USMNT over a decade ago, also before a World Cup summer. Ever since USMNT players started flocking to Europe en masse, Donovan’s main public position has been one of skepticism: towards the idea that Serie A or the Bundesliga is actually better than MLS, towards people finding his own club career disappointing because he mostly played in MLS, and towards the idea that making it big on the largest stage and in the hardest competitions matters more than beating Jamaica like 15 times a year.
Unfortunately, Pulisic responded. “When it comes to those guys, I don’t know, I guess it is tough because I looked up to those guys growing up,” he said. “Some of these guys were my idols and I respect them so much as players.” He said he offered to play in the two pre–Gold Cup friendlies, which Mauricio Pochettino took issue with. “With Christian, he explained that he wanted to be involved in the two games and, knowing that, I respect and understand him. I understand him, but I don’t need him to understand our decisions,” the manager said. “Players need to listen and stick with our plan. They cannot dictate the plan.”
This whole saga is frustrating in its particulars. I’d prefer if the team didn’t lose four in a row, mostly because smirking gasbag Alexi Lalas would not have a plank on which to advance his solution to the USMNT’s woes, which is: it’s time to get racist. I’d also prefer that everyone was not fighting all the time, that Pulisic could be left to rest, and that the American soccer world would not throw a fit about anything having to do with the Gold Cup.
But a stronger feeling than frustration here is malaise. The long-prophesied mass soccerification of American men’s athletes has finally happened and it mostly has not mattered. MLS is still ass, dozens of players have crossed the Atlantic and proven their skill at a bunch of the biggest cubs in the world, and even though the U.S. has produced one elite player, the national team is basically as successful as it was 20 years ago. It is cool for American soccer players to finally be able to play in Europe, but it is hard to shake the slow-dawning realization that this is probably as big as soccer in America ever gets. The team will be better with Pulisic, Weston McKennie, and Tim Weah back in the fold, but you’d have to be delusional to think they can even come close to making the semifinals next summer.
If all those guys were around for the Gold Cup, the team would probably perform better, which would only serve to underscore the unavoidable point that the USMNT is a big fish in a small pond. If the U.S. were in, say, CONMEBOL, they would be regularly exposed to and in all likelihood humiliated by some of the best teams in the world. They would have legitimate competition more often than every four years, and fans would be able to feel like more games mattered than the one knockout-round match the team qualifies for and loses in the World Cup. Instead, as we have it now, the club-soccer aspect of American soccer legitimating itself has happened, and not only has national team success failed to follow, there are not even real games to play.
That is part of why the looming specter of the 2026 World Cup feels like a threat more than a promise. The rest is, well, everything else happening in the United States, both on and off the nation’s soccer fields. Nobody is attending the U.S.’s big World Cup prep tournament, and the biggest story beside the empty stadia is FIFA announcing the return of racism. The U.S. government is also busy trying to terrorize and deport as many people as they can. It’s not hard to imagine the Trump administration shrugging their shoulders as their ICE goons are unleashed en masse on the horrified millions of fans who travel to see their teams play in the U.S. next summer—though given the recent history of autocratic governments who have hosted the World Cup simply pausing the most public parts of their engines of violent repression for a few weeks, the more likely bad outcome is a bunch of fans simply choosing not to travel.
American soccer has always been interesting because of its contradictions. The U.S. is the most sports-upped nation in the world by every metric (Olympic success, financial heft of the stateside sports industry, etc.) except for success in the most important tournament for the most popular sport in the world. Unlike gargantuan TV rights deals or even Olympic medals, World Cup success can’t be bought, and the success of much smaller countries with much richer soccer traditions compared to the U.S. bumbling its way around despite having the most money and nearly the most people suggests that there is something about winning international soccer tournaments that transcends actuarial analysis.
Enthusiasm for the American soccer project is understandable, then, both on its own terms and also because it represents the quest to find an answer to the much more complex question of what makes people good at sports. The conventional wisdom was always that the U.S. could be the best men’s soccer nation in the world if our best athletes simply played soccer instead of spreading themselves thin, with the unspoken assumption of inevitability. But even that assumes a determinism that doesn’t, and shouldn’t, exist. And I expect the 2026 World Cup to demonstrate that.