The USMNT Had Us Believing. Then Reality Showed Up

Ethan's Corner is the Friday spot where I stop talking about cannabinoids and talk about whatever is actually taking up space in my head. This week it's soccer. It's going to be soccer for a while.

Nine minutes. That is how long the U.S. held onto the illusion that this World Cup was going to end differently. Nine minutes into the Round of 16 against Belgium, down goes the lead, and by the time the final whistle blew we were staring at a 4-1 scoreline and a fifth exit at this exact stage in six tries since 1994. I watched all of it from Wichita with the same knot in my stomach I have had since I started following this team in 2006, and I want to talk about it honestly, because the honest version is more complicated than "we lost."

We did not lose because the talent was not there. That is the part that actually stings. For three weeks, this team looked like something new.

Pochettino Had Us Rolling

Top of the group. A win over Bosnia and Herzegovina to reach the Round of 16 for real, not by technicality. And at the center of it, two guys who made this feel like a different program than the one I grew up watching lose in the same predictable ways.

Folarin Balogun scored a brace against Paraguay in the opener, the first multi-goal game by a U.S. player at a World Cup since 1930. He added another against Bosnia and Herzegovina to put himself ahead of Landon Donovan's 2010 tournament haul, with only Bert Patenaude's four goals from the very first World Cup still sitting above him on the all-time single-tournament list for an American. He picked up a red card in that same game, had it overturned on review, and came back to lead the line against Belgium anyway. That is not a hype player. That is a guy who shows up.

Malik Tillman was the other half of it. He scored the free kick that put away Bosnia and Herzegovina and earned Man of the Match doing it, then turned around and scored another direct free kick against Belgium to tie the game in the first half. Do you understand how hard that is? Nobody had scored a direct free kick for the U.S. at a World Cup since Eric Wynalda in 1994. Tillman did it twice in one tournament, which makes him only the second player since 1982 to pull that off at a World Cup at all. He is 24, he plays every week at Bayer Leverkusen, and he looked like the best player on the field in stretches against a team we ultimately lost to by three goals.

Then We Went Back To Playing USMNT Football

You know the version. Full backs bombing forward with nobody home behind them. A midfield that presses hard for seventy minutes and has nothing left when a team like Belgium decides to be patient and wait for the mistake. A giveaway becomes a turnover becomes a goal, and suddenly you are not playing the way you played against Paraguay anymore. You are playing the way this program has played every single time the stage got too big for the room.

Four and one is not a scoreline. It is a diagnosis. Pochettino said it plainly after the game: we did not connect, we were never really in it, even the equalizer got answered right back. He was not wrong, and he was not making excuses either. Sometimes a good team just does not show up on the one night it matters most, and that is a harder thing to sit with than losing to a better team would be.

This program has one Round of 16 win in the last 24 years before this tournament. One. The Bosnia and Herzegovina result this summer was only the second time it has ever happened. Every time we get within reach of the next round, something in the machinery seizes up at the exact moment it needs to hold. Belgium did not out-talent us. Belgium waited patiently for a fullback to get caught upfield, the way water waits for a crack in a foundation, and once it found one it did not need a second.

Why I Am Not Actually Worried About 2030

Here is the part nobody wants to hear three days after a beatdown, but it is true anyway. The pieces for the next cycle are better than the pieces we just watched lose, and the two names doing the most heavy lifting right now are the two I just spent four paragraphs on.

Balogun is 25 and just proved he can score against real competition on the biggest stage there is. Tillman is 24 and just did something for this program that has not been done in three decades. Neither of these guys are projects anymore. They are the standard the next generation gets measured against, and that is a very different starting point than where this program usually sits heading into a new cycle.

Gio Reyna got the version of him back that everyone had stopped expecting, the one who looks like he actually wants the ball in tight spaces instead of hiding from it. Alex Freeman, 21 years old and already grinding real minutes in La Liga with Villarreal, looked like he belonged in games most 21 year olds would have hidden from, and he did it as the youngest player on the entire roster. Christian Pulisic is still Christian Pulisic, still a real piece of this, and I will leave it there. My optimism is not built around any one guy carrying us again. It is built around a spine that is deeper than it has ever been, and deeper than what most of the teams we lost to this summer are working with at our same age range.

The Names Coming Up Behind Them

None of these next three played a single minute of this World Cup. All three could be starting the next one.

Cavan Sullivan is going to be 20 years old at the 2030 tournament, already with multiple professional seasons banked in MLS and a move to Manchester City queued up whenever he decides to take it. A midfielder who was logging real minutes at 14 is not a projection anymore. He is simply early.

Julian Hall just became the youngest player in MLS history to score a hat trick, at 18 years and 50 days old, doing it as a Red Bulls homegrown forward who was scoring senior goals before he had a driver's license. There is a real complication here. Poland has been actively recruiting him through his mother's side of the family, and U.S. Soccer needs to close that door before it turns into an actual loss instead of a rumor.

Mathis Albert became the youngest American to ever play in the Bundesliga, debuting for Borussia Dortmund at 16 years, 11 months, and 5 days old. That is not a domestic prospect who might translate to Europe someday. That is a kid already living there.

The Only Variable That Actually Worries Me

Pochettino's contract is up and nobody, including him, will say what he wants to do next. That is the whole ballgame. Retain him and let him finish building the thing he already started, and I think this program is genuinely fine. Better than fine.

The other version I would trust just as much is BJ Callaghan. He is the head coach at Nashville SC now, but before that he was the guy who actually held this program together when it needed it most. When U.S. Soccer fired Gregg Berhalter's staff in the mess that followed the Reyna scandal in 2023, it was Callaghan, the longest-serving assistant on that staff, who stepped in as interim head coach and did not lose a single game. Seven games, all in official competitions, not friendlies. He won the Concacaf Nations League title against Mexico and Canada, then took what was basically the program's B squad to the semifinals of the Gold Cup. Since taking over in Nashville, he has won the club's first ever trophy with the 2025 U.S. Open Cup, and this year his team sits at the top of the Eastern Conference and made a run in the Concacaf Champions Cup. That is not a guy keeping a seat warm. That is a guy who has been quietly building a case for four years running.

Roll the dice on a total stranger who needs eighteen months just to learn the player pool, and we are having this exact same conversation in four years with a different opponent's name filled in.

The talent stopped being the excuse this summer. Balogun and Tillman made sure of that. Now it is just about who is holding the clipboard.

Back to the usual programming next week. If you want first look at what's coming out of Tall Trees before anyone else does, the Canopy Crew is free to join and takes about ninety seconds.

— Ethan