The Impact of the 2022 World Cup on U.S. Soccer Players

On the eve of Wales, in a Doha hotel far from home, Gregg Berhalter asked his players to stand in a circle and think about history.

Then he gave them a number.

“He said, ‘Each one of you guys has been assigned a number specific to you, and it represents what number you are representing the U.S. in a World Cup,’” Walker Zimmerman recalls. “For me, it was 152.”

One hundred and fifty-two. The 152nd man ever to wear the U.S. shirt at a World Cup. When Zimmerman found the jersey laid out in his room later that night, the scale of it hit him. Only 151 men had done this before. A fraction of those had been center-backs. Fewer still had started games.

You think you know what it means. Then you see the number.

A generation grows up together

For many in that circle, the weight of the moment came from the faces around them. Tyler Adams had grown up with Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie in the youth ranks, the trio handed the task of dragging the program out of the rubble of 2018. Tim Weah, Josh Sargent, Sergiño Dest — they had their own shared bus rides, youth tournaments, dorm rooms.

By Qatar, they weren’t just teammates. They were chapters in the same story.

“That’s why you played soccer,” Adams says. “My memories with Weston are always going to be more valuable as a kid. It’s the memories of us getting to that stage, even more than where we are now.”

Then the whistle blew on all of that nostalgia.

There were no easing-in friendlies, no gentle runway. Players stepped off club flights and straight into the most intense environment of their careers. The tournament, compressed by a winter schedule, ran at a sprint.

“It’s so quick,” Tim Ream says. Kickoffs at 10 p.m. Body clocks flipped. Breakfast at noon, lunch at four, training at night. Even on off days, the staff kept them awake until 2 a.m. to mimic match rhythm. They lived in a bubble of bright lights and blackout curtains.

Some tried to slow the film down.

Sargent leaned on his mental coach. Deep breaths. Gratitude. Reminders to actually look around. It helped, but only so much. Wales, England, Iran — three games in eight days, bleeding into one another through recovery sessions, late nights and the strange stillness of hotel corridors.

“Looking back now,” Haji Wright says, “the World Cup was like a fever dream. It went by so fast.”

For others, the fever never quite broke the skin. Joe Scally never left the bench, one of five USMNT players who didn’t see a minute.

“A World Cup is a World Cup,” he says. “Of course, it was different for me… but it also lit a fire underneath me.” He watched the anthems, the full stadiums, the world’s eyes fixed on a stage he could almost touch. “Of course, I was a part of it, but not on the field.”

Three goals, three very different nights

Heading into Qatar, only 22 American men had ever scored at a World Cup. Three more joined that club in 2022. Same team, same tournament, wildly different memories.

Weah went first.

Pulisic slipped him through against Wales, and Weah shaped his run, opened his body and passed the ball into the net. It was the goal that announced the U.S. was back on the biggest stage, the finish he had seen a thousand times in his head.

“Years were passing by, and I literally always dreamt of that one moment at a World Cup,” he says. “For it to become a reality… it was amazing. Just playing in the World Cup alone was a dream come true, but scoring? It was an amazing feeling.”

Pulisic’s moment came with a price.

Needing a win against Iran in the group finale, the U.S. found its breakthrough when Pulisic hurled himself at a low cross and slammed the ball over the line. As it rolled in, he crashed into goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand and crumpled, pelvis injured, celebrations cut short.

No iconic knee slide. No arms spread under the lights. Just pain, a hospital trip, and a FaceTime back to a jubilant dressing room.

“It would have been, and it was, a huge moment,” he told GOAL in 2024. “I would have had a pretty cool celebration with the team… but it was like, I just didn’t have that.”

He doesn’t dwell on it. “I wouldn’t have changed it for the world,” he says. He wants tournaments, trophies, not one perfect photograph. “At the end of the day, people will talk about that and that’s what they’ll remember.”

Wright’s goal was stranger still.

Against the Netherlands in the Round of 16, he flicked a loose ball with the outside of his boot and watched it loop, improbably, into the far corner. It gave the U.S. life, a sudden jolt of belief. For a few minutes, he thought the game might turn.

“It felt crazy,” he says. “I kind of felt like the momentum might change a little bit and felt we might get another opportunity. Obviously, that’s not how it went.”

The U.S. lost 3–1. The dream died that night. The goal sits in his memory as something he still hasn’t fully unpacked.

“Being a World Cup goalscorer is amazing,” he says. “Being knocked out of that same game, though?… That’s what I remember.”

With time, perspective crept in. Social media keeps those seconds alive: the replays, the fan videos, the bars back home erupting in noise.

“We were just seeing the reactions online,” Weah says. “Seeing the fans back home when I scored or when Christian scored, it was amazing… just to see the impact that we have and the representation that we have in our country.”

