For the USMNT, a successful summer is harder than ever to define

The Guardian

21 hours ago

In a certain sense, there really is no winning the Concacaf Gold Cup.
Not if you're the United States men's national team, at any rate. While the tournament's name may allude to a glory conferred by the most valuable of precious metals, the whole thing remains among the ugly ducklings of global continental championships.
If you're the US, lifting the biennial Gold Cup this summer would amount to winning it for an eighth time overall and a sixth in a quarter century. There's no novelty to it, no real sense of upward momentum on the long-sought ascent to a higher international plane. Fail to win it, however, and there will be an inquest and existential questions, even though this incarnation of the American roster is missing a half dozen-or-so key pieces, depending on how you count them.
But if the optics of the Gold Cup are zero-sum, it retains an intrinsic value to the Yanks less in the thing itself than in what it simulates: a World Cup. Squint, and pretend that you're playing, say, Poland and South Korea instead of Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, and there's something useful in going through the cadence of a competitive summer tournament. Even if the opponents are just the same old regional foes – fellow Group D denizens Saudi Arabia excepted, as they're a guest team – the slow boil and gathering momentum of an unspooling tournament offers helpful experience.
Certainly, the hope was that the 2025 Gold Cup would be an exercise in putting the finishing touches on a supposed golden generation, positioning all the pieces just so as the team prepared for a career-defining summer next year while hosting the 2026 World Cup. Going through a tournament one last time would be a final chance to spot and address the flaws and fissures in the foundation. Winning it, if at all possible, would be a kind of byproduct of all that finessing and finetuning.
Instead, the Americans will spend the summer trying to rehabilitate their battered reputation after March's Concacaf Nations League debacle. The discourse will probably be dominated by who isn't there as much as who is.
Yet there can still be some real use in this exercise. It's even feasible that the USMNT could have a good summer by showing some signs of life.
'I don't think there's any denying that some of our performances have fallen short over the past year to 18 months,' said defender Walker Zimmerman. 'It's something that us, as players, we obviously aren't satisfied with, and it's a big focal point for this camp. It's always such a great opportunity to have a month in front of the staff, get a lot of quality trainings in together, and find yourself hopefully getting into a rhythm of playing multiple games where you can put everything on the line to try to make a World Cup team in a year's time. It's a massive opportunity.'
All the absences underscore just how prone a summer tournament is to the flukes of form and fitness. But head coach Mauricio Pochettino has a chance to scour his overhauled roster for a few new depth pieces and tactical alternatives in among all the fresh faces, sourced in unexpected number from Major League Soccer. The USMNT's lineup has been largely ossified going back a half decade or so now, and when given a chance, more pleasant surprises like Real Salt Lake's spitfire midfielder Diego Luna might well present themselves. Or players who can offer the American attack a different look anyway, on the semi-regular days when Plan A isn't working.
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Then there are the players who have accomplished resumes at the club level but, for whatever reason, just not really shown it for the national team yet. Malik Tillman, the Bayern Munich castoff, has established himself as one of the best players in the Dutch Eredivisie in an attacking midfielder role where the U.S. could really use a spark. While contributing hugely to PSV's second straight league title, however, Tillman has been largely anonymous for the national team. This is also true of the New Jersey-born, Brazilian-raised Johnny Cardoso who, like Tillman, is 23. So impressive in his season-and-a-half with Real Betis has Cardoso been that a move to mighty Atlético Madrid is reportedly imminent.
With a full national team complement in camp, Tillman and Cardoso would have gotten lost in the shuffle, either the odd men out in the midfield logjam or pushed out of their best positions. Here, now, is a chance for them to make their case, or at least pose some questions about whether the incumbents really ought to be automatic starters.
The importance of identity and tactical systems probably gets overstated at the national team level, where a dearth of time means that an awful lot of teams play broadly the same way. But the coming month does offer Pochettino a chance to cultivate some of the closeness and feistiness that his best club teams displayed. There is perhaps a larger exploration to be undertaken at some point about the ways in which the improved conditions and job security of the modern American player have undercut the existential belligerence the Yanks used to play with, but, for now, any kind of low-level aggravation will do.
Some bite. A little more getting-after-it intensity, even when the stadium is half-empty and the opponent unthreatening, on paper at least. There would be as much value in unlocking any of those intangibles as there would in winning the Gold Cup, even if that's the macro expectation.
'I think I'd be lying if I didn't say, 'Lifting that trophy on the final day' would be what we would consider success. I think that's the standard we've set for ourselves,' said goalkeeper Matt Turner. 'But at the same time, things happen in soccer, and I think what we need to control is what we bring to the table every single day: the intensity, the way we push each other, the passion, the energy, the connection with the fans, with each other, with the staff. We're going to be together for a long period of time and it's a really good opportunity for us to put a lot of things together, tactically, technically, emotionally.'
Taken together, these alternative accomplishments would probably make for a satisfying summer of national team soccer. They might even compensate for a failure to win the Gold Cup.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men's national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist University.