USMNT opens home World Cup in style against Paraguay

The United States stepped into SoFi Stadium with more than an opener on the line. Against Paraguay in the Group D start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the USMNT played its first men’s World Cup match on home soil since July 4, 1994, in front of a crowd judging not just one night, but the credibility of an entire cycle.

The setting mattered because the tournament itself has changed. FIFA’s 2026 World Cup runs from June 11 to July 19 and expands to 48 teams, 104 matches and an additional knockout round, turning the event into a longer, more demanding test. FIFA described USA v Paraguay as one of the most eagerly anticipated games in American soccer history, and as the co-hosts opened the second World Cup ever staged on U.S. soil, that description fit the moment.

For Mauricio Pochettino, the match was the clearest early measure of the job U.S. Soccer hired him to do. The federation appointed him head coach on Sept. 10, 2024, with the explicit aim of guiding the United States to success at the home World Cup, and he arrived in Atlanta with a finalized 26-player roster announced on May 26 before the team began final preparations. That sequence gave the cycle a sharper outline than many past U.S. campaigns, where the runway to a World Cup felt less deliberate and less defined.

The benchmark, however, remains fixed. The U.S. men’s best modern World Cup finish is still the quarterfinals in 2002, when the team lost to Germany on June 21, 2002, in Ulsan, South Korea. Twenty-four years later, that result still marks the line between a promising American team and one that can claim a place among the sport’s elite.

That is why the opener against Paraguay carried such weight. A strong night at Los Angeles Stadium in Inglewood can energize a home tournament, but it does not erase the standard that still defines the program. The real question is whether this team can turn the occasion at SoFi Stadium into the start of something more durable than a perfect first impression.