International soccer? For the USMNT, the 2025 Gold Cup is about the vibes

With Christian Pulisic and so many other stars missing, it is more important for USMNT to be fun this summer than to be good

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a soccer confederation in possession of a good number of member nations must be in search of a regular competition to determine which team is the best. Generally, this takes the form of a summer tournament.1Both the African Cup of Nations and Asian Cup have shifted to the winter this century in which the continent’s best teams gather their best players and meet up in a host country. Since 1991, Concacaf’s version of this has been the Gold Cup, a biannual tournament crowning the best team in North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

Or at least that’s the idea. 

The problem is that increasingly, the biggest nations in the region treat the competition more like a chore than an opportunity.

This is most glaringly true for the United States, who haven’t sent a full-strength roster to the tournament since 2019, and will not be sending their best possible roster to the 2025 edition.

The provisional roster for this summer’s tournament is missing posterboy Christian Pulisic, along with easily half of a hypothetical best XI: Antonee Robinson, Yunus Musah, Weston McKennie, Tim Weah, Giovanni Reyna and Folarin Balogun will all miss the tournament. 

With the Gold Cup representing the final chance for a vaguely flailing USMNT to play competitive matches before the World Cup next summer, those absences are, to put it mildly, a bummer.

First, the mitigating factors: To an extent, this is a decision that was made for head coach Mauricio Pochettino by FIFA, who created a big Club World Cup this summer that requires McKennie, Weah, and Reyna all stay with their clubs rather than join the national team.2In the interest of fairness, former USMNT regulars Jesus Ferreira, Jordan Morris and Christian Roldan also will be tied up participating in the tournament with the Seattle Sounders, but people on the internet are less mad about that. That’s between two and three locked-in starters3Depending on how you feel about Reyna, which is a topic for a different blog. unavailable because FIFA has decided its foray into the club game is more important than its member nation’s longtime international tournament commitments.

Meanwhile Musah is missing for personal reasons that Pochettino did not disclose in his most recent press conference, and it feels a little bit gross to speculate about that, and Balogun and Robinson are both injured.4It’s possible that both of those injuries are ones that they would play through in a World Cup, but I am extremely not a doctor so we have to take Pochettino at his word there. Pulisic is being rested, which is obviously lame, but there is definitely merit to picking and choosing your spots: Soccer players play a lot of very taxing soccer these days, and it’s not unreasonable for someone who has sacrificed his body5Do not ask which part of his body for the team to ask for one summer off.6Also: it’s not like the USMNT invented disregarding the Gold Cup. Mexico sent decidedly B team rosters to at least the 2013 and 2017 editions, when they were competing in the now-disbanded Confederations Cup. Keylor Navas, arguably the most successful player ever to come out of Concacaf, never played a single Gold Cup minute after he made it to Europe’s top leagues. 

But all those missing names add up to one big missed opportunity. National teams don’t get to play a lot of soccer together, and they certainly don’t get to play in the weird compact environment of a summer tournament very often. And, because he was hired last fall in the wake of the 2024 Copa America disaster, this summer is literally Pochettino’s only chance to have his team together for an extended training camp and competition before he coaches arguably the most consequential tournament in the history of men’s soccer in America. 

And the optics of so many big players missing the Gold Cup are just really bad in the context of the last couple of years. 2024 was a genuine embarrassment, and the truly competitive games of the Pochettino era were truly dispiriting, hapless losses in almost completely empty stadiums. 

If the 2022 World Cup felt a bit like the United States’ first generation of European-based stars taking the first step into taking the team to the next level, the 2025 Nations League felt like every low point of the mid-2000s all over again. They were bad, and no one even bothered to show up to be disappointed. 

The 2025 Gold Cup will not be a chance for the best USMNT lineup to coalesce and prove that it has what it takes to compete at the World Cup next summer. But it is still a chance to reset the vibes.

Which is why, this summer, it is more important for the USMNT to be fun than to be good. 

In the context of creating a winning team, it doesn’t matter that much how well the U.S. play at the Gold Cup, since the lineup they roll out against Trinidad and Tobago June 15 will bear only a passing resemblance to the one that will start at the World Cup next  year. If your focus is on World Cup performance, it doesn’t really matter if a Haji Wright-Patrick Agyemang-Diego Luna front line can really click into gear when Pulisic, Balogun and Weah will more than likely take those spots in 2026.

But in the context of creating some sense of momentum around the team and giving the average American soccer fan a reason to start getting excited for next summer, this Gold Cup is still a genuine opportunity for the team. If your focus is on reenergizing the team and the fans, and getting people to actually care about watching the United States Men’s National Team again, then this Gold Cup does still matter — and there are actually plenty of reasons to be optimistic. 

This is not a roster completely bereft of talent or personality or potential. The aforementioned Diego Luna is one of the few charismatic soccer players in the United States and is on an absolute tear in MLS this season.

Meanwhile, Malik Tillman is genuinely one of the best rising young players in Europe and was rated the best player of the year in the Dutch league by the site WhoScored.7The Dutch league is in Europe, so you know that Tillman is for real good. More importantly, he has the same voice as Werner Herzog when he speaks English and is a certified party animal, consistently getting so drunk every time his club team PSV wins a trophy that Dutch fans call him Tequila Tillman.

Tyler Adams is guilty of going into Generic Athlete Mode at times, but his commitment to nonstop free safety action will have you crying like this old English man at how he wins that ball so much. Look at Chris Richards’ beautiful smile.8Chris Richards is also a very good center back, for what it’s worth

Perhaps most importantly, this team will re-introduce America to Sergino Dest, one of the most delightfully strange athletes in the world. He once dribbled through half the Mexico team and also got sent off for punching someone in the face in the same game. He spent his entire post-2022 World Cup vacation at a private zoo for exotic animals in Dubai. He shares edited packages of his best highlights on his own Instagram page, and ended 2023 with a wrap up Reel that included his red card against Trinidad for punting a ball out of the stadium, set to a DJ Khaled song built around a sample of “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. He is God’s perfect right back.

So no, the USMNT will not be using this vital last opportunity before the World Cup to develop a cohesive strategy that brings the best out of their most talented players. They will not be getting valuable repetitions practicing attacking patterns of play or collectively recognizing pressing triggers. They will not finally realize the potential of some of the best soccer talent ever produced in America finally all taking the field together at the same time. 

But what they might do is play broadly exciting soccer and reconnect with an increasingly disillusioned fanbase. They might not take another step towards being able to compete against the best teams from Europe or South America, but they might just fix the deeply broken vibes around the program.

And, with so many key players missing, fixing the vibes just might be the most important thing this summer.

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