The USMNT’s disastrous Copa America and the 2026 World Cup.

On Wednesday, U.S. Soccer announced that it would be firing men’s national team head coach Gregg Berhalter after the team bombed out of the group stages of the U.S.-hosted 2024 Copa America.

Berhalter was a good if imperfect coach who did a good if imperfect job with the group for his three years in charge. His tenure culminated in the 2022 World Cup, where the team lost to the Netherlands in the first knockout round, but he probably didn’t do quite enough to earn getting rehired for another cycle. He was also a lightning rod for a portion of the fanbase who blamed him for every inconsistency of a talented but young team, a habit that earned him far more ire than he deserved but kept much of the heat off his players as they grew into themselves. That growth has not happened fast enough, even with the extra time he was given during this second cycle. Now for the third time in a row, a manager who led the USMNT to a World Cup and was retained for another four years has been fired before the subsequent tournament. Maybe this job needs term limits.

An early exit from this summer’s Copa America ended the USMNT’s best chance at a high-stakes run-through in tournament play before it hosts the 2026 World Cup. It beat South American minnows Bolivia but lost to both Panama and Uruguay, failing to qualify for the knockout rounds.

In the game that ultimately doomed their tournament, the Americans looked comfortable for 18 minutes before winger Tim Weah received a red card for hitting Panama’s Roderick Miller in the face. The U.S. scored a few minutes later, only to concede Panama’s equalizer shortly after that. They then spent 65 or so minutes playing defense and failing to break out on the counterattack before Panama’s José Fajardo slipped past a ball-watching Cameron Carter-Vickers to slam the winner home seven minutes from the end of normal time. The team was put in a tough spot by Weah’s foolish dismissal, but it failed to respond with a toughness of its own to match the occasion. Berhalter was unlucky to be so inconvenienced in the most pivotal game of the group stage, but he hadn’t built up enough goodwill since the 2022 World Cup to cushion the blow of that bad luck—perhaps in part because his return to the team was held up by one of his close friends digging out skeletons from his past in retaliation for not playing his kid.

Playing poorly in a tournament on its own is not unforgivable. A full-strength England team needed 95 minutes to score an equalizer against Slovakia in the knockout rounds of the European Championships. Portugal labored to a goalless penalty shootout win against Slovenia. Brazil was held to a 0–0 draw by Costa Rica in the Copa America. The talent gaps in each of these cases are far greater than that between the U.S. and Panama.

The difference is that England, Portugal, and Brazil all advanced in their respective tournaments. The problem for the USMNT under Berhalter is that it never seemed possible for it to win when it played poorly. It simply did not strike often enough against the run of play, did not steal a goal from a set piece, did not execute a perfect counter with its back against the wall. The players enter the game with a Plan A—one that might look very different for Uruguay versus Panama, as evidenced by how the U.S. played in the first 20 minutes of each of those matches—but find themselves unable to adapt when situations demand it. They go down a man against Panama and never make up for the missing link on offense. They race out of the blocks neck-and-neck with Uruguay but then let the game grind to a halt once Uruguay decides it wants to settle down. They look in these moments like it’s more complicated than they expected, like someone halfway through a home improvement project who realizes they should have called a professional.

There are coaches out there who I think would do a better job, and there are several potential candidates who I think would do a worse job. I don’t think U.S. Soccer is necessarily guaranteed to get one of the former, someone whose arrival will immediately lift the players to new heights that Berhalter was supposedly preventing them from reaching. In the wake of the Copa America failure, criticism of the team’s performance that had previously focused primarily on Berhalter finally spilled over to blast the players as well. Some of this reaction has been oddly pejorative, as though the players themselves were the ones who started calling themselves a Golden Generation, but it wasn’t entirely incorrect. Weston McKennie is either the best player on the pitch or invisible, and at the Copa America, he was invisible. Gio Reyna is the most adept American at creating chances with the ball at his feet, but he’s a half-step slow moving toward it if the pass to him isn’t gift-wrapped and laid gently before him. Christian Pulisic draws fouls like he’s Houston Rockets–era James Harden, but his set piece delivery from the resulting free kicks too rarely leads to danger. Even up a man, Panama couldn’t stop the U.S. attackers without scything them down. It had four tackles, four interceptions, and 19 total fouls. (Compare that to Panama’s opener against Uruguay, where it had eight tackles and nine fouls.) Those 19 fouls led to just one shot on target from set pieces. How different would that game have been if the U.S. had converted even one of those attempts?

