It’s our first day off from World Cup matches. Let’s take a moment to reflect on the reality of the United States’ performance, last-16 exit, and the unhelpful claim by some that this was their best World Cup ever.
Unchecked optimism is perhaps the most off-putting characteristic of certain United States soccer fans and media. It doesn’t apply to everyone, but sometimes it’s the loudest among us who can’t bring themselves to issue a critical word to match a lacking outcome.
The US soccer community has never been, for whatever reason, one particularly adept at objective self-reflection. It unfortunately seems born out of inadequacy or a difficulty to accept that a desired belonging among the football elite is still very far off. Our incapacity for leveling criticism also, unfortunately, reiterates our standing as an unserious football nation in the eyes of the global community. What was referred to as “unchecked optimism” might, to someone in a more objective position with international distance, be assessed as either denial or curiously low standards.
The latest example of unbalanced exuberance is the insistence by some that the overall performance we witnessed over the past three and a half weeks, stamped with Monday’s 4-1 loss to Belgium, was the United States’ best at any World Cup.
It’s an odd assessment.
No serious football nation is likely to have ever considered a three-goal loss in the round of 16 a step forward. Particularly as hosts.
Host nations of the World Cup have considerable advantages. Regardless of their quality, they are drawn from Pot 1, meaning they are immediately separated from confronting the top-ranked teams in the tournament for their first three matches. It frequently results in chances of group-stage progression that fall somewhere between realistic and a cake walk, followed by a favorable knockout draw.
The reality of the 2026 co-hosts is none of the three sit in particularly strong historical standing. Different World Cup formats and increasing numbers of participants make one-to-one comparison difficult, but Qatar in 2022 and South Africa in 2010 are the only hosts to fail to be among the last 16 teams alive at a tournament. 2002 co-hosts Japan were eliminated in the last 16, as were with the United States in 1994. That is the round the US, Mexico and Canada reached in 2026. Two of them lost by three goals.
The other 18 host nations in World Cup history did no worse than the quarter-finals. That includes 21st-century examples of that are not traditional football powers. South Korea reached the semi-finals in 2002; Russia made the quarters in 2014.
The lingering positivity around this US team seems to be coming from an unwillingness to let go of an encouraging start to the tournament. The US were, for two matches, one of the data darlings of the World Cup. They were among the tournament leaders in skillful categories ranging from take-ons to line-breaking passes that positively alluded to the fluidity of their attack. They pressed high, won the ball back and dictated play. They also passed the all-important eye test, earning the praise of television analysts such as Thierry Henry and Zlatan Ibrahimovic for those early performances.
The thing is, you have to keep going for any of that to matter. Come the knockout stages, no one in England is holding dear their 4-2 win over Croatia. No one in France believes their 3-1 win over Senegal has any bearing on their chances of defeating Morocco. No one in Morocco or Spain is concerning themselves with their unbeaten group stages. Those matches, if or when those teams are eliminated, will not be a crutch those nations fall back on; they will be the afterthoughts they already are.
And if you don’t keep going, you at least have to exit admirably to start talking about bests. For the US, the same old story of being dominated by a superior European side played out with a more embarrassing scoreline, worsened by the unfortunate subplot of special pre-match treatment granted to the US with the overturning of a long-established rule of the game for a player suspension in the match following a red card.
It didn’t matter. The humbling that happened would have overturned any backroom overturning. The US may have had the tactician in place with Mauricio Pochettino doing what he could to play a flexible system that seemed on paper to address uncomfortable questions about his side’s defensive weaknesses. But, just as they were in 2022, US players were incapable of defending quality opponents. The first minutes against Belgium immediately exposed that, and the Red Devils consistently worked the ball into advanced positions in the US penalty area for goals or near misses.
We knew the US were eventually going to be tested defensively, and a lot of us were not looking forward to how that would go because of the evident holes in their best XI. What we didn’t know was everything in front of that would fall apart as well, and against a Belgium side that had underwhelmed until the US played an unfortunate role in its 2026 redemption.
The Belgium loss is naturally the defining game of the tournament for the US, but it wasn’t the only game. So, what did the United States accomplish at this event after eight years of hosting hype? They beat three teams with an average world ranking of 44 that from a combined 13 matches managed three wins, 6.62 expected goals and 16.11 expected goals against. The US benefited from early leads, including three goals in the opening 11 minutes of matches – two of which were scored by the other team. Yet they looked good doing it.
We as humans at times come to believe a false narrative only because the truth becomes difficult to accept. Eight years of hype gathered the brush, and three wins that hinted at a possibility for a new level of success ignited it. With a John Denver chorus tugging at our heartstrings, it’s understandably difficult for some of us to square the crash. But this 2026 tournament was not the best USMNT World Cup performance. It was just a dressed-up, soundtracked one in our own mega-stadium backyard that seated thousands of like-minded hopefuls.
To borrow from the song, being better about putting ourselves in the place we belong seems like a decent starting point for actually emerging from it.
So what was the best USMNT World Cup performance? 2002 is the only answer, and the argument requires very little ammo.
Not only did the US emerge from a group that included an eventual semi-finalist (South Korea, who the US drew with) and the fifth-ranked team in the world (Portugal, who the US beat), they also did something the USMNT have never done outside of that tournament: They followed a knockout-stage win with a serious run at a global power in the match that led to elimination.
A 2-0 last-16 win over Mexico was followed by a 1-0 quarter-final loss to eventual finalists Germany, who scored their only shot on target and the US had 60% of the ball.
Some will go all the way back to 1930 and claim the US’s semi-final appearance at that first World Cup experiment in Uruguay was their best result, but the US reached the last four directly from a shorthanded three-team group and lost 6-1 to Argentina. It was a 13-team tournament to which the US were invited that didn’t feature many of Europe’s best.
The title of best USMNT World Cup only matters in the context of 2026 because of the discourse of the alleged success and the illusion of measurable progress.
The United States are making progress in the sense that they are producing players of a quality that get significant minutes in the top European leagues and even play on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the Champions League. That guarantees nothing for national-team success. They are not making progress in terms of how they perform at major tournaments involving teams from outside Concacaf.
In the past 24 years, since that encouraging loss to Germany, the United States men’s national team have played 32 matches at the World Cup and Copa America; they’ve won 10, drawn six and lost 16. The wins have come against Bosnia-Herzegovina, Australia, Paraguay (twice), Iran, Ghana, Algeria, Bolivia, Ecuador and Costa Rica. That, with the 2026 World Cup very much a consistent part of the frustrating stagnation, is hardly anything to be proud of.
No amount of thunderous optimism in fan parks, no 70,000-strong harmony of ‘Country Roads‘, should drown that out.
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