Doug McIntyre
Soccer Journalist
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] if you don’t play”
Fellow central midfielder Aidan Morris started Pochettino’s first two games at the helm last October, then waited almost a full year for another chance. He established himself as one of the top central midfielders in the Championship in the interim, and tried to control what he could.
“It’s obviously my goal and my dream to play for this country as much as I can, but you’re gonna go through times where you’re not called up,” Morris said. “Between those times, just put in the work. Everything works out how it should. I’m in a good place right now.”
The arrival of fresh faces and the omission of other, well-known ones isn’t an accident. Since taking over a U.S. locker room in which as many as eight positions were seemingly set in stone, Pochettino has tried to boost competition internally.
“The players that were not called, they need to be desperate to perform better and to do better and to improve,” Pochettino said after naming his current 26 for the two October tuneups.
“And the players that were called need to arrive here and be desperate to perform, score goals, save, [win] tackles, run more than the opponent, and to convince us to have the possibility to be called again,” he added.
“That is the challenge.”
“I want to be in the World Cup squad,” said Wright.
“Hopefully, I give myself the best opportunity to do that.”
Doug McIntyre is a soccer reporter for FOX Sports who has covered United States men’s and women’s national teams at FIFA World Cups on five continents. Follow him @ByDougMcIntyre.
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