48 Nations: USMNT. The Only Host Nation in History That Isn’t Sure Yet If It Loves the Game.
Tonight at SoFi Stadium, the United States plays its first game of a tournament it is hosting. Thirty-two years after 1994 changed everything and not enough. Here is the story of a country still figuring out what football means to it.
No country in the history of the tournament has hosted the biggest football event on earth while being genuinely uncertain about its own relationship with the sport. Brazil did not wonder if it cared about football when it hosted in 2014. Germany did not wonder in 2006. France did not wonder in 1998. Every previous host nation arrived at the tournament with a football identity so deeply embedded in the national culture that the question of whether people would show up was never asked. The United States is the first host nation in history for whom that question is real.
That is not an insult. It is the most interesting cultural story in the entire tournament. A country of 335 million people that has professional leagues in basketball, baseball, American football, hockey, and now soccer, that produces world-class athletes in almost every sport simultaneously, that has the infrastructure and the money and the attention span to dominate anything it decides to commit to, is tonight playing its first game of a World Cup it is co-hosting on home soil for the first time since 1994. And the question hanging over all of it is the same one it has been asking since that summer: does this country actually love football, or does it just love winning?
Tonight at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, against Paraguay, in front of a crowd of 70,000 people in the Los Angeles metropolitan area where more than five million residents trace their roots to Latin American countries where football is not a sport but a language, the United States starts to find out.
WHAT 1994 DID AND DID NOT DO
USMNT World Cup 2026: The Thirty-Two Year Question
The 1994 World Cup in the United States is the template for everything that is happening tonight. The tournament drew the largest crowds in World Cup history at that point. The final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena set an attendance record that stood for decades. The soccer infrastructure that emerged in its wake, the MLS launched the following year, the growth of youth participation programs, the gradual development of a domestic talent pipeline, all of it traces back to that summer.
And yet. Thirty-two years later, the United States men’s national team has still never won a World Cup. Has never reached a semifinal. Has never been considered a genuine contender by the rest of the world in the way that the size and resources of the country would suggest it should be. The gap between the ambition that 1994 created and the results that followed is the central tension of American football history. The 2026 tournament, hosted at home, is the most visible possible arena in which to close that gap or confirm that it remains.
Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine coach who took over the national team and built it into a side ranked 14th in the world at the draw, has said that he believes this generation of American players is the most talented in the country’s history. Thirteen of the 26-man squad played in Qatar in 2022. The other thirteen are experiencing their first World Cup. Christian Pulisic, the player who has carried the weight of American football’s ambitions on his shoulders for the better part of a decade, is 27 years old and at the peak of his powers. Tonight is the match he has been building toward since he was a teenager.
“No country in the history of the tournament has hosted the biggest football event on earth while being genuinely uncertain about its own relationship with the sport. The United States is the first.”
48 Nations · USMNT · Sideline Sports · 2026
USMNT World Cup 2026: The Cultural Argument for Why This Time Is Different
The case for optimism is real and it starts with demographics. The United States in 2026 is not the United States of 1994. The Latino population has grown to over 63 million people, roughly 19 percent of the country, and within that population football is not a sport of choice but a birthright. The communities in Los Angeles, in Miami, in Houston, in New York, in Dallas, that have been watching and playing and caring about football for generations, are the reason SoFi Stadium will be full tonight in a way it might not have been if the group stage draw had sent the United States to a different city.
There is also the generation argument. The players who were children during the 1994 World Cup are now in their thirties and coaching youth teams and raising children who grew up watching Pulisic and Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie play in the Champions League for European clubs. The pipeline that 1994 was supposed to create has, slowly and imperfectly, created something. The MLS has grown from a curiosity to the fifth-most attended soccer league in the world. American players are starting for clubs in Spain, Germany, England, and Italy at a rate that would have been unimaginable when the Rose Bowl hosted that 1994 final.
And then there is the host effect itself. Something happens to a country when the world shows up at its door with a football. Mexico declared a public holiday yesterday. The Azteca was full before the ceremony started. The noise that greeted Mexico’s goals against South Africa was the kind of noise that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up regardless of which team you support. That noise is waiting for the United States too. The question is whether the country knows how to make it.
Yesterday’s opening match in Mexico City, which produced three red cards and what some are calling the most chaotic World Cup opener in 20 years, set the emotional register for the tournament. We covered the cultural weight of that moment in our Mexico City piece for Where the World Plays. Tonight the register shifts to English.
——— TONIGHT ———
SOFI STADIUM, INGLEWOOD, 9PM
What USMNT vs Paraguay Means Beyond the Result
SoFi Stadium in Inglewood holds 70,000 people for football. It is a $5.5 billion building opened in 2020, one of the most technologically advanced venues in the world, the home of the Rams and Chargers, and the building that will host multiple World Cup matches this summer. The crowd tonight will be overwhelmingly pro-American in the stands but the streets and bars and living rooms of greater Los Angeles will be watching in at least three languages simultaneously. That is the United States in 2026.
Paraguay arrives as a team that has qualified for the World Cup for the first time since 2010. They are not favorites. They are not expected to challenge deep into the tournament. What they are is a side that will make the United States work for everything it gets, and in a tournament where the host nation’s first match carries this much expectation, making the host work is its own kind of victory for the underdog.
Tim Ream captains the team at 37 years old, which is its own kind of statement about the generation that built this moment and the generation that is inheriting it. Pulisic leads the attack. Pochettino has had a year to build a system and a belief in a squad that, more than any previous American generation, understands what it means to play under pressure in hostile environments on the world stage. They have done it for their clubs in Europe. They have done it in qualifiers. They have not done it at a World Cup at home.
That changes tonight. Whatever happens at SoFi, the United States will have played a World Cup match on home soil for the first time in 32 years. The result will matter enormously for the tournament and moderately for the longer story. The longer story is whether this country leaves July 19 having decided, once and for all, that football is its sport too.
“The question is not whether the United States can win. It is whether this country can believe. Tonight at SoFi Stadium, in front of five million Latin American residents of greater Los Angeles, it starts to find out.”
48 Nations · Sideline Sports · June 12, 2026
Christian Pulisic has been carrying American football’s ambitions for a decade. Mauricio Pochettino took a 14th-ranked team and built something from it. Thirteen players who were in Qatar are back. Thirteen who have never done this before are about to.
The 1994 World Cup asked a question. Thirty-two years of American football tried to answer it. Tonight at SoFi Stadium, in Inglewood, California, the answer begins in earnest.
It is time to find out if this country loves the game.
