Doug McIntyre
Soccer Journalist
Editor’s Note: USMNT Footnotes takes you inside the major talking points around the U.S. men’s national team, MLS, European leagues, and all across American men’s soccer.
The 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup kicks off a month from Wednesday, and the USMNT’s final competitive tournament before the main event — next summer’s all-important World Cup on home soil — is coming into clearer focus.
On Monday, the region’s governing body is expected to publish 60-man preliminary rosters for each of the 16 participating countries.
Four days later, on May 22, U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino will name his final 26-player squad. The Americans open their Gold Cup slate on June 15 versus Trinidad and Tobago, then close out the group stage with games against Haiti and guest nation Saudi Arabia. Final rosters must be submitted to Concacaf no later than June 4.
Following a demoralizing last-place finish at the Concacaf Nations League finals in March, Pochettino said last month that he and his staff “need to be intelligent in the way that we are going to select the players and not just choose based on talent alone…we need to have the right characters to be really competitive.”
That suggests at least some personnel changes from the Nations League. A few open spots were already assured with veteran starters Weston McKennie and Tim Weah unavailable this summer; the Juventus pair will compete in FIFA’s expanded 32-team Club World Cup, which will be played simultaneously mostly in the eastern half of the U.S. with Gold Cup matches mostly on the west, instead.
As usual, the biggest question concerns Gio Reyna. The 22-year-old is finally expected to leave Borussia Dortmund this summer following yet another lost season in Germany, where Reyna has been an unused sub in eight of Dortmund’s last nine Bundesliga games.
Entering the final year of his contract, Reyna has been granted permission to find a new club. His lack of playing time down the stretch has prompted speculation that the Black & Yellow, another Club World Cup entrant, could release him for international duty or sell him to another team prior to both competitions, thus making him available to the USMNT.
But given that Pochettino will name his roster next week for the Gold Cup and two early-June tuneups against Türkiye and Switzerland, that seems unlikely. The coach has long been operating under the assumption that he wouldn’t have Reyna at his disposal this summer. “We decided to call him because the only opportunity that we have is now in March,” Pochettino said then. “We are not going to have [Reyna] in June.”
There’s no indication that anything on that front has changed. Reyna made just one cameo off the bench in the Nations League, for the final 21 minutes of the 2-1 loss to Canada in the third place match. His already dire situation with Dortmund has only further deteriorated.
Reyna has made just three appearances for BVB over the last seven weeks, though he did feature in both legs of Dortmund’s UEFA Champions League quarterfinal loss to Barcelona last month. It makes one wonder: Would Pochettino pick Reyna for the Gold Cup even if he could?
Perez visits Dest at PSV
Four camps into his tenure at the U.S. helm, Pochettino has now worked with almost every member of the national team’s player pool. But there are at least two key players he has yet to call in: PSV Eindhoven right back Sergino Dest and Monaco striker Folarin Balogun. Both recently retuned to the field for their clubs following long-term injuries. Both figure to be at the Gold Cup this summer.
USMNT assistant Jesus Perez, Pochettino’s chief deputy, recently met with Dest and the rest of PSV’s American contingent — fullback Richy Ledezma, forward Ricardo Pepi and midfielder Malik Tillman — in the Netherlands.
Meantime, Balogun went the distance and scored in Monaco’s 3-1 win over Saint-Etienne on May 3. It was the 23-year-old’s first goal since undergoing shoulder surgery in December.
Will Ledezma get the call?
As polarizing as U.S. boss Gregg Berhalter became during his five years in charge of the program, even his harshest critics have to agree that his recruitment of dual nationals was wildly successful. Berhalter’s efforts helped lure Balogun, Dest, Pepi, Tillman, Yunus Musah and others to the USMNT. Dest and Musah started every game at the 2022 World Cup.
But where Berhalter was aggressive, reaching out to players who held U.S. passports and selling them on the “brotherhood” of the national team, Pochettino promised a different tack.
“We don’t need to convince [anyone],” Pochettino said last November of his approach to dual-nationals. “The player, if he’s an American player, needs to be desperate…we want maybe less talent, but people who will come in and be desperate to defend that shirt and fight for the country.”
So it will be interesting to see if Ledezma, who is also eligible to represent Mexico, is on the preliminary and/or final U.S. squad. The Arizona native, who has made 27 Eredivisie and Champions League starts for PSV this season, was left off Pochettino’s provisional list ahead of the Nations League finals. The snub came shortly after Ledezma said he was “waiting” for a call from El Tri.
A trio of dual-nationals — Patrick Agyemang (Ghana), Diego Luna (Mexico) and Jack McGlynn (Ireland) became permanently cap-tied to the U.S. with their Nations League appearances.
Diego Luna, Brian White can’t stop scoring
Speaking of Luna, the 21-year-old Real Salt Lake playmaker has stayed red-hot since setting up Agyemang for the Americans’ only goal in March: his strike on Saturday in RSL’s 1-1 tie with FC Dallas was his sixth goal in his last seven games and fourth in his last three.
Up in Vancouver, Brian White has been equally scorching. White, 29, scored his seventh and eighth goals of the MLS season on Sunday in the Whitecaps’ 2-2 draw with LAFC, pulling him even with three other players in the league’s Golden Boot race. White also scored in both legs of the Canadian club’s Concacaf Champions Cup semifinal win over Lionel Messi and Inter Miami late last month.
The ‘Caps visit Mexico City-based Cruz Azul for the final on June 1 — the same day the USMNT’s pre-Gold Cup camp begins in Chicago.
Japan, South Korea friendlies announced
As reported last month on the State of the Union podcast, the U.S. men will take on two of Asia’s strongest teams in September friendlies.
The USMNT will host Korea Republic on Sept. 6 at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, New Jersey. It’s the national team’s first visit to the home of MLS’s New York Red Bulls since 2017, when the U.S. lost what turned out to be a pivotal World Cup qualifier to Costa Rica.
On Sept. 9, the Americans will welcome the Samurai Blue — FIFA’s No. 15-ranked side — to Lower.com Field in Columbus, Ohio.
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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