CHICAGO – Antonee Robinson struck the ball perfectly with his left foot, it rocketed into the corner of the net, and he celebrated with a cartwheel and a backflip. Sixty-three thousand people at Soldier Field came to their feet. The United States were level. For twelve minutes, on a steamy Saturday afternoon in Chicago, the 2026 FIFA World Cup felt like something that might actually go the way the country hosting it has never managed to make it go.
Then Leroy Sané scored. The United States lost 2-1. They fly to Los Angeles now, and the World Cup opens for them Friday at SoFi Stadium against Paraguay. This is where the warmup ends and where, for Mauricio Pochettino’s squad, everything either starts to become true or doesn’t.
The concern arrived in the first sixty seconds. Joshua Kimmich delivered a free kick into the box from the right flank, Kai Havertz rose at the center of the area, and Miles Robinson never found his mark. The header was good but not unstoppable. The goal was the set piece every national coach dreads – a clean defensive assignment left undone before the crowd had properly settled. In a tournament of this scale, against a group that includes Turkey after qualifying at the expense of Kosovo, that type of defensive lapse cannot repeat.
The encouragement came in the twenty minutes that followed. Christian Pulisic drove at Germany’s backline in the way he tends to when he’s in form. His combination with Sergiño Dest down the right flank yielded the corner kick that Robinson scored from. The midfield pairing of Tyler Adams and Malik Tillman controlled possession for extended stretches. “I thought we were dangerous at times,” Pulisic said after the match. “We had good stretches of possession, defended well for good portions of it.” Robinson’s goal – his fifth for the national team – was exactly the kind of moment that defines what the U.S. needs from its left back over the next four weeks.
Sané’s goal in the 57th minute settled the result, coming from Germany pressing high in transition in the right channel, behind the American fullback. Pochettino will want that closed before Friday. Germany were also without Manuel Neuer (calf) and Lennart Karl, an 18-year-old midfielder ruled out of the tournament entirely with a thigh injury. The score against Germany’s full-strength team could have been different.
The match ended with a flare of bad temper in stoppage time, as Timothy Weah’s reckless slide tackle on David Raum sparked a brief confrontation between players. None of it will matter on Friday. The final whistle mattered.
The United States has now lost nine consecutive matches against European opponents since 2022. That is the number Pochettino will not want to say aloud, but that every senior player on the squad is aware of. It is also a number that speaks to the quality of the opponents on that list rather than to a systemic failure. What the U.S. now has is a clean bill of health, a squad that knows its XI, and one week of tournament football before the group stage determines whether this generation delivers or whether 2026 becomes another chapter in a long American story of proximity to greatness without actually reaching it.
The tournament itself is the largest in World Cup history – 48 teams across 16 cities in three countries, 104 matches, a final at MetLife Stadium on July 19. What the expanded format does is give teams like the United States more room to survive early stumbles. The 32 teams that advance from group play include some who would not have cleared the old threshold. For a host nation, that extra cushion is not incidental. Paraguay is the first test – a team the U.S. beat 2-1 in a November friendly – followed by Australia and Turkey. The path to the knockout rounds is manageable. The path beyond it requires something this team has not demonstrated against the teams capable of testing it.
Pochettino said the loss was “not a surprise” and that the team showed “the right mentality.” The SoFi Stadium labour dispute that threatened to complicate Friday’s opening had not been formally resolved as of Monday. CBS Sports reported that Germany – in Group E alongside Ivory Coast, Ecuador and Curacao – opens its World Cup campaign on June 14 in Houston, a week after the United States. The gap between the two sides on Saturday was one goal and twelve minutes. Whether there is a gap at tournament time, and how wide it might be, is what the next five weeks are for. NPR noted that Pulisic broke his monthslong goal drought against Senegal the previous weekend, and that Robinson’s offensive playmaking has given Pochettino’s staff reasons to believe. A cartwheel and a backflip tend to do that.
