Predicting the USMNT roster for an expanded September camp
With time (and roster spots) suddenly available, here's who makes the cut for the first camp of the 2030 cycle
The World Cup is over. Good.
Not good good, obviously. Getting bounced 4-1 by Belgium in the round of 16 on home soil has left a mark, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. There is an entire generation of fans who think, because of Couva, that the USMNT are a bunch of losers. They tuned in in record numbers this summer; they got those those feelings confirmed.*
(*) It is useless to try explaining to those fans that Couva was a black swan event, that we've made the round of 16 four of the past five tournaments and five the past seven, and there's only a handful of other teams that have been that consistently good for that long. Until the US has a spectacular success, the casual fan will remember only the spectacular failures.
And glass-half-full as I am about the program and US soccer in general, losing 4-1 at home to that Belgium team with a quarter of the country watching is, indeed, a spectacular failure.
From the standpoint of building the next USMNT, however, things are now interesting, because Mauricio Pochettino now has something he didn't really have access to in his first half-tenure: time.
This is not a two-game window with everybody jockeying for position, nor is it a tournament where the margins are so thin that you basically have to trust the guys you already know. Rather, the first camp of the 2030 cycle is an expanded September camp with four friendlies, and – more importantly for our purposes here – a whole bunch of roster spots that suddenly aren’t spoken for.
Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie will be there, as will Folarin Balogun. Chris Richards, Jedi Robinson, Tyler Adams? No reason to think the old stand-byes won't be on-hand, standing by. But also, Pochettino has straight-up said that he's planning for real integration between the core group and the next generation, with an eye specifically on the US Olympic team for 2028.
And so there is likely to be a lot of churn.
The obvious temptation, then, is to treat this as the Great Youth Revolution, because that is much more fun than admitting that roster construction is mostly a series of guys being healthy at the same time and coaches having preferences that may or may not make sense to us. There are kids coming. Some of them are very good. A few of them may even be ready right now. But “next generation” is not necessarily synonymous with “better,” and the 2030 cycle does not require Pochettino to torch the existing depth chart and start over just because everybody* likes the shiny new toys.
(*) Me included, obviously.
So here's where we're at: Four friendlies and an expanded roster give Poch an unusually useful laboratory for answering questions. There will be minutes to spread around, combinations to test, and – mercifully – enough games that one bad half doesn't have to become a referendum on someone's entire career.
Just so it's clear, I am going to pick a regular camp roster, and then bump each group with at least one Olympic-eligible who's pushed his way into consideration (in italics). Let's take a crack at this:
