With big names absent, USMNT hope big personalities will fill the gap

If the 2022 World Cup was the debutante ball for a shiny new generation of United States men’s national team players, the 2025 Gold Cup was supposed to be a general rehearsal for the big dance: next summer’s World Cup.

Instead, still-somewhat-newish US manager Mauricio Pochettino will go into this summer tournament for the continental title shorn of a great many of his leading players. As such, his first and only chance to work with his team for an extended period of time before the start of the 2026 World Cup will present all kinds of challenges.

Pochettino is, in effect, playing a game of chess without several of his key pieces. He will just have to imagine how they fit into the larger strategy later on.

Star Milan forward and captain Christian Pulisic asked to sit the tournament out in order to take his first extended rest since the summer of 2023. If Pulisic plays 48 more minutes in Milan’s Serie A season finale against Monza on Saturday, he will have surpassed his career high of 3,589, which he set only last season.

Fulham full-back Antonee Robinson, likewise, will sit out the summer after dragging his battered body through the last few months of the Premier League season, mostly skipping practices and saving himself for the games. Robinson has already posted his fourth straight season of at least 3,000 minutes.

“I think it is the best decision in that case to give a rest,” Pochettino said in a press conference on Thursday. “When you assess all the circumstances, not only for Christian but for different players, [it is] the best decision thinking for the principal objective, which is the World Cup.”

Also absent from the 27-man preliminary Gold Cup roster are four regulars involved in the Club World Cup, to be held in the United States, and which supersedes national team duty during a time of year typically reserved for international soccer. Juventus players Weston McKennie and Tim Weah and Borussia Dortmund’s Gio Reyna will be with their clubs, rather than their nation. Club América winger Alex Zendejas, who was long overdue for a look under Pochettino on account of his strong form in Liga MX, will instead be tied up by a Club World Cup play-in game against LAFC for the final berth at the tournament.

These difficulties in roster construction are something of a parable for the overscheduling and overuse of the modern player, forcing the national team head coach to consider how his decisions this summer will contribute to his players’ fitness a year from now.

“The demands today are so high, the level that they need to perform and the demand in all the areas are affecting the physical condition and the mental,” said Pochettino. “It’s a big season, a long season, traveling, playing competing Wednesdays, Sundays. We need to consider 10, 11 months of competing.”

But he insisted that there is opportunity in these absences for a team who have long had much of their starting lineup written in Sharpie, having settled into an ossified hierarchy after a promising pack of young players was anointed as a golden generation.

“It’s true that it’s possible to miss an opportunity to have all the players that maybe you have in your head thinking in one year,” Pochettino said. “But at the same time, it’s so exciting to see different players, young players, players that are going to make their debut in the national team – people that maybe can challenge different names that everyone considers are maybe going to the World Cup.”

An influx of fresh players will hope to aid in the correction of the national team’s recent course. The US looked dismal and uninterested in their March outing in the Concacaf Nations League, recording consecutive losses to Panama and Canada in a tournament they had previously won three straight times. “We need to send a signal to our fans [about] the team that we want to be in the next year before the World Cup,” Pochettino said.

Just 13 players from the Nations League roster were recalled, with five uncapped players joining up instead. Pochettino has dropped several experienced players in striker Josh Sargent, midfielder Tanner Tessmann and defenders Cameron Carter-Vickers and Joe Scally. Midfielder Yunus Musah is away from the team dealing with a personal issue after a disappointing campaign with Milan.

While much of that turnover was forced on him, Pochettino is also messaging a demand for more professionalism.

“What we want to create in our national team is people desperate to come but desperate to come to perform,” he said. “We only have time to train one, two, three times; play; compete. One, two recoveries, and play. And then go home and maybe wait two months to be all together [again]. If you want to arrive to the camp, and you want to spend a nice time, play golf, go for a dinner, visit my family, visit my friends – and that is the culture we want to create? No, no, no, no, no. What we want to do is be focused and spend all my focus and energy on the national team. We need to create this culture about winning and to chase our aim. If we want to be good in one year’s time, we need to think that today is the most important day.”

In the last World Cup cycle, the USMNT cultivated and celebrated an intense closeness. The team, it seemed, got along famously and it led to an admirable performance in Qatar. Now, Pochettino would like to see more intensity among positional rivals, a realization that every camp might be any player’s last.

With several jobs in the starting lineup vacant this summer, the US hopes to gain in mentality what it is losing in talent.

• Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men’s national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist University.