"Zero chance." That's Gary Lineker's verdict on the United States men's national team winning the World Cup this summer — and before you dismiss it as an outsider's take, the betting markets are saying roughly the same thing.
The USMNT is priced as the 14th-best team to lift the trophy on American soil, which lines up almost exactly with their FIFA ranking of 16th. Co-hosts. Home crowds. And still not in the top ten. That tells you something.
Lineker, who'll be broadcasting his The Rest is Football podcast on Netflix from a Times Square studio throughout the tournament alongside Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, didn't sugarcoat it when speaking to The Athletic. "I'm going, 'No, you've got zero chance of winning it — it's impossible, because you haven't got the players yet,'" he said. The quarter-finals, in his view, would be "incredible." The round of 16 "reasonable."
The youth system problem isn't new — it's just never been fixed
Lineker put his finger on the structural issue that American soccer fans have been arguing about for decades. "Their youth system is awful, hopeless," he said. "It's a very middle-class sport played up until a certain age in schools and then it peters out." The pay-to-play model, where families foot the bill for academy football, has long been identified as the reason why talent from lower-income communities — the kind of talent that floods the academies of Europe and South America — simply doesn't make it through.
The contrast with the women's game is stark. The USWNT has won four World Cups and five Olympic titles, largely because the college system funnels exceptional athletes into the program year after year. The men's pathway doesn't work that way, and Mauricio Pochettino is managing the consequences of that right now.
On paper, the group stage at least offers a clear path forward. The USMNT draw — Turkey (22nd), Australia (27th), Paraguay (40th) in Group D — is about as kind as it gets at a World Cup. Eight of twelve third-place teams advance, so elimination in the group stage would require a genuine collapse. Win the group and a last-16 clash against Belgium in Seattle becomes the likely reward. That's also, notably, the team that beat them in a friendly earlier this year.
What 'doing well' would actually mean
A 3-2 warm-up win over Senegal has slightly lifted the mood around the camp, but one result doesn't rewrite the broader picture. Pochettino's side has looked unconvincing for stretches of their buildup, and the 14th-best World Cup odds reflect that honestly.
Lineker did allow for the romantic possibility. "If they win there, there will be a euphoria," he said of a potential knockout victory. "Once football gets you, it really gets you." He's right — a deep run would do more for soccer's commercial and cultural footprint in the US than anything MLS has managed in three decades.
But the youth system will still be broken when the tournament ends. And Lineker's parting thought cuts through the optimism cleanly: the best World Cup finish in USMNT history came in 1930, in a semi-final they lost 6-1 to Argentina. Their sole knockout-stage win since then was against Mexico in 2002. That's the actual ceiling, not the dream.
