The U.S. men open their World Cup on Friday in Inglewood, California, then play again a week later in Seattle, beginning a group stage that will unfold almost entirely in front of home crowds. For Cristian Roldan, the stage is even smaller than it looks on the schedule: Inglewood is only 14 miles from where he starred in high school.
That is why the question of when does usa play in the world cup is drawing so much attention now. The opener is immediate, the cities are familiar, and the first two matches land in places where the team and its players already have deep ties. Roldan said this year would be a “slightly different experience” than 2022, when the U.S. made the round of 16 in Qatar but still felt far from home because of the time difference and the separation that came with playing across the world.
The third group-stage game adds to that sense of a homecoming. The U.S. will play all three group matches in cities where Roldan spent much of his life, and he said that being able to do it in “my backyard” and his “adopted city” made it “a beautiful story.” The schedule gives the Americans rare exposure to packed stadiums and a crowd that knows the players by name, not just by shirt number.
That support has already shown up in the days before kickoff. The team drew 32,000 applications for 5,500 spots at Monday’s training session in Irvine, and a sellout crowd at Soldier Field watched the U.S. lose to Germany last week. Tim Ream said the group has been “pleasantly surprised” by the buzz around the team and by seeing “5,500 fans ready to watch a training session,” while Joe Scally said many of the players are carrying the feeling of what it means to play for the fans and trying to build on it.
But the noise around this tournament carries a memory the U.S. would rather not repeat. The team hosted Copa América two years ago and still failed to reach the knockout stage, a result that cost Gregg Berhalter his job. Mauricio Pochettino is now in charge and has a 15-10-1 record with the U.S., but the urgency around this home tournament is inseparable from what happened the last time the Americans were supposed to make the most of friendly ground.
The Americans have reached the World Cup quarterfinals only once, in 2002, and they advanced to the round of 16 in Qatar four years ago. This time, the path begins Friday in Inglewood with Paraguay, and the first answer to the bigger question will come quickly: whether a team getting the kind of home-field lift it could only dream about can turn that energy into results before the crowd noise becomes pressure.
