Haji Wright started two of the United States’ four games at the 2022 World Cup. He was one of just three American goalscorers in Qatar, joining star forward Christian Pulisic and veteran winger Tim Weah.
Yet eight months before soccer’s last quadrennial showpiece, Wright’s odds of making the 26-man roster seemed long at best.
(Photo by Richard Sellers/Getty Images)
He hadn’t made a single appearance during World Cup qualifying. The journeyman pro, then 24, didn’t even have a senior international cap. Wright eventually made his debut in the penultimate camp before the final 26-man squad was named, then survived the final cull after a hot start to the season in the Turkish league.
Wright’s story is instructive as he and 25 other 2026 World Cup hopefuls gather in Austin, Texas this week ahead of the tournament co-hosts’ friendly there versus Ecuador and another next week against Australia in Commerce City, Colorado.
When it comes to earning a World Cup trip, timing is everything.
“My mindset doesn’t change whether I’m in camp or not,” Wright, the current Golden Boot race leader in England’s second-tier Championship division, said Tuesday during a video conference with reporters. “Hopefully, that hard work turns into an opportunity with the national team.”
U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino likes to talk about his “open system” of calling up players. Last week, the former Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain manager invited midfielder James Sands into the fold for the first time since being hired a little more than a year ago. On the flip side, there was no place for a pair of 22-year-old 2022 World Cup alums Joe Scally and Yunus Musah.
Both play regularly in some of Europe’s top club competitions, though Musah has been used mostly off the bench for Italy’s Atalanta so far this season and Scally’s Borussia Dortmund owns one of the most porus defenses in the German Bundesliga.
“The overall message is that nobody’s spot is guaranteed,” Tim Ream, Pochettino’s usual captain, said on Monday. “Just because you were at a previous World Cup doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed another one.”
Having turned 38 on Sunday, Ream knows it better than most. He didn’t make the 2014 World Cup team, served as a reserve on the U.S. side that shockingly failed to qualify for 2018 and was on the outside looking in for almost all of 2022. When Ream started the Americans’ World Cup opener against Wales, it had been more than a year since his previous international appearance.
“He revitalized his national team career at an older age,” Cristian Roldan, 30, said of Ream. “It provided me with a little bit more added motivation to get back here with the team, to really believe that I could get here.”
(Photo by John Dorton/ISI Photos/USSF/Getty Images)
A depth piece on the 2022 team, Roldan hadn’t represented the U.S. for more than two years when he came on as a sub in a 2-0 loss to South Korea last month. His performances for the Seattle Sounders at the FIFA Club World Cup helped catch Pochettino’s eye. The popular Roldan also impressed the coach off the field.
“The way that he behaves within a group, with teammates,” Pochettino said, “That is a good example of how you need to want to be involved and defend and fight for your place…you to arrive and show your personality and your character and then be available always. And if you play, you behave the same [as] when you do not play”
Fellow central midfielder Aidan Morris began Pochettino’s first two video games on the helm final October, then waited nearly a full yr for one more likelihood. He established himself as one of many high central midfielders within the Championship within the interim, and tried to manage what he might.
“It is clearly my objective and my dream to play for this nation as a lot as I can, however you are gonna undergo occasions the place you are not referred to as up,” Morris stated. “Between these occasions, simply put within the work. Every thing works out the way it ought to. I’m in a great place proper now.”
The arrival of contemporary faces and the omission of different, well-known ones isn’t an accident. Since taking on a U.S. locker room wherein as many as eight positions have been seemingly set in stone, Pochettino has tried to spice up competitors internally.
“The gamers that weren’t referred to as, they must be determined to carry out higher and to do higher and to enhance,” Pochettino stated after naming his present 26 for the 2 October tuneups.
“And the gamers that have been referred to as have to arrive right here and be determined to carry out, rating targets, save, [win] tackles, run greater than the opponent, and to persuade us to have the likelihood to be referred to as once more,” he added.
“That’s the problem.”
“I wish to be within the World Cup squad,” stated Wright.
“Hopefully, I give myself the most effective alternative to do this.”
Doug McIntyre is a soccer reporter for FOX Sports activities who has lined United States males’s and girls’s nationwide groups at FIFA World Cups on 5 continents. Observe him @ByDougMcIntyre.
What did you consider this story?
beneficial
Get more from the FIFA Men’s World Cup Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more
