The USMNT exceeded expectations at the 2026 World Cup, and then experienced a generationally crushing loss. What now?

We should imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus tells us that, and he would know: He was a goalkeeper.

Camus’s existentialist exploration of the tragic myth of Sissyphus, cursed by the gods to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, is the classic text of his philosophy. Its conclusion is surprisingly sanguine, for an essay that is usually packaged along with an exploration of the merits of suicide. In a world without a mountaintop, Camu writes, the joy is in the boulder. 

The point of it all, insofar as there is such a thing, is in finding fulfillment from the everyday experience of being alive, pushing whatever your metaphorical giant rock is up the hill whose summit you will never reach. When the boulder inevitably slips from Sisyphus’s grasp and he has to start over from the beginning, one should imagine that he is happy: He is about to embark again on the tedious, painful, occasionally joyful, and probably meaningless pursuit of his existence. 

And that’s life as a fan of the United States Men’s National Team.

Over the course of the last month, the USMNT proved that they are better than they have ever been. They dominated games against Paraguay and Australia, both of whom were competitive in their knockout stage matches. They won their round of 32 match against Bosnia convincingly, a first knockout stage victory in 24 years. 

The USMNT had never won three games in a World Cup before this summer, and they did so in style: A maniacal counterpress led by Weston McKennie and Malik Tillman and Tyler Adams kept opposition stuck in their own defensive third, while Folarin Balogun feasted on the opportunities created by that press and then the space left behind when opposing teams tried to push for goals.

Then that same group of players turned in one of the all-time World Cup no-shows, an abysmal 4-1 loss to Belgium in which not a single player played to the best of his abilities. It was a catastrophe, an embarrassment on a scale heretofore unseen in American soccer: When the USMNT failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, most people learned about it after the fact. That Belgium loss was the most watched soccer game in American television history.  

The most crushing thing about the game was the nature of the loss, the way that these players who had looked so confident and competent throughout the tournament looked like shells of themselves.

But the second most crushing thing about the loss is the way that it feels like it put American men’s soccer back at ground zero.

For all the great play in the first four games, and for all that has changed in American soccer in the past three decades, the USMNT lost in the round of 16, the same point where they lose in every tournament. People who check in on the team once every four years saw the same mediocre group, pushing the same boulder up the same hill, and once again getting pushed back to the bottom by a big European team.

Starting Tuesday morning, a cohort of people who post about everything constantly but only watch soccer a few times a year started rehashing the same arguments about why the US lost that happen every World Cup. It’s because our best athletes don’t play soccer. It’s pay-to-play. It’s promotion and relegation.¹The pro-rel thing is something believed by people who post constantly but actually do watch a lot of soccer, to be fair.

But the thing about this World Cup is that it actually doesn’t have anything to do with any of that.

The USMNT lost to Belgium because their good players — who we know are good because they had played extremely well for a month beforehand and because clubs with millions of dollars on the line trust them to win games every week — played very poorly in a big game. 

This is something that happens in sports. It is arguably the thing that happens in sports. The choke. The baffling underperformance under pressure. At various times in their careers every single great player of every single sport has come up short in a big moment.

Four years ago, France played 70 minutes of awful soccer against Argentina in the World Cup final. They were so terrible in the first half in particular that Ousmane Dembele — who went on to win the Ballon D’Or — and Olivier Giroud — who was at the time the leading goalscorer in French history — were hooked before halftime. 

That final will always be remembered as an iconic showdown between two truly great teams and two all-time great players in Mbappe and Messi. But France’s dramatic comeback wasn’t due to their brilliance alone. They were brought back into the game because after not doing anything with the ball for 78 minutes a catastrophic Nicolas Otamendi error gifted them a penalty. 

Sometimes you play badly but a mistake lets you back into the game. That’s soccer.

Similarly, for the rest of time this USMNT loss against Belgium will be considered an irredeemable choke. It will be the game when a good American team with an opportunity to be great suddenly froze. But if you look under the hood, that narrative hinges — more or less — on one mistake.

Despite a disastrous start to the game, the US managed to get into halftime only down 2-1. In the second half, a far-below-his-best Sergino Dest was replaced by Gio Reyna and for about 15 minutes the US looked like themselves again. They were playing soccer, in a way that somewhat resembled how they had played soccer for the month prior.

