If you'll indulge me for a minute, the 2026 World Cup has had a certain March Madness feel to it.
There's been Cinderellas like Cape Verde who have had their unexpected moments in the sun. Paraguay had the feeling of a rough-and-tumble team from a mid-tier conference that knocked off a giant and made life miserable for an afternoon for another blue blood. Norway was like 2026 Iowa as a dark horse with a star and some unheralded talent making it deep in the tournament.
But, by and large, like the post-NIL and transfer portal NCAA tournament, the biggest names are there as we wind down the bracket.
Keeping with a March Madness analogy, you'd expect that the team ranked 17th in the pre-tournament polls would usually max out at the Sweet 16 before bowing out. The United States was 17th in the FIFA World Rankings before the World Cup and fell to Belgium in the Round of 16.
To me, this was a decent result for a team no one thought of as elite on the world stage coming into the tournament and hasn't been past the Round of 16 in a generation.
Those who expected more from the USMNT will probably point to the fact that it was a home World Cup. But even hosts with plenty of footballing pedigree like Spain (1982), Mexico (1986), Italy (1990), Germany (2006), and Brazil (2014) maxed out at the semifinals or worse. And of non-traditional soccer countries to host the Cup since 1980 (the U.S., South Korea, Japan, South Africa, Russia, Qatar, and Canada) only Korea and Russia made it past the Round of 16.
I also came away impressed by the U.S.' style in the World Cup, which may sound puzzling if you only watched their performance against Belgium that, to be fair, was meek.
But in every game except Belgium that mattered (I'm not counting the glorified friendly against Turkey), the USMNT displayed a degree of game control that wasn't familiar from past World Cups.
In tight spots like when the game devolved into a Copa America-esque slugfest against Australia or when playing a man down in the knockout stage against Bosnia, the Americans largely held their nerve. Talent and skill are wholly apparent, and the majority of the World Cup squad play club football in Europe's top five leagues.
There are of course issues with the USMNT as a whole. But I can't help but wonder if they aren't being a little bit overblown.
To me, the most hot-button issue that's come from the U.S.' elimination on July 6 is the discussion about how much the pay-to-play model dominates youth soccer and the potential development pipeline for the national team. And it is definitely a problem when you consider soccer's ethos as the world's egalitarian game. But for generations, that hasn't really been how the sport has been treated in the U.S.
It's only been in the past 10-15 years that the MLS and the club pyramid in the U.S. has become even a bit serious about academy systems like European or South American countries have. That system takes years to build up, and I think well-meaning fans should support it through seeing their local clubs if they can afford it.
U.S. Soccer as a de facto national governing body for the sport will have to decide if it has the wherewithal to truly support a soccer development culture that gives kids from all economic levels chances or turns a blind eye to a private equity wealth extraction model that could make the USMNT player pool look more like a lacrosse team.
Additionally, U.S. Soccer not fighting back against administrative and travel costs that regular families have to pay makes it more likely that players like Obed Vargas and Esmir Bajraktarevic are going to continue to decide to play for their ancestral countries, not the U.S.
Finally, and somewhat obviously, a sport's culture is more than five weeks every six years. In the past, I'd say this fact worked against soccer. And while there are always going to be people who only tune into the sport during the World Cup, you see the Premier League on TV all the time now.
Despite the Apple TV contract, you're much more likely to see a random MLS game on at a sports bar on a Saturday evening than you were 10 years ago. Liga MX is a fixture on Spanish-language TV. There actually is a deep soccer culture now in the U.S. That matters, and will continue to, even if "the soccer moment" never truly arrives in the country and the USMNT never makes it to a World Cup semifinals.
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