Photo: Tasos Katopodis/FIFA/Getty Images

The FIFA World Cup Draw at the Kennedy Center last week was the sort of surrealist spectacle that can take a few days to truly absorb. (FIFA president Gianni Infantino gave Donald Trump a “FIFA Peace Prize” that he accepted with legitimate joy and appreciation in a way that gets more disturbing the more you think about it.) Every time I think about it, I find myself tapping the right side of my head with my palm like I’m trying to get water out of my ear. But a little lost in all the absurdity was what the event ostensibly exists for in the first place: announcing the groups, matchups, and schedule for the cup itself, which will be hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico next year. And while the draw was a nightmare for the U.S. as a country — an estimated 200 million people around the planet watched us immolate in real time — it was a dream for the U.S. as a soccer team.

In terms of our national teams, there is no squad more reliably dramatic than the U.S. men’s soccer. The men’s and women’s Olympic basketball teams win every gold medal, and the women’s soccer team is one of the most popular soccer teams in the world, but the USMNT is always going through it. I have been writing about the pending breakthrough of the U.S. men’s team for this magazine for more than a decade now, and the team has rewarded me by persistently falling on its face. It’s fired multiple coaches, restructured their entire operation, and had players fighting with their coaches (including star Christian Pulisic and current coach Mauricio Pochettino), and, worst of fall, it imploded by missing the 2018 World Cup entirely, unquestionably U.S. soccer’s nadir at the exact moment it was supposed to making its big leap forward. (The most recent disaster was being bonked from the 2024 Copa America at the exact same moment, just a few miles away in Atlanta, that Joe Biden was having his own debacle on a CNN debate stage.) You can always count on U.S. soccer to break your heart.

That is why the draw last Friday caused equal parts excitement and anxiety. The U.S. could have ended up facing powers such as Morocco, Switzerland, or Norway (led by Premier League stars Erling Haaland and Martin Ødegaard) in its group: Instead, it got relative weaklings Australia and Paraguay. The third team in its group will be determined in a March playoff, but worst-case scenario, it’s Turkey, which is still ranked below the U.S. (and is enmeshed in a gambling scandal), and in the best case, it’s Kosovo, the 80th-ranked team in the world. The United States is heavily favored to win its group, something it has only done once, back in 2010. As the home nation, the U.S. has a terrific opportunity to advance to the quarterfinals for the second time ever. It got the best draw imaginable. “This is about as favorable of a group as the U.S. could have hoped for,” wrote ESPN’s Bill Connelly.

This is happening at the same time that the U.S. team has been playing better than it has in years, and for good reason. Pochettino, formerly the coach for the Tottenham Hotspurs, has made some strategic adjustments and embraced what he calls “organized chaos,” leading to some eye-opening wins, including a stunner of a 5-1 blowout against Uruguay last month. Pochettino also seems to have won his staring contest with Pulisic: He lambasted Pulisic for skipping out on the Gold Cup, and Pulisic fired back at him, but now everything is simpatico, thanks largely to Pochettino’s making tactical adjustments that benefitted the way Pulisic likes to play. The USMNT has its coaching staff and roster aligned for the first time in nearly a half-decade. That’s particularly valuable because this is unquestionably the most talented roster ever, with more international players playing in the top leagues than anyone could have imagined even a decade ago. While the USMNT hasn’t seen the success on the pitch of the elevation of national talent, it’s certainly seeing it with its players on club teams: The roster is stacked.

Does that mean the USMNT is going to win the World Cup? Obviously not. (“The Athletic,” which called the team the “big winners of the draw,” has the U.S. as the 14th-most-likely team to take home the trophy, which corresponds with its current FIFA ranking.) But it means it’s never been more set up to succeed than it is right now, even not accounting for the gentle results from the draw. The last decade has featured constant predictions that the U.S. was about to finally break through, hopefully just in time for hosting the 2026 World Cup. It has been a rocky ride to get there, to say the least, but it looks like the stars are aligning.

This is of course a reason to be more scared, not less: We have all been excited before. But there is something weirdly perverse about USMNT having everything lay out perfectly for them at the exact moment that the U.S. and its president are set to humiliate themselves in front of the entire world. (New fun development: The ACLU is warning that FIFA — famously one of the most corrupt organizations on the globe — “risks becoming a stage for authoritarianism” simply by being involved with the United States.) Infantino and FIFA have made Trump — who continues to threaten to pull the cup out of “blue cities” — the centerpiece of the biggest sporting event on earth, and we’re going to have to deal with that all next summer. It is a little ominous that the notoriously combustible, self-destructing USMNT feels comparatively stable and reliable.

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