The US delivered their best modern World Cup performance – and also let themselves down

The US celebrate during their opening win over Paraguay. Photograph: Patrick T Fallon/AFP/Getty Images So now what? How are we supposed to think about this supposedly golden generation of the United States men’s national team who have fallen short of expectations at this World Cup on home soil? How do we come to terms with the sense that this team beat Paraguay 4-1 in their opener – the most impressive performance in the program’s history – but also lost dismally against Belgium by the same scoreline in the last 16? And what of Christian Pulisic? The golden boy who was largely absent – either physically or in terms of his influence on the proceedings – but for 45 manic minutes to start off this tournament? If he didn’t lead the team on the field, he was certainly its face off it, appearing in endless commercials – outnumbered only by the omnipresent David Beckham, who last kicked a ball on American soil 14 years ago. Pulisic hardly dislodged the legends forged at the last World Cup in the US, who were decades overdue for their displacement. Related: World Cup 2026 team power rankings: England on the rise as last eight are set Neither did his feted teammates, some of them the stars of their own advertising blitzes. On Monday, so many of Pulisic’s peers were well below their personal par of the last few weeks as well– Weston McKennie and Tim Ream and Sergiño Dest and plenty of others. How are we to process that this group both proved that it is undoubtedly the most talented and pedigreed generation this program has ever produced, and also utterly imploded in the face of its first serious test in the knockout stages? The core of this team is unlikely to get better by the next World Cup in 2030, when Antonee Robinson will be 32; Tyler Adams, Pulisic and McKennie will be 31; and Dest 29. These are not the ages at which the modern soccer player tends to improve . The window on this generation hasn’t closed quite yet. But the opportunity to leverage this moment to make that long-awaited breakthrough into the American mainstream very much has. This summer, the USMNT had a chance to finally be embraced by the nation in a permanent way – and they faceplanted . It hardly helped when Donald Trump interfered to undo Balogun’s suspension for the Belgium game – or at least claims he did , an assertion delicately disputed by Fifa – and ruined the excellent vibes with his drenching loser stink. Until then, you could almost physically feel a country falling in love with this group. The USMNT claimed the whole Balogun brouhaha had no effect , and that may well be true – we’ll never really know. The Belgians and the rest of the world nevertheless dunked on the US when given the chance to equate the loss of a team to a personal defeat for Trump. That, too, will be the lingering recollection. But two things can be true here. First, that this edition of the USMNT badly let down the nation when the country was dialed in – to the tune of 42 million TV viewers, more than any college football or NBA finals game ever, and more than any baseball game this century – and prepared to tag along on a deep run in this tournament. And at the same time, they delivered the best World Cup performances in their modern history, winning a single knockout game – just as the US did in 2002, when it was a 32-team tournament and they reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup. That’s the central awkwardness here. The commanding wins over Paraguay and Australia, in which the US controlled the games and asserted themselves and fashioned the better of the chances, really were unprecedented. Time has sanded down the memory of 2002, when the Americans were fortunate to cling on to their upset over Portugal in their opener, were equally lucky to draw with the hosts South Korea, and were fairly rinsed by an already-eliminated Poland. Then came the 2-0 win over Mexico, a result that was perhaps a tad flattering. In 1994 and 2010 and 2014 and 2022, the US hardly marched through the group stage – let alone win it with a game to spare, as they did for the first time in 2026 – and then went out right away. Usually in losses that were lopsided in all but the score. Real growth was demonstrated in this tournament. For a few weeks, we saw the future we had long been promised, the answer to the age-old question of when we would finally be good at men’s soccer. We witnessed a USMNT that, on the sport’s biggest stage, bullied teams with less talent (Paraguay, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), and that matched up well with a team of roughly their own level (Turkey) with a bunch of reserves. And then it all disintegrated when we most needed it to hold together. That’s the legacy of the 2026 US World Cup team. They soared as high as we always hoped they might, and to an altitude far above any predecessors. And then stalled in mid-air, smashing a deep crater into how we will remember this campaign. Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts , which is out now . He teaches at Marist University.