WASHINGTON, D.C. – No matter the nation, no matter its potential and no matter its baggage, national teams gather six months before a World Cup hoping for a favorable draw. As a selection of the USA’s most prominent athletes randomly picked one country after another out of a bowl, though, it was hard not to feel like the U.S. men’s national team received some version of a best-case scenario. There were no quote-unquote hard teams to face in the group stage, the natural result of earning a Pot 1 berth as a host nation. They also happened to draw teams they have very valuable – and very recent – experience facing.
First came Australia, the team they beat 2-1 in October. Then came Paraguay, the team they beat 2-1 in November. At the end came a twist – a little slip of paper with four teams’ names on it, the quartet set to face off in a playoff in March for one of the few remaining tickets to the World Cup. Romania, Slovakia and Kosovo make up three-fourths of that group while the fourth is Turikye, a team the USMNT played in a 2-1 loss in June.
“I think we can go into it with a good feeling,” Christian Pulisic said hours after the draw. “Obviously, we’ve played against these teams recently, which is not always the case, so we know, more or less, what they’re going to look like and we know they’re tough opponents as well. We’re not going to take anyone lightly. They’re all going to be tough games but I think it’s great that we have that experience. Obviously, they played against us, too, so they’re in the same boat but it’s cool. It’s cool that those friendlies and some of the other ones were able to prepare us for some of the teams we’re actually going to play.”
2026 World Cup draw winners and losers: USMNT’s Mauricio Pochettino a clear winner; Netherlands get tough draw
James Benge
Should they face a familiar trio next summer, the group stage opponents perfectly serve as pinpoints for the team’s progress in recent months as head coach Mauricio Pochettino finally morphs the team into his vision. One can almost pick out the 2-1 defeat in Connecticut against Turkiye as the exact point where things started to turn around for Pochettino’s team – he had many fresh faces in the mix just before of the Concacaf Gold Cup, a month-long camp in which the head coach began to establish his principles. As games against Australia and Paraguay came along, Pochettino broke out varying versions of a back three that allowed the team to really shine and finish 2025 on a five-game unbeaten run.
“I think if you look at the friendly against Turkiye before Gold Cup, I think you saw a lot of fresh faces, also a lot of experience but also a lot of hunger,” Chris Richards said. “I think we still went toe-to-toe with one of the best teams in Europe and got unlucky with two goals but definitely goals that we could avoid. I think it gave us a lot of confidence going into the Gold Cup and I think after that, playing teams like Australia, who are one of the top teams in their division, again went toe-to-toe and beat them and then Paraguay, you saw the same thing so I think it just shows that form the summer, from friendlies, that you can still improve but also with new faces being added in, with new systems, with new play styles, things like that. It shows that we are very versatile and that we’re also a very tough team to play, regardless of who steps on the pitch.”
The fact that there’s a lot of roster turnover and several different playing styles for Pochettino to realistically choose from makes the USMNT a tricky opponent, even for those who feel they have a sense of familiarity.
“I think it’s good to have some different options, obviously depending on opponents, depending on how we want to play, who’s available and I think we’ve done a good job of that,” Pulisic said. “I think we’ve shown we can play a few different ways so for me, I see that as a positive and makes it tougher for them. They’re not going to know what to expect.”
There is one difference that sticks out above the rest, though – the fact that the World Cup is a series of now-or-never opportunities that friendlies simply cannot replicate.
“I think we are going to play in different contexts, different circumstances and of course, the timeline is different,” Pochettino said. “We are going to arrive with the same confidence or form. That is why. The good thing that we compete[d] against Paraguay and Australia in a very good way, again, very good teams and of course, [there is] Turkiye, [could] be, but there’s another three that are going to challenge Turkiye, too … but I think it’s good, the reference, because we are going to feel that we can beat them but at the same time, when you beat someone or when you hurt someone, they are waiting for you. They could say, ‘but now we will see.’ When it’s going to be serious, it’s going to be the World Cup. That is why. Caution. We need to be [cautious].”
In the aim of being cautious, the USMNT will naturally begin scouting their opposition as soon as possible but the quirk of a lengthy qualification campaign means there is plenty of work for Pochettino and company to do.
“The problem is rather [than] to have three teams to scout, we have two plus four because we need to scout the four,” Pochettino said. “From here to March, we are going to amplify the numbers of teams that we need to observe because now we have, of course, Australia and Paraguay but we need to add another four teams, be prepared, all the analysts and to start to work now because we cannot wait until March and then start to work, no? We need to be ready from now.”
Pochettino was also surprisingly emotional about the fact that do-or-die moments do not exist solely for teams as a whole at World Cups, but for every individual that takes part in one.
“My dream always was to play in the World Cup, to play for my national team, Argentina, and be involved in a World Cup,” he said. “In some moments in my career, I was thinking it’s not going to happen but [then] it happened and [at] 31 years old, I had the possibility to play at the World Cup and it disappeared so quick. I don’t think that I [didn’t] do everything and I didn’t do enough with the possibility to do better but it’s true that through my experience, because after that, I suffer a massive depression because it’s like your biggest dream disappeared and then you feel that [there’s] not going to be another possibility to be involved in this and that, for me, is the most powerful energy that I want to translate to the people, to the players. Please, do everything that you [can]. Be humble enough and try to build, with your teammates, a good energy, a good dynamic.”
Caution or not, the draw has provided the perfect foundation for the USMNT to pull off the groundbreaking performance they have always targeted next summer in the hopes of further accelerating the growth of soccer in a country that has been slow to embrace the world’s most popular sport. There are officially no excuses they can pull from, especially as things trend in the right direction for them with a year-ending unbeaten streak. The onus is well and truly on the World Cup hosts to well and truly live up to the potential many had spotted in them years earlier.
“Potentially, we’ve played all three of these teams in the last six months but that can be a little bit of a false kind of sense of security,” Tim Ream said. “We need to make sure that we’re preventing that kind of security and safety feeling from setting in and we have enough guys with enough experience who know how to keep pushing, keep pushing each other and keep pushing the team in the right direction knowing what we could possibly do but again, it’s down to us and our work and our intensity and our focus.”
