Race/Ethnicity of Team USA World Cup Squad

The 26 men on the 2026 American team have been announced. This time, did we focus on black athleticism or Latino soccer savvy?

The U.S. men’s national soccer team for the upcoming World Cup has been announced. It’s always interesting to see how the U.S. tries to deal with the opportunities and problems inherent in being a huge, rich, multi-ethnic country that isn’t as soccer-mad as most other countries.

The U.S. World Cup men’s team is usually not bad, but not real good either. At the 2022 World Cup, for instance, Team USA edged Iran 1-0, tied Wales 1-1, and, in its big accomplishment, drew England 0-0. Then in the Round of 16 playoff, the USA got blown out by Netherlands 3-1.

That’s a pretty typical World Cup performance for the USA.

Here’s my table of the 26 players on 2026 squad by race/ethnicity:

As usual, Substack doesn’t handle tables well, so I’ve had to post it as a screencapture from my Google Sheets.

(By the way, while I like much about Substack, such as that I can make a living off it, it would be nice if Substack worked harder on making minor upgrades to their software, such as finally supporting tables. In my two years of working with Substack daily, they’ve barely improved any of their software features.)

My comments on this table are below the paywall.

Paywall here.