As World Cup fever takes hold, commercials become more patriotic, the U.S. national team jerseys suddenly appear on the backs of influencers, and a few outlets inevitably dust off the “monthlong Super Bowl” take. All of which is magnified this summer as the U.S. co-hosts the 2026 edition.
The U.S. men’s national team did its part to fuel this optimism, opening the tournament with a 4-1 statement win over Paraguay on Friday. Even the staunchest skeptics were forced to acknowledge the progress on display. After the victory, the U.S’s odds of advancing from Group D soared to 97 percent.
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The potential is obvious. But while the result provided a jolt of enthusiasm, the reality is that the United States remains a work in progress, rather than a genuine contender to lift the trophy.
Except the U.S. has won a World Cup — four, in fact, including one at home — and five Olympic gold medals and produced a Ballon d’Or winner. It has also regularly been ranked the best in the world. The U.S. has bona fide soccer superstars. However, the players who transcended the sport, changed culture and are among the world’s top 100 players are sitting at home … because their World Cup is next summer in Brazil at the 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup.
In April, the U.S. men’s head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, offered perhaps the most melodramatic assessment of the U.S. men’s national team after back-to-back losses in international friendlies.
“We are USA,” he told reporters at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. “We are competing against Belgium, Portugal. I think, for sure, Belgium and Portugal have, in the top 100 players, a few or some players playing in that top 100. I think we don’t have (any).”
The Argentine coach might not have intended to offend his players one month before announcing his World Cup squad, especially his star, Christian Pulisic, who is No. 39 on The Athletic’s list of best players in the World Cup. But it’s hard not to take those words to heart.
Shortly after, U.S. women’s national team head coach Emma Hayes was asked whether American players need more recognition. The coach, who has won FIFA coaching awards in her own right, explained the nuance needed with such lists.
“My issue and struggle with it is this is just a team game, so I hate the individual awards,” Hayes said. “I know the individual awards are something that maybe matter to the players, but fundamentally, it’s about the team trophies that I probably care about most. … I don’t read too much into them.”
The stark contrast between the answers is only the beginning of the divergence between the teams. Days after the women beat Brazil 1-0 in Fortaleza, the men’s squad arrived at the tournament lacking the star power and momentum expected of a host nation.
Why the U.S. men don’t have a men’s superstar, yet, is the same reason the U.S. women do: culture.
Soccer is a global game, and as Henry Bushnell writes, the American men’s belated emergence, decades after Europe and Latin America, “created handicaps that no amount of money, facilities or coaching education can fully unwind.”
It is hard to compete with nations such as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, where children often begin playing soccer almost as soon as they can walk.
They spend countless hours playing in the streets and local pitches before being identified by scouts and brought into youth academies, often at little or no cost. By the time they reach adolescence, many are already highly developed players, driven by talent and the ambition to make their mark on the world’s most popular sport. For many talented young boys across much of the world, few dreams burn brighter than becoming a global soccer superstar.
The sport is more than a game. It is an identity.
The USWNT, founded in 1985, might be behind the global men’s game, but it is at the forefront of the women’s game, dating back to the first FIFA Women’s World Cups in the 1990s. The U.S. also had the advantage of not enduring the same bans on women’s soccer as countries like England and Brazil.
This dominance in women’s soccer is rooted in a remarkable paradox: women benefited from the very forces that kept soccer on the fringes of American sports culture.
For decades, men’s soccer sat behind football, basketball and baseball. Because it lacked the deep-rooted male traditions, it was more accessible to girls and women. While many traditional soccer nations treated the game as a male preserve, the U.S. was building opportunities for female athletes. The catalyst was Title IX in 1972. The landmark legislation dramatically expanded athletic opportunities for girls and women, and soccer became one of its biggest beneficiaries. Schools and universities invested heavily in the sport, creating a vast player pool and a development pipeline unmatched anywhere in the world.
Unlike Major League Soccer — which operates in a far more crowded global marketplace and is generally viewed as outside the sport’s top tier — often ranked somewhere around the world’s sixth-best men’s league, the National Women’s Soccer League is widely regarded as the premier women’s league in the world, attracting many of the game’s top players.