Previous generations—ones that included many of the players now criticizing this team on TV—could rely on these moments to seize momentum back when games were starting to get out of hand. For a decade the team also had Clint Dempsey, whose prowess conjuring goals from nothing was essential to the USMNT’s success. The current team doesn’t have anyone who makes a habit of saving the day. It is a captive to its own momentum.

Listen, the USMNT is not going to win the World Cup in 2026, not even on home soil, no matter who is coaching them. (Bookmark it. I promise I won’t notice if I’m wrong.) For the U.S. to become the type of team that we could expect to make a deep run in the tournament, it was always going to take luck and timing. Thus far it has had neither. Another wave of newcomers to push the incumbents for minutes or even raise the team’s ceiling has not materialized. Progress for the team’s core has been more Snakes and Ladders than steady: Christian Pulisic starred at AC Milan this year as Gio Reyna had another lost season, playing fewer minutes in the past three years combined than he did during his age 17 season four years ago. Tyler Adams spent the year out hurt as Weston McKennie adapted and thrived at Juventus. Starting fullbacks Antonee Robinson and Sergiño Dest both had fine club seasons, but Dest tore his ACL in May.

We haven’t hit this group’s ceiling yet, but it is lower than we once had dreamed. The trajectories that once let us imagine a dark horse run as at least a remote possibility—our most talented team ever, coming into their respective primes after eight years of learning to play with one another—have been derailed by injuries and wasted seasons at clubs and development curves that seem to have flattened a little sooner than we might have liked. Our talent production hasn’t caught up to that of Colombia or Uruguay, much less England or Spain. The U.S. could ride a hot streak to its best-ever World Cup finish in 2026, or it could run into France in the Round of 16. It just doesn’t look likely to beat two or three or four straight contenders playing the biggest games of their lives.

For years, the U.S. men have treated the 2026 World Cup as the culmination for the program. Berhalter, the players, and the federation have consistently espoused a mode of Sabanite process thinking where everything is preparation for a future challenge and the most important match is always in the future. The 2022 World Cup was a warmup for the big one in 2026. This Copa America was the dress rehearsal. On to the next one.

Winning a world championship is obviously the main point of having an international team, but it isn’t the only one, and to spend years gazing myopically into the far distance does the present a disservice. There are more pleasures to be had from the sport than ultimate victory. If your fandom is a wager hoping for the return of World Cup glory then you are making a foolish investment. Only eight nations in its 92-year history have won the men’s World Cup. A select few others have been deserving but fallen short. The U.S. isn’t there yet, not even close.

Measured against this goal, every setback is a dire one, a portent of the loss that will one day end the nation’s World Cup hopes. But there is more to play for than having your name engraved on the bottom of the Wikipedia article for “List of FIFA World Cup finals.” This team has, for instance, been exceedingly good at completing U.S. Soccer side quest No. 1—beating archrivals Mexico—even if the difficulty on that has been turned down in recent years. (Mexico was dismal in this Copa and also failed to get out of its group.)

Whatever their ceiling ends up being, however far they go in 2026, it is a rare opportunity to watch a team grow from as youthful a nucleus as this one has, to follow them as they figure out everything they can do and maybe some things they can’t. For all the gloom and brooding reflection of the past week, facing the sharp realization that it might be time to confront their limits, the U.S. still started three 21-year-olds against Uruguay and just one field player over the age of 26. They are young and likely to keep getting better. If their next coach can teach them to be more adaptable, to take a little bit less of what the opposition offers them and a little bit more of what they need to pull themselves on top in a given contest, then they may yet surprise us.