Juan Manuel Sanabria reached the World Cup stage on Monday, when Uruguay opened its 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign against Saudi Arabia in Miami. The 26-year-old Real Salt Lake midfielder arrived there with a bigger club role than anyone expected when Marco Bielsa named him to the squad two weeks earlier.
That call-up is why Sanabria is being searched now. He leads Real Salt Lake with six assists in 11 MLS games this season, making him one of the club's sharpest creators even as he joined Uruguay's camp in Montevideo after leaving Minnesota in late May. For a first-year RSL player to be in a World Cup opener at the same time he is driving the Claret-and-Cobalt attack is the kind of overlap that turns a routine roster note into a real storyline.
Sanabria's path helps explain why Bielsa trusted him. He is a dual-national Uruguayan and Spanish midfielder born on March 29, 2000, and he built his career across Spain and Mexico before joining Real Salt Lake in late January on a permanent transfer from Atlético San Luis. He had already logged 170 games for Atlético San Luis, scored eight goals, and added two goals and five assists in 22 games in the six months before the move.
The wrinkle is that Sanabria is still learning one job while doing another. At Real Salt Lake, he is a first-year midfielder asked to create from the left and set up chances. For Uruguay, he is a call-up in a squad shaped for a short tournament, where every minute is rationed and every selection carries more weight than a club week in MLS. Bielsa made that choice two weeks before the opener, despite Sanabria having only four recent appearances in six invitations to Uruguay's first team before the World Cup.
Uruguay's path after Saudi Arabia is already set: Cape Verde on Sunday, June 21, 2026, and Spain in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Friday, June 26, 2026. If Sanabria keeps producing for Real Salt Lake the way he has through the opening stretch of the season, his role for La Celeste should stay in the frame too, because the player who is feeding chances in MLS is now trying to matter on the biggest stage in the game.
