- Howard casts doubt on any USMNT optimistism
- Says team struggles against top-25 opponents
- Squad lacks necessary nastiness as a unit
Assessing the USMNT’s 2-0 loss to South Korea and the state of the squad, former national team star Tim Howard discounted any sense of optimism around the program ahead of the 2026 World Cup.
“There’s an optimism around this team because there’s a World Cup and it’s coming to our country,” Howard said on the Unfiltered Soccer podcast. “And we just simply as soccer fans, get excited. But when you begin the dissect some of these numbers and stats, there’s not a ton to get excited about… but there’s there’s something with this team that they don’t have. I don’t know, the moxie, they don’t have something to win the big games.
“That like that’s not an opinion, that’s what they’re showing us. And, and so much of this exercise is the build up to the World Cup. Sometimes we picked the bones of it too much, or sometimes it’s fluff. But ultimately the World Cup is about winning big games.”
He specifically highlighted the USMNT’s struggles against higher-ranked opponents, noting their inability to compete with teams ranked in the world’s top 25. Under Mauricio Pochettino, the team has lost to the likes of Mexico, Turkey, Switzerland and South Korea.
“I mean, if you look back on all your World Cups and all my World Cups, I would say, the one takeaway was, how do we get through difficult moments? One how do we persevere in difficult moments? And if you can’t persevere, or how the hell do you hang on for dear life, right?” he said. “That’s essentially What we do. And this team just hasn’t really quite shown the ability to do that in the bigger games. I’ll blanket that by just saying top 25 teams in the world, right? The teams that are that are really going to matter, and they haven’t shown that ability.”
Former national team star Landon Donovan said the current generation of USMNT players lacks the guidance to get them where they need to be.
“After the 2018 failure to qualify for the World Cup, you said U.S, soccer made a decision that basically all of you guys were old, couldn’t cut it anymore,” Donovan said. “And we’re just gonna bring in all young players and let them grow and develop. On the surface interior, like, ‘OK, I can see that like we need to reboot.’ But what happened was massive void in leadership.
“And when I was coaching for a while you realize quickly that when a team has avoid in leadership chaos, or anybody thinks about countries around the world when there’s a void in leadership, chaos ensues. And there was a void in leadership. Now, I’m not talking about the coach, [Gregg] Berhalter, necessarily. I’m talking about the players… Of course, they had no guidance. And it’s not their fault because they didn’t know.”
Donovan said that he hopes US Soccer has learned from those decisions.
“I really do hope that we don’t have another reckoning like this in ’26,” he said. “But I think it could happen, right? It’s definitely a possibility. And I just hope you learn from that and don’t throw everything out the window.”
With World Cup success ultimately determined by performance in high-pressure situations against quality opponents, the USMNT’s current pattern of results against nations ranked inside FIFA’s top 30 rankings represents a concern.
The USMNT and Pochettino will face Japan Tuesday night.
