The Roster Lands (For Real)
Thanks to the top notch reporting of two American soccer journalism's top men, Pablo Maurer and Jeff Rueter, the USMNT roster will land later today with a decided paucity of drama.
That development (the roster leak) is maybe more fascinating to me than the roster itself. Pablo and Jeff did great work to get their hands on the list and the availability of the roster meant more time for pundits and fans to engage with what Pochettino's trying to accomplish with the group of 26 names on it.
These are the three big questions as I see them:
- Who is Tyler Adams's backup?
Without another out-and-out defensive mid in the group, Pochettino seems to have painted himself in a corner if a) Tyler gets hurt or b) Tyler gets suspended due to yellow card accumulation (a very likely proposition). I know Tanner Tessman's form had dipped, but with Johnny Cardoso out injured it's as though Pochettino decided that depth behind Tyler isn't worth pursuing.
- Who is Tyler Adams's midfield partner?
There are plenty of ways to go about setting up the double pivot that makes the most sense in a 3-4-3, but the bottom line is that you need someone to do the connecting and pressing into space that Tyler isn't going to do. The way the roster read, it looks like that will be McKennie, but is that the best use of his talents? I thought we'd already been through this...
- What's Gio's role?
It's hard to see Gio as anything other than a supersub considering his lack of match time at Gladbach, but it's not shocking that the most purely talented American player is in the group. Gio could be the American Ricardo Quaresma if he can impact a game or two in meaningful ways.
- What's the centerback pecking order?
We know Richards will start if healthy (thankfully the ankle injury isn't that bad) but after that it's a crap shoot. Pochettino clearly trusts Tim Ream as a veteran leader, but Ream's lack of speed is a major problem. Eric Wynalda has taken to describing a USMNT back three with Antonee Robinson as a centerback as a given on our radio show, something that might be a bit of wish-casting but makes me wonder if there's a unique mix of defenders who will get a chance to bracket Richards. On the right, both Freeman and Scally can step into the centerback role, something that probably went a long way towards earning them a spot on the roster.
All of those rumors about a "surprise" turned out to be just that, though I suppose we have to allow for the possibility that there's a bombshell coming during the official roster release. Not gonna happen.
The leak happened, we all tried to make sense of the roster as reported, and then the news that players who didn't make the team (Diego Luna chief among them) got an email informing them as such (instead of a call from Pochettino himself) sent American soccer social media into a tailspin.
People I usually think of as fairly level-headed and not prone to wild overreaction lost their minds over the report that Pochettino didn't call the players he left off the team—or, more specifically, players he left off the team that had played a significant role over the last year or so. Luna, for example, appeared in 17 games in 2025 but won't be suiting up for the World Cup.
While I understand the notion that Luna and a few others deserve the respect of direct communication from the head coach of the USMNT and emailing a "thanks for your interest but we've decided to go in a different direction" to a national team player feels like a cop-out, the whole thing feels moralizing.
I'm not even sure we have the whole picture of how the call-ups and not-call-ups happened, but even if this is the whole picture, Pochettino has made it clear that his approach to the national team involves a "in the moment" selection process. I'm sad for Luna and Tessman but nowhere in the rules does it say a player not selected is due any communication at all.
International soccer is a strange beast, turning in wrenching ways on the emotion of representing your country while at the same time being marked by a decided lack of sentimentality on the part of coaches making difficult choices over which 20-something players get to represent a country of hundreds of millions in the most important sporting event on the planet.
I sincerely hope that Luna and Tessman and any other player that might have gotten an email informing them that Pochettino did not include them in his final roster understand that there are no guarantees and that getting any word at all is somewhat out of the norm. I'm sure they're hurt, but I can't see how getting an email and not a phone call (remember that Ricardo Pepi famously hung up on Gregg Berhalter back in 2022) would lessen that pain.
I'm going to be live on The Best Soccer Show tonight at 9 ET to talk about the roster once it's made official this afternoon. Ahead of that, I'll be on SiriusXMFC (channel 157) from 4-7 PM ET with Wynalda. We'll have interviews with players on the scene in New York for the roster unveil. I imagine we'll also get some answers (but maybe not clear ones) from the USMNT head coach about his thinking. Poch's presser is set for 4 PM ET.
