IRVINE, Calif. – For the U.S. men’s national team, a World Cup on home soil is underscored by a pressure they rarely feel but as they inch closer to Wednesday’s round of 32 clash against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the weight of expectations feels a little different than it once did.
“Would it be weird if I told you I don’t really feel too much pressure at this minute?” captain Tim Ream said on Monday.
Though a heavily-rated version of the USMNT finished the group stage with a 3-2 loss to Turkiye on Thursday, the group has essentially gone from strength to strength since opening their World Cup camp on May 27. The unknowns that they entered the tournament with have subsided somewhat, to the point that there’s a healthy confidence with that great question mark out of the way.
“I just think there’s so much pressure that we put on ourselves and it feels very different this time around than 2022, I will say that, not because of the round of 32 or because that was the round of 16,” Ream added, noting the World Cup’s expansion means there’s an extra round of games before the last 16. “I think we put so much expectation on ourselves as players, and I said this at the beginning of the tournament, but I think we felt more pressure for that first game against Paraguay than anything and that’s coming from ourselves, not from anything on the outside. For us, for me, it’s a game we want to win. It’s a game that we have to put everything into and put in a performance [in] the way we have in the group stage and then we see where that takes us but in terms of pressure, there’s nothing added or nothing extra and that’s the way we’ve approached every, every single game.”
Head coach Mauricio Pochettino is expected to have most of his squad available for Wednesday’s clash at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., though a few players missed Monday’s training session in Irvine, Calif., their final practice at their World Cup base camp. Defender Auston Trusty and midfielder Cristian Roldan trained individually while defender Mark McKenzie received treatment for irritation, the trio missing out for a second straight day. Roldan has not actually trained since June 18, the day before the USMNT’s 2-0 win over Australia, while dealing with a small quad issue.
One player who is expected to be available is midfielder Gio Reyna, who started against Turkiye, his 70-plus-minute shift his longest in any game since Dec. 2024 when he played for Borussia Dortmund. He said he has experienced no issues since despite the lengthy stretch in between those two matches.
“I feel great but the training has been amazing for everybody,” Reyna said. “The athletic staff and coaching staff have been really, really good to make sure everybody’s ready to go for 90 minutes regardless of who’s playing.”
Bosnia and Herzegovina, like Paraguay and Australia before them, are expected to offer the U.S. team a stiff defensive test, making for a unique challenge for Pochettino’s attack-minded group. Ream is of the mindset, though, to expect the unexpected with the stakes as high as they are – not only are the USMNT chasing a deep run at a World Cup on home soil, their opponents are hoping to go as far as they can in their first-ever World Cup.
“It’s one of those that you come up against similar things throughout tournaments, right?” Ream said. “I don’t know that we completely expected Paraguay to be the way that they were in the first game, and then there’s always things that get thrown at you, so I don’t know that we fully expect Bosnia to just be defensive. I think we have to be able to expect the unexpected, as we proved against Australia so you see similarities but then there’s also things that we’re going to have to solve that they throw at us in in situations in game and that’s then down to us as players to figure those puzzles out and but there’s definitely some some similarities but we’re not going to like sit there and think it’s going to be exactly the same because no two games are ever the same.”
Certain pressures off them, the USMNT now switch their mindset as the most important games of a World Cup await them – a survive and advance mentality familiar to the knockout settings, no matter the level of the competitor or the competition.
“Everyone knows in the back of our minds what this could be for this country, not that we’ve really spoken about it much,” Reyna said. “We’re pretty much focused on each game in front of us at this moment.”