The moments no camera caught

The goals will live forever. For many in that squad, they aren’t the memories that matter most.

DeAndre Yedlin, the only holdover from 2014, knew what a World Cup can do to a young player’s head. In Brazil, he was the kid. In Qatar, he was the veteran shepherding a group that had never been here before.

After every game, Yedlin led a small procession back onto the empty pitch. No fans, no noise, just players standing on the grass, trying to absorb it.

“It feels like adversity gets multiplied by 10 because there’s always a camera on you, always a microscope on you,” he told GOAL. “I think it’s important to find that space and peace.”

He has learned to see the sport as both tiny and enormous at once. “We’re so minuscule in the grand scheme of things,” he says, “but we also play a huge part.”

Teammates searched for their own quiet corners. Sargent stayed off his phone and tried to memorize everything. “I feel like I can remember every single detail,” he says.

Ream can’t. “I can see glimpses of it,” he says. “It’s like tunnel vision. There’s a whole lot that you forget.”

What no one forgets is Qatar itself.

The call to prayer echoing through Doha. Souks and old markets sitting in the shadow of brand-new stadiums. A city pulsing on World Cup time, every conversation bending back to the next kickoff.

“I enjoyed every bit of it,” Matt Turner says. He remembers the calls to prayer as something calming. “It was special because we were in this foreign land all together… and we had just this rock solid bubble.”

Doha became two bubbles, really. Outside, flags and drums and busloads of fans. Inside, the team hotel on The Pearl — the Marsa Malaz Kempinski — turned into something closer to a college dorm crossed with a high-performance lab.

Sergiño Dest would sneak up to the rooftop and just listen.

“I was just living in that moment,” he says. He watched fans with flags spill out of bars and cafes, heard the roar when a goal went in somewhere else in the city. “I remember being like, ‘This is it.’… In the afternoon, you could just open the window and hear the sound of life. That’s what I miss most about it.”

Downstairs, the soundtrack changed: World Cup games on every screen, movie nights, trash talk over ping-pong and pool, players drifting in and out of the Players’ Lounge — the beating heart of their month in Qatar.

For Yunus Musah, that hotel lodged itself so deeply in his senses that he went back the next summer just to feel it again.

“Everything was like a throwback,” he said in 2025. “The smell!… It felt like I was experiencing all of those moments from the World Cup all over again.”

Tyler Adams calls the lounge their sanctuary.

“We had so much downtime with one another that it really just allowed us to connect,” he says. “Gregg made it a priority that team camaraderie and the time we spent together was valued and sacred.”

They competed at everything. If it wasn’t a match on TV, it was FIFA on the console, or pool, or table tennis.

“Sean Johnson and DeAndre Yedlin had their crazy style of pool,” Zimmerman laughs. “It was basically snooker. They barely hit the ball and just tried to make you lose by scratching.”

Cristian Roldan tried to avoid his room altogether. “I remember being around the boys in the Players’ Lounge and making sure I didn’t spend any time in my room and didn’t take any moment for granted,” he says.

The people who got them there

A World Cup is never just 26 players and a staff. It’s parents, partners, children, friends — the people who drove them to practice, paid for boots, sat through youth tournaments in the rain.

Zimmerman felt that most acutely during the anthem before the opener against Wales. As the music played, he scanned the stands until he found the U.S. family section.

“Everyone’s story is tied up with what that group of supporters has done to get us into this spot,” he says. “All of the sacrifices that those people made… That, for me, was a special moment.”

Those family windows — a few hours between games when loved ones could come to the hotel — became as precious as any training session.

“For me,” Ream says, “those were the only moments where you felt you could actually sit back and breathe… ‘Okay, I’m going to take a mental picture of this and remember this.’ My wife and kids and I, we’re all here in this place together.”

The families bonded with each other, too. Years of seeing each other’s names on group chats turned into real conversations in hotel lobbies and restaurants.

“We were all really close already,” Weah says, “but having that period of time to connect and meet everyone’s family, share our lives together, that was amazing… It’s one of those memories that, even when you’re old and gray, you’ll remember those moments.”

Life has moved on since then. Some players have become fathers. Some have watched their kids grow old enough to understand what a World Cup is.

For Roldan, that shift is his new engine. His daughter is almost two. The idea of walking out at another World Cup with her old enough to watch him play pulls him forward.

“Part of my motivation to extend my career and continue to play at a high level is that I want her to watch me play,” he says. “I want her to watch daddy play… rather than just being a bench player.”

Sebastian Berhalter saw Qatar from the stands, as a son, not a player. Still finding his way in MLS, he watched his father coach the USMNT on the sport’s biggest stage.

