Soldier Field (CHICAGO) — As the American and German players filed out of their locker rooms toward the buses following Saturday’s exhibition match, the air of excitement was impossible to ignore. Next stop for both teams? The 2026 FIFA World Cup.
For the United States men’s national team, this moment has been eight years in the making. The USA was awarded co-hosting rights, along with neighbors Canada and Mexico, just months after the Stars and Stripes’ epic failure to qualify for the 2018 tournament. A new generation of players responded by reaching Qatar 2022, where they fielded the youngest lineup in the competition and still reached the knockout stage. Now in their prime and employed by some of soccer’s marquee clubs, they’re aiming to make history on home soil.
“Excited to get going, man,” heart and soul U.S. midfielder Tyler Adams told the gaggle of reporters after Mauricio Pochettino’s team lost 2-1 to the four-time world champions on Leroy Sané’s second-half goal. “Now it’s down to business.”
Or, more accurately: the business of winning games. And that begins when USA next take the pitch for the real deal on Friday against Paraguay in its World Cup opening match in Los Angeles.
Pochettino’s team performed well against Germany in both sides’ final pre-World Cup warm-up. They outshot and out-possessed FIFA’s 10th ranked team, and even dominated the star-studded Die Mannschaft for long stretches — a feat made more impressive considering they trailed less than two minutes after kickoff on Kai Havertz’s goal.
“We can take a lot of positives,”said veteran left back Antonee “Jedi” Robinson, whose stunning volley pulled the hosts level before halftime. “Conceding that early, we could have easily crumbled, and it could have been a very, very bad day to be going into the tournament with.
“But we fought back, and at times played some really good football, and looked good, looked competitive…we’ve still got time to shore up a few mistakes that we’ve made going into the first game.”
Mistakes are often fatal at the highest level. And as encouraging as the Americans’ response and overall performance was, they still lost the game. Winning is a habit. At the World Cup, there are so such thing as moral victories.
The U.S. players know that as well as anyone. Opening the tournament with a victory over the Paraguayans on Friday is imperative, even though the new 48-team format is more forgiving than the previous editions; 32 countries will now qualify for the knockout stage, including eight third-place finishers across the 12 four-team groups.
As one of the dozen No. 1 seeds — a privilege automatically afforded to the three hosts — the U.S. has a manageable path to the second round, with Australia and Türkiye rounding out Group D.
Those games won’t be easy, but the U.S. is favored to advance. After that, though, a true world power could await.
Christian Pulisic and the USA in action against Germany. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
“We’re gonna face teams like this in the World Cup,” star forward Christian Pulisic said after the Germany match. “We have to be ready to compete with some of the best, and yeah, we’ve had good performances, but we still want to win these games.”
Being able to focus solely on the World Cup now should help. The U.S. delegation flew directly to Irvine, California on Saturday night and will remain there until jetting to Seattle ahead of playing Australia on June 19. The first and final group game against Türkiye will then be back in Los Angeles. That’s a far cry from the USA’s recent itinerary. Pochettino’s 26-man roster was introduced in New York City on May 26. Over the next 11 days, they traveled to Atlanta, Charlotte, back to Atlanta, Chicago and finally onto Irvine.
“It’ll be nice to just get in one place and be able to settle in, try and minimize the travel as much as possible,” Adams said. “We’ve been in a million different places, a million different facilities, in and out.”
Now that they’re on the ground, what’s the plan?
“Watch the film, obviously, and get the little details right,” Pulisic said. “[We’ll] keep working as a team, and we think that we can do it when it really matters.”
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