Something Is Different About This U.S. World Cup Team

Folarin Balogun is a 24-year-old Londoner of Nigerian descent who plays professionally in France and whose claim to an American passport came courtesy of serendipity and birthright citizenship. Mauricio Pochettino is a 54-year-old Argentine whose meteoric coaching career has taken him through some of Europe’s most storied clubs and whose most meaningful connection to American culture is his obsession with the hockey movie “Miracle.”

In years past, the United States men’s national soccer team would’ve never had the juice to lure Balogun into its fold, nor the money to import Pochettino. But everything feels different this summer when it comes to the USMNT, and for all the many, complex reasons why that might be so, it starts with the combined presence of Balogun and Pochettino — who among other attributes, share a lack of personal investment in the sordid history of the program they’re in the process of redefining.

Just one match into their 2026 World Cup, the Americans are already doing things never before seen from them on soccer’s preeminent stage. Their opening 4-1 victory over Paraguay in Los Angeles marked the biggest offensive output in the program’s World Cup history and their largest margin of victory since the inaugural tournament 96 years ago. It also sets up the possibility the Americans could advance to the round of 32 — if not win Group D outright — as soon as Friday, when they take on Australia in Seattle.

Of course, one measly win means little in the big picture, particularly given the dilution of talent inherent in this summer’s newly expanded field of 48. Though Paraguay was far from a pushover, having beaten Brazil and Argentina during South American qualifying, nobody is likely to believe the Americans can pull off a “Miracle on Grass” until they start beating opponents of higher pedigree. Let’s just say their recent history provides reason for skepticism.

There is an immense amount of emotional baggage that comes with being a member of the USMNT around World Cup time — perhaps never more so than this summer, after eight years of breathless buildup around the first home-soil World Cup in 32 years. This is a program that once went 40 years without so much as qualifying for the World Cup, that had won only nine of its previous 37 World Cup matches, and that as recently as 2022, scored just three goals in its four matches — or one fewer than it did last week against Paraguay.

The core of that 2022 U.S. squad, for better or worse, is back on the roster in 2026. But notably, first-timers Balogun and Pochettino seem to be shaping the culture of this USMNT. You can attempt to describe or quantify their influence in all sorts of ways: Balogun’s swagger and deadly scoring touch, Pochettino’s smoldering intensity and tactical mastery. But what is perhaps most important to the task at hand is the way they can shrug off the program’s many past failures as irrelevant to them — and make it sound like sincerity rather than compartmentalizing.

“Today’s today. It’s difficult to compare now to the past,” Pochettino told reporters in Los Angeles following the win over Paraguay. “I don’t know what’s happened in the past.”

Coach Mauricio Pochettino has brought a new energy to the U.S. soccer team. Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill

Pochettino joined the USMNT at one of its lowest points — just after the 2024 Copa America, where it had become the first host country in tournament history to fail to advance out of group play. All it took to pry him away from Europe was a reported annual salary of $6 million — roughly three times what his predecessor Gregg Berhalter earned — and a willingness on the part of U.S. Soccer to grant him the leeway to rebuild the program’s sagging culture.

“Culture,” Pochettino is fond of saying, “eats strategy for breakfast.”

Pochettino’s time at the helm of the American program may be short-lived. His contract ends after the World Cup, and he is widely believed to prefer a return to elite-level European club soccer.

Balogun’s origin story is much more sinuous and intriguing — but equally as instructive for what it says about both the USMNT and America itself.

In the spring of 2021, his mother, Florence, came to New York to visit relatives. But when she attempted to fly home to London, the airline refused to allow her on board, as she was seven months pregnant. Instead, she remained in New York, and on July 3, just hours before Independence Day, she gave birth to a boy she named Folarin. The baby lived just two months in America before he and his mother moved back to England, where young Falorin would go on to become a highly touted prospect in Arsenal’s youth academy and later on England’s U-17 and U-21 national teams.

But thanks to the principle of birthright citizenship, as formalized by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, Falorin Balogun’s birth in New York made him an American citizen. And in 2023, a concerted, multipronged effort by U.S. Soccer and its supporters was successful in luring Balogun to the USMNT over similar entreaties from both England and Nigeria, his parents’ ancestral home.

“I’ve always said the [American] fans gave me so much motivation, showed me so much support,” Balogun said after he scored two goals against Paraguay, referring to a social media recruitment campaign by USMNT fans in 2023. “For me, the most important thing has been being able to repay that.”

Of course, Balogun’s claim to an American passport — and by extension, a USMNT roster spot this summer — is under assault by the Trump administration, which has sought to end the centuries-old policy of birthright citizenship via an executive order signed on the first day of the Trump presidency and that was immediately challenged by the ACLU and other entities. The matter is currently in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in April and is expected to rule later this summer.

Even a ruling that upholds the executive order and effectively abolishes the concept of birthright citizenship, should it come prior to the end of the World Cup on July 19, would be unlikely to result in Balogun’s being booted off the USMNT right away. But it could affect his eligibility for future years, including the 2030 World Cup, which is to be held in Morocco, Portugal and Spain.

Still, as the present World Cup cycle has shown, four years is an eternity in soccer. Who, for example, could have foreseen, as the Americans slouched off the field following their lopsided loss to the Netherlands in Qatar in 2022, that their fortunes might be turned around a quadrennial later by an Argentine coach and a British-Nigerian-American striker?

And who is to say that in 2030, whether or not Pochettino and Balogun are still around, whatever transformative impact they will have had on the USMNT — if that, in fact, is what we are witnessing — might not outlast them both?