"I think the distraction got to the team for sure in some type of way." Megan Rapinoe didn't sugarcoat it — the off-field chaos surrounding the USMNT, she believes, was a significant factor in their 4-1 Round of 16 collapse against Belgium.
Speaking on her podcast A Touch More: The Beautiful Game, Rapinoe pointed directly at the Folarin Balogun red card saga — and Donald Trump's controversial intervention pushing FIFA to review the suspension — as the kind of pressure this group of players simply had no framework for handling. FIFA eventually rescinded the ban, but the damage to the team's focus, in Rapinoe's view, may have already been done.
The USWNT had been through this. The men hadn't.
Rapinoe drew a sharp comparison to the 2019 Women's World Cup, a tournament that kicked off in the middle of the team's equal-pay lawsuit and with Trump already taking shots at them publicly. "We were a little bit more prepared," she said. The scrutiny wasn't new. They had built a callus for it.
The men's team hadn't. And that, she argued, is the real issue — not just Trump, not just the red card, but the fact that most of these players had never been asked to process something politically charged and emotionally loaded while also preparing for a knockout match.
"I feel like this is the first time that most, if not all, of these players are having to even think about something off of the field that is controversial." There's no experience to draw on. No older core who's been here before. In men's football, she noted, players rarely choose to engage with anything beyond the game — which leaves them completely exposed when the game forces the issue.
"It's impossible to say how much all the discourse with the president, all that, it's immeasurable. We'll never know what it would have been like for this team if that hadn't happened."
Belgium were good. But the USMNT weren't right.
Rapinoe was careful not to hand Belgium all the credit without also crediting the mess the US brought on themselves. She called Belgium "a really, really, really good team" with "legends sitting on the bench" — and that's fair. But a 4-1 scoreline against a host nation in the Round of 16 suggests more than just a quality gap.
She also floated an interesting tactical wrinkle: that Pochettino's teams tend to thrive as underdogs, and that it might actually have "been better for us to play without" Balogun rather than have the entire pre-match narrative consumed by whether he'd be available.
"I don't think they handled just all of the circus that was around their team very well." That's the honest read. When the chaos around a team becomes louder than the team itself, a 4-1 loss stops being a surprise.
