The men’s World Cup is happening! And it’s happening in the country where I live! (It’s also happening in Mexico and Canada, but I don’t live in those places.)

Before kickoff of the first game (Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m. ET!), I wanted to swoop in with a little mini-preview of the biggest World Cup ever.

Like I said the other day, we’re going to be posting three times per week during the World Cup — 50 percent more newsletter for a 50 percent bigger World Cup! However, the newsletters won’t be entirely focused on the World Cup, like this one is — they’ll feature a grab-bag of all sports. Next one comes out Friday. Enjoy the Sports!

– Rodger Sherman

Today’s Lineup

We do not know a lot about this USMNT, but I’m optimistic?
More teams are competing than ever, which is great for tiny island nations
The World Cup is still special … but the U.S. could muck it up

🇺🇸⚽️🦅 It’s called soccer 🇺🇸⚽️🦅

This could be the USMNT’s best World Cup since its 2002 quarterfinals run. This U.S. men’s national team is loaded with players in their primes playing well for teams in the major European leagues. They’re experienced, but not old. And more often than not, World Cup hosts outperform expectations.

On the other hand … it’s almost impossible to get a feel for this team’s current form. As hosts, the USMNT was able to skip qualifying. The U.S. still hasn’t really fielded a fully competitive team under head coach Mauricio Pochettino, who has been in charge since 2024.

How will it go? I don’t know! But I’ll try to give you a quick breakdown:

The USMNT’s core is almost entirely built out of players who play big roles for clubs in the Big 5 European leagues. Christian Pulisic is playing like the star he was supposed to be — since joining AC Milan in 2023, he’s led the team in goals, and he was also their most productive player this season with 0.67 goals+assists/90. Weston McKennie was named to the Serie A Team of the Season for Juventus. Folarin Balogun scored in seven straight games (!!!) for Monaco, spanning from February to April. Tyler Adams, Antonee Robinson, and Brenden Aaronson are critical players for their Premier League teams — Bournemouth, Fulham, and Leeds, respectively.
All of those players besides Balogun were important pieces on the 2022 World Cup team that advanced out of the group stages, and all of them are under 30.
Point being: This is the moment. It’s our home World Cup, most of the team’s key players have panned out as well or better than expected, and they’re in the most productive eras of their careers.
There is, however, an obvious weakness: The team is weak on defense. The USMNT has given up at least two goals in every match it has played this year, including five against Belgium.
We’re all waiting and praying for Chris Richards. Richards is the team’s best center back. He helped Crystal Palace win the FA Cup and reach the UEFA Conference League Final … but he tweaked his ankle in May, and has only logged one practice with the national team. The team’s next-best center back is 38-year-old Tim Ream, who has been playing with the USMNT since 2011. Richards is reportedly good to go, but his fitness is clearly the biggest question mark of the World Cup for Team USA.
Pochettino seems unsure what to do back there. He’s bringing ten defenders (most teams have eight or nine, and some as few as six) but might only start three of them, as he toys around with a three-back lineup. (Although thinking about the lineup in terms of formation is somewhat simplistic — the team’s shape changes depending on whether they have the ball.)
Pochettino has had a lot of success with various clubs, but he has never coached a national team before. The USMNT hasn’t exactly shined since he took over in September 2024, finishing fourth in the CONCACAF Nations League and second in the Gold Cup …
… but the U.S. squads for both of those events looked vastly different from its World Cup roster. Because Team USA qualified automatically, they’ve played a full strength lineup pretty rarely over the past four years. The 2025 Gold Cup roster, in particular, barely looked like this USMNT because the event was played concurrently with the Club World Cup.
(Honestly, it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth that Pulisic skipped the Gold Cup last year. I know, players need time off … but it was the USMNT’s only competitive event the year before hosting the World Cup! He should’ve been there!)
OK, back to good news: World Cup hosts usually do really well. Dating back to Mexico in 1986, host nations tend to significantly outperform expectations. (The exceptions: Qatar couldn’t really do much in 2022, and while Brazil made the semis in 2014 … the semifinal match went poorly, to say the least.) We just wrote about the Olympic Host Bump, which saw Italy breaking through in events like biathlon and luge.
The United States famously did well in two home World Cups: The 1994 men’s team made it out of the group stage for the first time since 1934 (RIP, Andrés Escobar), and the women won the World Cup in 1999, which is as good as you can do at the World Cup.
Take a quick scan of Team USA’s group, and it looks pretty favorable: We’re up against Australia, Paraguay, and Turkey. Australia is the only one of those three teams to have qualified for a World Cup since 2010, and the Socceroos aren’t exactly world-beaters.
But we really shouldn’t sleep on our opponents. Turkey has one of its best teams in years, and reached the quarters of the Euros two years ago. Australia reached the Round of 16 at the last World Cup. And Paraguay beat Brazil and Argentina on its way through South American qualifying.
Opta Analyst actually projects Team USA as the weakest of the four teams in the group. That’s a pretty harsh outlier, but everybody seems to feel this is a very evenly matched group. The Athletic gives Team USA the best odds in the group to make it out … but even so, they’re only projecting Team USA with a 85 percent chance to make it out of the group. That sounds good, but the other 11 groups all have a team with 90 percent or better probability to make the knockout stages.
I keep flip-flopping here. The talent seems good; the run-up to the World Cup has been bad; we don’t really know who will take the field; it’s hard to get a read on their opponents.
I hate to be so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about everything here … but this is the World Cup. Soccer players spend all year playing dozens of matches to sort out their club’s position in the table. Then once every four years they play 3-8 matches with teammates that they’ve only had a few weeks to practice with, and the outcome determines how they’re remembered across the globe. It’s bonkers, and that’s why we love it.

