Wales and the World Cup: A Journey of American Soccer Players

On the eve of Wales, Gregg Berhalter pulled his 26 players into a tight circle and gave them a history lesson.

Not tactics. Not shape. A number.

Each man, he said, had been assigned one. It was his place in the lineage of Americans who had played in a World Cup.

"For me, it was 152," Walker Zimmerman remembers. "I was the 152nd player to represent the U.S. in a World Cup."

He went back to his room. The jersey was waiting. The number suddenly felt heavy.

Only 151 before him. A sliver of those center-backs. Fewer still starters. The math stripped away the noise. This wasn’t just another cap. It was entry into a tiny, elite club.

For this group, that sense of belonging didn’t arrive alone. It arrived with shared childhoods.

Tyler Adams had grown up in the U.S. youth system with Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie, the trio tasked with dragging the national team out of the wreckage of 2018. Tim Weah, Josh Sargent, Sergiño Dest – they had their own youth tournaments, their own bus rides, their own dreams.

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

"Those are the best memories," 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."

A World Cup in fast‑forward

Once the tournament started, the pace was brutal.

No extended camp. No warm-up friendlies. Players stepped off club flights and straight into the most intense games of their lives.

"It's so quick," Tim Ream says. "You're in such a bubble. The games are late, 10 PM, so it switches our body clocks. We're staying up until three in the morning… even on days we weren't playing, they wanted us to stay up until 2 o'clock in the morning. Breakfast at 12, lunch at four, then training."

Some tried to slow the tape.

"I have a good mental coach that I work with," Sargent says. "We made that a big priority. It's going to be a stressful time… but make sure that, while you're there, take some deep breaths and be grateful and take it all in."

Still, the days smeared together. Wales. England. Iran. Three group games in eight days. Training, recovery, late nights, the odd rhythm of life in a sealed World Cup city.

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

For others, the dream stayed mostly on the periphery. Joe Scally never played a minute, one of five USMNT players who didn’t see the field.

"A World Cup is a World Cup," he says. "There's nothing better in sports. Of course, it was different for me… but it also lit a fire underneath me."

He watched the anthems, the full stadiums, the world watching, and felt both part of it and just outside the glass.

Three goals, three very different stories

Before Qatar, only 22 American men had ever scored at a World Cup. Three more joined that fraternity.

Each remembers it differently.

Weah went first. Wales, game one, the moment the U.S. re-announced itself.

Pulisic burst through midfield and slipped him in. Weah took the touch, opened his body, and passed the ball into the far corner.

"Leading up to that World Cup, I dreamt of scoring," Weah says. "Years were passing by, and I literally always dreamt of that one moment… For it to become a reality, it was – man, it was amazing."

Playing in the World Cup was the dream. Scoring in it? Another level.

Then came Pulisic.

The U.S. reached the third group game against Iran needing a win. The stakes were obvious. The politics, the history, the knockout place on the line.

In the first half, Pulisic hurled himself at a cross, met it, and watched the ball slide over the line as he crashed into goalkeeper Alireza Beiranvand. The U.S. had the goal it needed. Its star had a damaged pelvis.

There was no iconic sprint to the corner flag. No choreographed celebration that would live forever in highlight packages. There was pain, a hospital, a FaceTime back to the locker room.

"It would have been, and it was, a huge moment," Pulisic told GOAL in 2024. "Normally… I would have been excited. I would have had a pretty cool celebration with the team. You could see the team wanted to run over and celebrate, but it was like, I just didn't have that."

He doesn’t dwell on the missing image.

"I wouldn't have changed it for the world," he said. "I hope to have many big moments. It's not like I feel like 'Oh, I need that one moment, that iconic celebration'. I want to go in and I want to win these tournaments."

Wright’s goal arrived with different baggage. Round of 16, Netherlands. The U.S. was chasing the game when a flick off his foot looped into the far corner and gave them a lifeline.

Hope surged. It didn’t last. The Netherlands closed out a 3-1 win.

"It felt crazy," Wright says. "After it went in, I kind of felt like the momentum might change… Then after the game, you're just emotional, really. It's your dream for your whole life, and then you get knocked out and everything comes out of you."

The goal lives in the record books. In his mind, it’s tangled up with the exit.

"I don't really have a memory of the moment of it because it was a happy and a sad moment. Being a World Cup goalscorer is amazing. Being knocked out of that same game, though?… That's what I remember."

Only with time have those three scorers been able to see their goals through a wider lens. Social media has helped, replaying the noise from back home.

"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 quiet moments that lasted longer

The goals will be replayed for years. Inside the squad, though, they’re not always the first memories that surface.

For DeAndre Yedlin, the only holdover from 2014, the real value lay in perspective.

Back then, he was the kid trying to prove he belonged. In 2022, he was the veteran, shepherding a young group through the glare.

After every game, he led teammates back onto the field to walk the empty stadium, to breathe, to let the noise drain away.

"It feels like adversity gets multiplied by 10 because there's always a camera on you," Yedlin told GOAL in 2024. "I think it's important to find that space and peace."

He has stripped the job down to its core.

