Members of the United States men’s national soccer team pose after announcement of the team’s roster on Tuesday in New York ahead of the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Associated Press
The 26 players tasked with delivering the biggest moment in American men’s soccer history were officially named to the United States roster on Tuesday.
But right out of the gate, things did not go smoothly. U.S. Soccer has to hope that bungling such an easy lift as a roster reveal isn’t a harbinger for the much more difficult task ahead: trying to capture the imagination of the American public.
In other countries World Cup roster reveals are huge news, as fans live and die with which players will make the team, what newcomers are ascending, what aging stars will be left off. The players are household names, the trajectory of their careers a point of civic fascination and the selection for a World Cup a national honor.
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In this country, not so much. Aside from Christian Pulisic, who has been the face of the team for nearly a decade and who is inescapable in World Cup-related advertising, the rest of the team is largely unknown to the greater American public. Millions were not waiting to learn head coach Mauricio Pochettino’s roster.
But Fox Sports built a show around it, as part of their kickoff to wall-to-wall World Cup coverage that begins with the opening matches on June 11. Fox turned it into a made-for-TV event, as though we actually are the kind of nation sitting on the edge of our collective seats for the news.
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And then someone leaked the U.S. roster three days before the scheduled reveal, taking all the steam out of Fox’s programming.
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It was emblematic of how this World Cup has been unfolding, with insanely priced tickets, pricey hotel rooms left unbooked and fears from international visitors over visiting the United States. Enthusiasm is tepid, at best.
Fox is trying to drum up support, with overhyped productions like Tuesday’s. The “reveal” of the already revealed gave a hint of what’s to come. Do you want to hear Tom Brady talking about soccer? Don’t care for enormous doses of Alexi Lalas’ bloviating? Oddly placed musical acts? Enormous stage sets and screaming announcers? This coverage might not be for you.
The U.S. roster itself contained no enormous surprises. Thirteen of the 26 players were on Gregg Berhalter’s Qatar roster in 2022, which finished second in its group with a win and two draws, then lost in the round of 16 to the Netherlands. Three newcomers narrowly missed that 2022 tournament due to injury.
Can this team do better? Can this roster become the first U.S. team to win a knockout game since 2002, when the upstart Americans made it to the quarterfinals?
We’ll find out. This is the most internationally experienced and arguably most talented team the Americans have ever assembled. But no one is taking a look at this roster and projecting it as world beaters.
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Among the surprises was the omission of Sunnyvale’s Diego Luna, a midfielder who played youth soccer in Palo Alto and was part of the Earthquakes Academy from age 12 to 15. Now with Real Salt Lake in Major League Soccer, Luna has been a regular for Pochettino, yet he didn’t make the cut. Neither did Tanner Tessmann, a Lyon midfielder who had been projected as a potential starter for the U.S. team; he’d been hampered by a muscle injury, which may have led to his exclusion.
Pochettino, who received criticism for informing players who didn’t make the team via email rather than a personal phone call, did not want to discuss why certain players were left off. In his condensed stint with the team, he has shown he won’t be warm and fuzzy.
Making the team was Gio Reyna, a player thought to be on the bubble because of his lack of playing time with his German club Borussia Mönchengladbach. Reyna, son of former U.S. captain Claudio Reyna, became the second-most well-known American player during the last World Cup cycle, largely because of the embarrassing scandal that erupted in the aftermath of Qatar. Reyna got little playing time, pouted, and Berhalter criticized him — anonymously, though everyone knew who he was talking about. In a rage, Reyna’s parents exposed an embarrassing domestic violence incident from Berhalter’s past in a bid to get him fired.
After an internal investigation, Berhalter didn’t get fired for his past misdeed. But he was fired in the summer of 2024 for being an uninspiring leader. That led to the hiring of Argentinian Pochettino a few months later, giving him only about 20 months to analyze his players and prepare his team, which had no qualifying process to sharpen the group.
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Now his roster is set and the big event is almost upon us.
“The first thing is to believe,” Pochettino said Tuesday. “Why not us?”