🌎📈 A Bigger World 🌎📈

It’s the biggest World Cup ever: 48 (FORTY-EIGHT) teams! Quick math: That’s 50 percent larger than the 32-team format the World Cup had used since 1998.

The good news: We’re getting a ton of cool, new teams who usually wouldn’t be in the World Cup. Four teams are making their World Cup debuts, which is the same number that debuted in the 2014, 2018, and 2022 World Cups combined. Six teams are playing in the World Cup for the first time in the 21st century. Let’s celebrate some of these teams!

🇨🇼 Curaçao 🇨🇼 is in the World Cup for the first time, becoming the smallest nation ever to reach the World Cup. A Caribbean territory of the Netherlands, Curaçao is also just the second non-sovereign nation to reach the World Cup, and the first since the Dutch East Indies in 1938. Curaçao has a population of just 150,000 people … and soccer isn’t even the most popular sport there! Curaçaoans love baseball, and are responsible for most of the players on the Dutch World Baseball Classic team. The national soccer team has improved greatly in recent years thanks to a number of Netherlands-born players with Curaçaoan heritage who came up through the Dutch youth system.
Also debuting, 🇨🇻 Cape Verde 🇨🇻, the third-smallest country in World Cup history! (Cool team nickname alert: THE BLUE SHARKS!) An archipelago off the coast of West Africa, Cape Verde (rhymes with “herd”) clinched a World Cup spot at home in front of a raucous crowd — absolute scenes. Click on that video if you wanna be really surprised by the accent of the player who was interviewed, a member of the widespread Cape Verdean diaspora.
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan 🇺🇿 made its first World Cup ever! (Cool nickname alert: THE WHITE WOLVES!) (Damn, everybody has a cool nickname.) Coached by legendary Italian defender Fabio Cannavaro, it is the first of the seven nations named “—stan” to reach the World Cup. Almost every player on the roster plays in Uzbekistan or Iran … except for Abdukodir Khusanov, who plays regularly for Premier League powerhouse Manchester City(!!!)
🇯🇴 Jordan 🇯🇴 is making its World Cup debut. LeBron could never! (Cool team nickname alert: THE CHIVALROUS ONES!) The country’s crown prince has been in the stands at a lot of the team’s games; he’s got his own custom jersey, a nice perk of royalty.
🇭🇹 Haiti 🇭🇹 is back in the World Cup for the first time since 1974! (Cool team nickname alert: LES GRENADIERS!) Due to ongoing crisis and conflict in Haiti, the team hasn’t played a home game since 2019. Coach Sébastien Migné still has never been to Haiti. (Incidentally, Haiti “hosted” matches in Curaçao during qualifying — one tiny island, two World Cup teams!) The team is led by the phenomenally-named Duckens Nazon, who led all of CONCACAF in goals during qualifying.
🇮🇶 Iraq 🇮🇶 is in the World Cup for the first time since 1986. (Cool team name alert: They’re the Lions of Mesopotamia!) Needless to say, it’s remarkable that a nation that has been through so much can field a competitive team. “The team is the one thing where you’ll have Sunnis. Shias, Kurds, Christians all working together,” a fan told The Athletic. Iraq was able to host games during its World Cup qualifying run for the first time in decades, with attendance peaking at over 60,000. Aymen Hussein, who scored the winning goal against Bolivia to put Iraq through to the World Cup, lost his father in an al-Qaeda attack, and his brother was kidnapped by ISIS and is presumed dead.
🇳🇴 Norway 🇳🇴 is in the World Cup for the first time since 1998, which makes sense, because Erling Haaland is one of the world’s best players. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 is also back for the first time since 1998, which is great, because the Tartan Army is one of the world’s best-traveling fanbases.