“It’s the one time I got to feel like an ultra,” he says, laughing. “Seeing your dad coach against some of the best teams in the world was something I’ll never forget.”

The fracture in the story

Not every family story from 2022 was heartwarming. Not every memory is wrapped in nostalgia.

For Gio Reyna, Qatar became a scar. He arrived nursing injuries and expecting a starring role. Instead, he found limited minutes, mounting frustration and, eventually, one of the most bitter sagas in modern U.S. Soccer history.

Questions about his attitude in training, whispers about his response, then — after the tournament — the Reyna family’s revelation to U.S. Soccer of a decades-old domestic violence incident involving Gregg Berhalter. The fallout was ugly, personal, and it stretched far beyond tactics and team sheets.

Berhalter returned in 2023, then departed after Copa América 2024. Reyna stayed in the pool. Time did its slow work.

Looking back, Reyna frames 2022 as a harsh education.

“I think just individually and collectively, we were all very, very young and maybe a little bit inexperienced at the time,” he says. The U.S. ran into a Netherlands side “a little bit more experienced, a little bit better, a little bit more savvy with the game.”

“It’s a World Cup,” he says. “I learned so much from that… you learn that it’s about just trying to do whatever you can to help the team. This is your whole country that’s fighting something.”

The next one is on home soil. For Reyna, simply being there would be a dream. “It’s just about the collective,” he says.

His experience is a reminder: a World Cup doesn’t just crown heroes. It exposes fault lines.

The ones who never made the plane

Qatar also lives in the minds of those who watched it from afar, nursing injuries or wounds of a different kind.

Miles Robinson was a lock for the roster until his Achilles went in May 2022. Once the diagnosis came, the World Cup vanished.

He had a choice: shut it out or lean into it. He chose the latter.

“Man, I was outside watching that sh*t,” he told GOAL, smiling. “We were partying, watching, cheering on my guys. I really wanted to experience that real-life energy because that’s who I am.”

Chris Richards didn’t have the luxury of time. A hamstring injury at Crystal Palace came just weeks before the squad announcement. It was always going to be tight. It wasn’t tight enough.

He rehabbed in London while teammates from club and country lived the dream. He forced himself out to a pub to watch a game.

“I was so, so happy for them,” he says. “But for myself, it was lonely… I didn’t want anything to do with soccer.” The dream had been snatched away too close to the finish line.

Mark McKenzie’s pain was different. He was healthy. He just didn’t get the call.

“Missing out on the 22 World Cup? It ripped me apart, bro,” he says. “It was gutwrenching because I was so close… When you get that call that you’re not going, that you weren’t selected, it’s a punch to the stomach.”

In time, he came to see it as a brutal kind of clarity. “Maybe I put too much onus on this,” he says. “So much that I lost who I was, lost focus on the small areas of my game or my life that I need to improve.”

From prelude to main event

Much has changed since that winter. Berhalter’s second spell ended with a Copa América exit. Mauricio Pochettino now holds the whistle and the responsibility of choosing the 26 who will carry the flag this summer.

The stakes are different now. The World Cup isn’t somewhere else; it’s here. The tournament will stretch across a continent, but its impact will be felt in American living rooms, on American streets, in American youth leagues.

Tyler Adams felt the aftershocks of 2022 as soon as he got home.

“From a notoriety standpoint, people all of a sudden knew who I was walking back home in the streets of New York City,” he says. A city where anonymity is a given suddenly felt smaller. He was balancing a first child on the way with a career that had just been beamed into millions of homes.

How this group handles the weight of 2026 — the pressure, the expectation, the chance to change the sport’s place in the country — will define their summer and, perhaps, their careers.

“It’s an amazing feeling, but also a responsibility at the same time,” McKennie says. The kids watching now don’t just see players on TV or in magazines. They see them on their phones, every day. “Hopefully, people see that there is a pathway out there for them… The ultimate thing is to believe in yourself and bet on yourself always.”

Soon, 26 more players will get their World Cup number. Some will arrive with Qatar etched into their memory. Others will step into this storm for the first time. Some will be stars. Some will never leave the bench. All of them will leave changed.

For the class of 2022, that winter in Qatar is a bond they’ll carry forever. For some, it was a chapter. For others, it was the defining scene. Ask any of them, and they’ll tell you: it was special, and it will never happen in quite the same way again.

“I can understand how people call it emotionally draining,” Wright says. “After it was over, it felt like soccer had changed me… It’s hard to get that feeling again outside of a World Cup.”

Turner feels it too. “That’s why I need to get back there,” he says. “Because I really want that feeling again.”

The fever dream is over. The next one is about to begin.