In The Guardian’s annual ranking of the world’s 100 best female players, the United States had nine representatives: Lindsey Heaps (ranked No. 27), Trinity Rodman (35), Alyssa Thompson (46), Emily Fox (24), Sam Coffey (55), Catarina Macario (62), Rose Lavelle (67), Lily Yohannes (80) and Phallon Tullis-Joyce (84). The breadth of that representation is perhaps more telling than the rankings themselves. Two of the United States’ previous top goal scorers, Mallory Swanson and Sophia Wilson, were absent last year while they started families, but have made similar lists in the past.
Hayes’ squad features elite players across every line of the field, from goalkeeper to attack, and several are still in their early 20s. The list underscores what has become increasingly evident over the past year: the U.S. women’s team is once again building a roster with world-class talent and significant depth.
The U.S. men’s picture is far different. The Athletic’s ranking of the top 100 players expected at the 2026 World Cup included just one American: Pulisic, who was the highest-ranked Concacaf player on the list.
During the 2026 World Cup, the rankings serve as a reminder that the U.S. women enter major tournaments with a deeper pool of globally respected talent than their male counterparts.
This U.S. men’s team’s generation is supposed to be “the golden generation.” We have heard that phrase for nearly a decade now. Yet for all the hype surrounding the European clubs, transfer fees and social media clips, the team felt oddly anonymous in the broader American sports landscape before Friday night.
Even when it comes to marketability, the women might have the edge. Rodman has become one of the most recognizable faces in American soccer, fronting campaigns for Adidas, Red Bull and Oakley. In Adidas’ recent World Cup commercial, actor Timothée Chalamet recruits Rodman, Spain’s Lamine Yamal and England’s Jude Bellingham in his quest to take down a neighborhood champion team. The advertisement is packed with soccer stars past and present, yet not a single U.S. men’s player makes an appearance.
Rodman is hardly an exception. Sisters Alyssa and Gisele Thompson have assembled endorsement portfolios that include Nike, BodyArmor, NYX Professional Makeup and TOCA Football. Meanwhile, Macario reportedly signed a 10-year, $10 million deal with Nike last summer, further evidence that some of the biggest brands in sports increasingly see the USWNT’s stars as among the most valuable faces in American soccer.
Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Carli Lloyd, Ali Krieger, Abby Wambach, Mia Hamm, Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, Christen Press or any of the other women who built soccer into a meaningful part of American sports culture are more recognizable than their male counterparts.
Rapinoe became a global political and cultural figure whose fame extended far beyond soccer. Morgan turned into one of the most marketable athletes in the country. Lloyd’s ruthless 2015 World Cup final hat trick became one of the defining moments in modern American sports television. Krieger and her teammates helped create visibility for LGBTQ+ athletes in a way American men’s soccer never approached.
The U.S. women spent decades playing with a level of intensity and clarity that made people care, even if they did not regularly watch soccer. Their matches felt important. Their celebrations became memes before sports social media weaponized every celebration into content strategy. They embraced pressure instead of treating every knockout-stage appearance like a miraculous achievement. The men’s team talks about “growth,” “potential” and “the future of the sport in America.” And yes, before the angry reply that guys text about FIFA rankings and Champions League appearances, this is about relevance, visibility, star power and, perhaps most importantly, cultural impact.
The women became stars in America because they won repeatedly on the biggest stages while simultaneously pushing conversations about equal pay, gender equity and athlete activism into the mainstream. They forced Americans to care with their play on the field and fight off it. The men still feel like a team America is waiting to fall in love with.
Sure, the men have Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria that surprised the world and now Folarin Balogun two goals and Gio Reyna’s trivela. But the U.S. women have Brandi Chastain’s penalty celebration in 1999, which remains bigger than any men’s soccer image this country has produced; Lloyd’s historic hat trick against Japan in the 2015 final was far from the first time a U.S. player scored multiple goals in a single World Cup game; and Rapinoe’s pink hair, outstretched arms and unapologetic persona, which became instantly recognizable globally.
That differentiation matters.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
US Women's national team, Women's Soccer, FIFA Men's World Cup
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