The 2026 World Cup is a little more than a month away from starting, and the U.S. men’s national team is beginning a 26-player countdown with Weston McKennie at the front of it. The midfielder is the first name in the newsletter’s look at players to watch, with only one player from each country included.
McKennie, now 27 years old, has spent much of his career moving through some of Europe’s biggest leagues. He made his Bundesliga debut for Schalke at 17, joined Juventus in Serie A at 21 and became the first American ever to play for the Italian club. At 23, he moved to Leeds in the English Premier League before returning to Juventus, where he has spent the last four seasons. He has scored 11 goals in the Champions League.
The countdown comes with the 2026 World Cup arriving on American soil for the first time in more than three decades. That matters for the U.S. men because their World Cup history has been uneven: they finished third at the first tournament in 1930, have not finished better than eighth since then and scored only three goals in four matches in their last appearance in 2022.
There is also a historical echo in the background. In 2006, a 7-year-old McKennie posed for a photo with Landon Donovan and Carlos Bocanegra after the U.S. men visited Germany for a meet-and-greet at Ramstein Air Base before that World Cup kicked off. Nearly 20 years later, he is no longer the kid in the picture but one of the players expected to carry the team into the next one.
Elsewhere last night, the San Antonio Spurs beat the Minnesota Timberwolves 133-95 in Game 2 of their conference semifinal matchup to even the series at 1-1, with Victor Wembanyama scoring 19 points and grabbing 15 rebounds as San Antonio led by as many as 47 points. In the East, the Knicks took a 2-0 lead over the 76ers, who played without injured center Joel Embiid, behind 20-point nights from Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and Jalen Brunson. Anthony Edwards said Minnesota had expected a bounce-back from the first game, but the Timberwolves came out flat and were blown out.
For now, the focus returns to the world cup schedule and the names that will shape it. McKennie is only the first of 26 players the newsletter plans to track, and the U.S. will spend the next year finding out whether his long climb from Schalke to Juventus to a home World Cup can become part of a run the program has not produced in generations.
