The United States was awarded co-hosting rights for this World Cup alongside Canada and Mexico as part of the North America 2026 bid, a decision that was announced in 2018 and has spent the eight years since acquiring the weight of a cultural moment. This is not simply a football tournament happening in proximity. This is the moment, or so the argument runs in the press releases, that football in America becomes something different from what it has been — when the largest audience in the largest market in the world watches the game at its highest intensity for five weeks and finds itself changed by the experience.
Football in America, of course, has been on its way to becoming something different since at least the 1994 World Cup — also hosted here, also argued to be a turning point, also producing a significant (if sometimes overstated) shift in American engagement with the sport. MLS has grown substantially. The generation of American players now operating in European leagues is the most talented in the country’s history. Mauricio Pochettino, appointed manager in 2023 following Gregg Berhalter’s departure, has brought to the programme the tactical sophistication and the demand for intensity that European football requires.
Whether all of this produces a USA team capable of doing what no American side has done — reaching a World Cup semi-final or beyond, in a tournament where the opposition includes Brazil, Argentina, Spain, France and Germany — is the question the next five weeks will answer.
The Group and the Advantage of Home
USA are in Group D alongside Paraguay, Australia and Turkey. The group is manageable but not easy. Australia, with Harry Souttar and a squad that has qualified consistently in recent cycles, will defend with discipline and make every match competitive. Turkey, with Hakan Çalhanoğlu at Inter Milan and a squad that qualified ahead of expectations through UEFA, carry creative quality in midfield. Paraguay, from CONMEBOL, provide the physical directness that South American qualifying produces.
The United States will play their group matches across multiple venues but the knock-on effect of home support — the crowd noise, the familiarity of time zones, the logistical advantages of not travelling internationally — is significant in tournament football. Host nations have historically outperformed expectations in the opening rounds. The psychological pressure cuts the other way in the knockout stages, when the weight of the home crowd’s expectation becomes a burden rather than a boost, but the group stage benefit is real.
The Squad Pochettino Built
Mauricio Pochettino announced his twenty-six-man squad on the twenty-sixth of May in New York City, at an event that generated more mainstream American media coverage than any previous USMNT selection in history. The squad has an average age of twenty-six and represents, in its composition, the most experienced American group to have played consistently in European leagues.
Christian Pulisic, thirty, is the most capped player in the squad with eighty-four appearances and remains the player around whom much of the USA’s attacking play will be organised — his ability to carry the ball at pace and finish in tight situations giving Pochettino the directness that USMNT’s best attacking moves have been built on.
Weston McKennie, at Juventus, provides the physical box-to-box quality in central midfield. Tyler Adams, now at Bournemouth, is the defensive midfielder whose reading of the game and whose ability to win the ball and distribute give Pochettino the defensive midfield platform that sophisticated possession football requires.
Gio Reyna — the most technically gifted young American player of his generation, whose career has been complicated by a series of significant injuries — was confirmed in the squad despite Tanner Tessmann’s absence. Reyna’s fitness and availability across a five-week tournament is the selection whose outcome Pochettino cannot control, but his inclusion is the choice of a manager who believes in the player’s quality enough to accept the risk.
Folarin Balogun, at Monaco, is the centre-forward Pochettino has built his attacking plan around — a player who grew up in the USA but developed at Arsenal’s academy, whose physical presence and ability to receive under pressure and turn towards goal make him the focal point of the American attack.
No Diego Luna, No Tessmann
The most discussed omissions are Diego Luna — who was expected by many analysts to make the squad on form and was left out in favour of Alejandro Zendejas, the Club América winger who holds a US passport — and Tanner Tessmann, the Venezia midfielder whose physicality and energy in pressing situations made him a fan favourite. Pochettino’s reasoning on Tessmann was tactical: with Adams as the only true defensive midfielder, he wanted a different profile of player in the deeper central roles rather than duplicating the type.
Zendejas’s inclusion is the decision that generates the most debate within American football culture — the discussion about eligibility switching, about what it means to represent the United States, about whether the best available player at a given position should always take priority over the longer-serving player. That conversation will continue regardless of what Zendejas does at the tournament.
The Host Nation Pressure
In 1994, when the United States hosted the World Cup for the first time, they reached the round of sixteen before losing to Brazil. The result was celebrated as a success, and it was — the expectations for a country hosting the sport’s biggest event for the first time while operating in a context where the sport was still peripheral to mainstream American culture were different from what they are now.
In 2026, the expectations are higher. American football culture has developed. The fanbase in major cities — New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas — is large and genuinely passionate. The weight of hosting, the visibility of playing in MetLife Stadium and SoFi Stadium and AT&T Stadium in front of eighty thousand people, is a different kind of pressure from what the 1994 squad faced.
Pochettino, who managed Tottenham to a Champions League final and has operated in high-pressure environments across his career, has spoken about the home tournament advantage as something to be embraced rather than feared. Whether the players — several of whom are twenty-two or twenty-three and playing in their first major tournament — can internalise that message when the crowd noise peaks and the moment demands everything they have is something no preparation can guarantee.
The Verdict
USA should advance from Group D without drama. The round of sixteen will likely bring an opponent from Group C — potentially Brazil or Morocco — and that match is where the tournament’s honest assessment of this American side begins.
A quarter-final would represent the best result in American World Cup history since 2002. A semi-final would represent a transformation in the country’s relationship with the sport that goes beyond football into something broader about American sporting identity. Whether Pochettino’s squad is capable of reaching the semi-final depends on whether the European-trained core — Pulisic, McKennie, Adams, Reyna when fit — can produce their best performances simultaneously in the same five-week period, and whether Balogun develops into the tournament centre-forward the squad needs him to be.
The talent is the closest to world-class that American football has ever produced. The expectation is the highest it has ever been. The tournament is at home.
What else are they saving it for.