The bad news: a 48-team World Cup miiiiiiiiiiiight be unnecessarily big. The expansion will result in a complicated format, a diluted group stage, and a weaker overall competition.

Not to burst any bubbles … but these new teams in the World Cup are not, you know, good, strictly speaking. Haiti finished last in its group at last year’s Gold Cup. Cape Verde failed to qualify for last year’s Africa Cup of Nations. Qatar was outscored 7-1 in the last World Cup. In New Zealand’s last ten matches, it has won once, with one draw and eight losses.
In the 32-team format, the top two teams from each group advanced to the knockout Round of 16. Easy, simple, clean. This year, the group stages will trim the 48-team field to 32. The top two teams from each group will advance to the knockout stage, and so will the top eight overall third-place teams from the group stage.
So the standard for advancing just got a lot lower. Teams will probably be able to get through on three points, as well as some weird scoreboard watching: The mediocre teams hoping to make it through from third-place won’t just be keeping tabs on their own groups, but also the mediocre teams in every group.
My #1 sport is college football, and it has gone through a notable change the past few years: Conferences have increased in size and eliminated divisions, resulting in a larger cohort of teams competing against each other with fewer tiebreakers to sort out the standings. The results have been chaotic; it’s how we got Duke winning the ACC on a five-way tiebreaker that came down to opponent winning percentage.
Picking those third-place teams could get messy. As a heads up, the tiebreakers go in this order: Points, goal differential, total goals scored, red and yellow cards accumulated, and then global FIFA rankings.
Advancing could come down to one brutal question: Who got placed in a group with the worst World Cup newcomer, and how aggressively did they pummel them? Whoever faces Curaçao or Cape Verde will be incentivized to put four or five goals on them.
And then we’ll have a knockout Round of 32, which is as big as the entire tournament used to be. It’s gonna be a lot of World Cup soccer … so that’s good, at least.

🇺🇸⚽️ An American World Cup ⚽️🇺🇸

Photo of Argentina-Iceland at Auburn posted by Justin Ferguson of the Auburn Observer.

The week or so ahead of the World Cup has filled my heart with a handful of little moments that made me happy that America is hosting the world.

There’s a German guy road-tripping around the South. Yesterday he saw Auburn’s War Eagle and then posted “DUDE LMAO THIS IS A GAS STATION” from the Auburn Buc-ees. As a lover of American road trips, I’m all over it. There’s video of an older couple gleefully thanking Algeria for deciding to stay in Lawrence, Kansas, and pledging their support to the Fennec Foxes. And sentences like “the Spanish national team has arrived in downtown Chattanooga.”

Diasporic glee is pouring out across America as national teams have sought out their country’s hyphenated-American communities. The Bosnian team played a game in St. Louis, where tens of thousands of Bosnians relocated during the 1990s. The Cape Verde team had a send-off event in Rhode Island, which has a huge percentage of the American Cape Verdean population.

Remember how I said Haiti hasn’t played a home game since 2019? They did the next best thing last week, playing a pair of games in South Florida, where 500,000 Haitians live. Look at the crowd pop after Haiti’s first goal against Peru (or any of their four goals against New Zealand.)

Can you imagine what that must have felt like? For those players who have spent so long working for this dream, to finally feel what it meant to their people?

Unfortunately, much of the pre-tournament focus has been on the Trump administration’s efforts to keep non-Americans out of America, even if they’re clearly here for the World Cup. After starting a war with Iran, the administration is refusing to let the Iranian team stay overnight inside the United States. The team was forced to move its base camp to Mexico, and will be commuting across the border for their three games on American soil. Although the Iranian players have visas, the Trump administration has stated that visas do not guarantee entry, even for World Cup players.