Then the tragicomedy of Matt Freese. The American goalkeeper came 30 yards out of his net to break up a long ball and prevent a breakaway. He did that successfully. Then, all he had to do was kick the ball away and the US would continue growing into the game and pushing for an equalizer. But what happened instead was he stubbed his toe on the ground, failed to recover, and Tim Ream was unable to respond as the eventual Belgian shot drifted right past his feet and into the net. The air left the stadium. There were 30 minutes and a Romelu Lukaku goal still to come, but that was the entire game gone in one moment.

Sometimes you play badly and then your goalie makes a terrible error just when you’re recovering. That’s also soccer. 

And when you try to figure out why exactly these players were so poor on that day in particular, it’s impossible to ignore the seismic vibe shift around the team in the 24 hours leading up to it. FIFA’s decision that Balogun could in fact play in the game despite his red card against Bosnia and Donald Trump gleefully taking credit for that decision immediately flipped the feeling around the team externally. 

What had been a fun and engaging team, generally respected by outside viewers and winning over casual fans, suddenly became a globally despised lightning rod. None of the players will ever admit this, and maybe it really didn’t affect them at all, but it is difficult to look at the unflappable team that played in the round of 32 and the fearful team that played five days later and not see the massive international corruption scandal that happened in between. 

The best month of American men’s soccer in generations turned into a massive disappointment in the end. A deafening thud when so many had dreamed of celebration. A loss that had many staring into the abyss of the USMNT simply never being good.  

But it is perhaps not as bad as all that. Before the tournament, I wrote that the USMNT were probably the 14th best team in the world, and would probably be able to beat teams ranked lower than them but would need to play well and get sort of lucky to win their round of 16 matchup against a more talented squad.

Once the games actually started, it turned out the USMNT are actually much better than the teams ranked lower than them, and if they are really clicking they are good enough to not only beat those teams but absolutely dominate them. 

And then instead of playing well and getting lucky against a talented team, they choked, for lack of a more eloquent way to say that. Faced with the biggest game in American men’s soccer history, the players folded under the pressure.

The wins were better than we thought they would be, and the defeat far more upsetting, but the tournament does not really change where the team is. Good, but not great, and still figuring out how to compete with the global elite.

Zoom further out from the deflating nature of the final loss, and you are left with a light positive of a World Cup and the overall trajectory of the team. 

Eight years ago the USMNT failed to qualify for the World Cup. Today they are comfortably one of the 16 best teams in the world. Four years ago the USMNT could barely generate goalscoring chances against World Cup opposition. Today they are able to put four goals past Paraguay.

It is not as good as many of us dreamed it might be. But it’s not all that bad either.

In 1975, the New Yorker published Roger Angell’s “Agincourt and After,” one of the sacred texts of American sportswriting. It’s nominally about the Cincinnati Reds defeating the Boston Red Sox in the World Series, but it’s much more sweeping than that, and the part that lives forever is the part about being a fan, what it means, and why it is a worthwhile pursuit.

In so many words, Angell writes that you’ve got to be a goddamn idiot to be a sports fan. Caring about a professional sports team in any real capacity requires deactivating the logical parts of your brain and tapping into something inherently childish and probably stupid.

But the caring is the point in and of itself. The feeling of being deeply, inextricably attached to something. The feeling of the entire bench chasing down a team’s young right back to celebrate with him after a VAR review determines his goal was onside. The feeling of a team’s soft spoken young star putting an exclamation point on a historic win with a perfect free kick.

The feeling of 70,000 people belting a corny John Denver song, celebrating a World Cup win in a country that we have been repeatedly told does not care about soccer and will certainly never care about its men’s national soccer team. A country where not long ago sports columnists and radio hosts made entire careers from mocking the very idea of taking the sport seriously.

To be a sports fan is to be Sisyphus with the boulder, and arguably it’s even more futile than that. You have no real control over whether the rock ever gets to the top of the hill, and for most of us it probably never will. But you still turn on the TV or you go to the bar and maybe in the embarrassing and superstitious part of you is compelled to put on the same hat you wore for the last big win. You dream of the hilltop, but the day-to-day unbearable caring of supporting a sports team is pushing the rock. That’s what matters.

Getting your heart ripped out is part of it. It hurts when the boulder rolls down the hill, and the boulder always rolls down the hill eventually, even for the best teams. This particular instance certainly hurt more than most. 

But there will be another World Cup in four years, and probably a Copa America in two. And in the childish, illogical fan parts of our brains we know that this team can be good. It might not even be that illogical. Look at how they played in June!

After a briefly exhilarating summer, the giant, immovable rock of USMNT fandom is back at the bottom of the hill. 

But isn’t that where Albert Camus said we should be happiest? And he’d know. He was a goalkeeper.