Meanwhile, the best referee in Africa, Omar Artan, was turned away at the border, likely because he’s Somalian. In December, Trump said that Somalia is “barely a country” and that Somalians are “garbage.” Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein — the player we talked about earlier whose father and brother were both likely killed by terrorists — was detained for seven hours.

I know some readers prefer I keep politics out of my writing. In this case, I’ve gotta ask: HOW???? The government is intentionally putting politics into sports! It is directly interfering in the event it is hosting! This meddling has been an issue since Trump’s inauguration in 2025. Most of the time, governments use major international sporting events to show how welcoming and benevolent they can be — even the really evil ones! This administration has chosen to use big events to showcase its steadfast commitment to exclusion and vindictiveness.

When I watch that clip of the Haitian-American crowd going nuts for Haiti, I see and hear what an American World Cup could have been: a celebration of our big, beautiful country that has become a home-away-from-home for people from every corner of the planet. A place that took in my family, and probably yours, too.

I’m hopeful that those moments of joy can break through the noise. It’s just too bad that they’ll likely be overshadowed by the pettiness of a failing government.

Some notes about watching the World Cup:

— I cherish the World Cup as a “drinking beers on Tuesday at 3 p.m.” experience, and was worried that an American World Cup would feature exclusively night games. Good news! There will be afternoon games pretty much every day, mostly at 3 p.m. ET, with a bunch of noon and 1 p.m. games as well. Here’s a rule of thumb that’s inaccurate, like, 30 percent of the time: Most of the games for Western Hemisphere teams (USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, etc.) are at night, while most of the games for big-ticket European teams are in the afternoon so their fans can watch on TV.

— The English-language broadcast for every game will be on FOX or Fox Sports 1, while the Spanish-language broadcast will be on Telemundo and Peacock. I like that they’re running ads for this year’s Telemundo broadcast (apparently aimed at English speakers) on the premise that watching the World Cup in Spanish will be mas divertido. There’s one where Owen Wilson learns Spanish from Sofia Vergara to watch the World Cup, and another where SNL cast member Marcello Hernández points out that “corner kick” is a more boring phrase than “¡tiro de esquina!” I’m gonna give the Spanish broadcast a shot — your boy Rodge is up to 355 days on Duolingo — but my comprehension skills aren’t quite where I want them to be.

Game previews written by Aidan Weiss and Rodger Sherman.

🇲🇽 Mexico-South Africa 🇿🇦

Thursday, 3 p.m. ET in Mexico City (FOX/Telemundo/Peacock)

The World Cup kicks off with a rematch of the 2010 World Cup opener. Of the three co-hosting nations, Mexico probably has the best opening ceremony on deck — they’re getting Shakira. Mexican goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa returns for his SIXTH World Cup, tied with Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for the most of all time.

🇰🇷 South Korea-Czechia 🇨🇿

Thursday, 10 p.m. ET in Guadalajara (FS1/Telemundo/Peacock)

South Korea didn’t lose in qualifying and made it out of the group stages four years ago. However, they’re dealing with a rash of injuries, and national hero Son Heung-min is at the tail end of his career, with no goals in 17 appearances for LAFC this season. Czechia went on a miracle run to make its first World Cup since 2006: After losing to the Faroe Islands in qualifying, it swapped coaches and captains, then won back-to-back games on penalty kicks to earn a spot.

🇨🇦 Canada-Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦

Friday, 3 p.m. ET in Toronto (FOX/Telemundo/Peacock)

Could this be the breakout moment for Canadian soccer? They’ve never won a World Cup game, having only appeared twice in the tournament, but they’re favored against the Bosnians. Canada’s opening ceremony features Canadians Alanis Morrisette, Michael Bublé, and Alessia Cara — see, not exactly Shakira.

🇺🇸 USA-Paraguay 🇵🇾

Friday, 9 p.m. ET Los Angeles,(FOX/Telemundo/Peacock)

Showtime for Team USA … and a tough opener. Paraguay is a gritty, defense-minded team, only giving up seven goals in 12 competitive games (!!!) since manager Gustavo Alfaro took over following the 2024 Copa America. Our opening ceremony features Katy Perry and Future. The return of Left Shark?

One of my favorite things on the internet every four years: The Guardian’s massive preview of every single player in the World Cup. I was worried they’d skip it this year, with the tournament expanding to 48 teams and rosters expanding to 26 players … but they did it again, providing thoughtful blurbs about the skills, careers, and personal lives of all 1,248 players. Delightful details abound. I could spend hours clicking around in there — and did while writing this preview!