"We're literally just entertaining people," he said. "That can bring inspiration, that can bring hope… We're so minuscule in the grand scheme of things… but we also play a huge part."

Others searched for their own pockets of calm.

"I tried to stay off my phone as much as possible and just be in the moment with the guys," Sargent says. "I feel like I can remember every single detail."

Ream can’t.

"I can see glimpses of it," he says. "It was like I'm there and I'm so insanely focused. It's like tunnel vision. There's a whole lot that you forget."

Qatar itself refused to blend into the background. The call to prayer rolled across Doha. Souqs sat next to gleaming new arenas. The entire city seemed to run on kickoff times.

"I enjoyed every bit of it," Matt Turner says. "It was so cool to be in a culture I've never experienced before. The call to prayer… to me, it was peaceful and it was thoughtful."

They were thousands of miles from home, sealed inside a tournament and a foreign city at the same time.

"It was special because we were in this foreign land all together," Turner says, "and… we had just this rock solid bubble."

Sergiño Dest tried to absorb it from a rooftop.

"I was just living in that moment," he says. "I would just sit there, drink my water, and watch these people enjoy life… I remember being like, 'This is it.'

He had a big room, a balcony, and a city soundtrack.

"In the afternoon, you could just open the window and hear the sound of life," he says. "That's what I miss most about it."

Inside The Pearl

The team’s true home was The Pearl, the man-made island where they stayed at the Marsa Malaz Kempinski. No flights between venues, no moving hotels. One base, one routine.

The heart of it was the Players’ Lounge.

For Yunus Musah, the connection ran so deep he went back the next summer.

"Everything was like a throwback," he said in 2025. "The smell!… The room, the view. I would just walk around, and it felt like I was experiencing all of those moments from the World Cup all over again."

"For me personally, the World Cup was the best experience ever. I loved it so much."

In that lounge, the days fell into a rhythm: late breakfast, training at night, long stretches of downtime in between.

"We had so much downtime with one another that it really just allowed us to connect," Adams says. "That Players' Lounge… it was like our own little sanctuary."

Berhalter pushed that side of it hard.

"Gregg made it a priority that team camaraderie and the time we spent together was valued and sacred," Adams says. "I got even closer to some guys that I didn't even know I could get closer with."

The bonding came with a competitive edge. If there wasn’t a World Cup game on TV, there was a movie, or a ping-pong match, or a video game showdown, or a pool table waiting.

"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."

Those are the snapshots that stick.

Cristian Roldan did everything he could to avoid isolation.

"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 family section

A World Cup doesn’t belong only to the players. It belongs to the people who got them there.

Zimmerman still sees the family section in his mind when he thinks back to the opener against Wales.

As the anthem played, he searched for the block of seats filled with parents, partners, kids, siblings, lifelong friends.

"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."

For Ream, the rare hours when families could come to the hotel felt like the only times the tournament slowed down.

"Those were the only moments where you felt you could actually sit back and breathe," he says. "My wife and kids and I, we're all here in this place together."

The effect ran both ways. Players met one another’s families properly for the first time. Relationships shifted.

"It was just this experience that drew us all closer together," Weah says. "Having that period of time to connect and meet everyone's family, share our lives together, that was amazing."

Some players have watched their lives change dramatically since. Marriages. New babies. Older kids who now understand what they’re seeing.

For Roldan, fatherhood has become the engine.

"It was almost like it was a collective effort to get there," he says of 2022. "Getting to see my loved ones there and enjoying it… that's where I got the most joy."

Now his daughter is nearly two.

"I've had this late surge because I've had my daughter around," he says. "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. I want her to watch daddy play."

Sebastian Berhalter lived Qatar as a son, not a player. He was still finding his way in MLS while his father coached the national team on the sport’s biggest stage.

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

The scars of those left out

Not everyone’s World Cup story is framed by nostalgia.

For Gio Reyna, Qatar became a knot of frustration, injury, limited minutes, and a fallout that spilled far beyond the dressing room. His role never matched the picture he had in his head. Emotions boiled over. After the tournament, a family complaint about a decades-old domestic violence incident involving Berhalter detonated into a full-blown scandal.

It was messy. It was public. It was about far more than football.

Time has pushed everyone forward. Berhalter returned in 2023, then departed in 2024 after a Copa America exit. Mauricio Pochettino now holds the job. Reyna remains in the player pool, and he speaks about 2022 as a harsh but valuable lesson.

"I think just individually and collectively, we were all very, very young and maybe a little bit inexperienced at the time," he says. The Netherlands, he admits, were “a little bit more experienced, a little bit better, a little bit more savvy.”

"It's a World Cup… I learned so much from that," Reyna says. "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, he knows, will be different. It will be on home soil.

"This one is in our home country, too, so it would be a dream come true just to be there," he says. "It's about the collective."

Reyna isn’t alone in feeling unfinished business.

Miles Robinson was a lock for Qatar until his Achilles snapped in May 2022. There was no race against time. No miracle return. Just the cold certainty that he would watch from afar.

By the time the tournament kicked off, he had a choice: look away or lean in.

"Man, I was outside watching that sh*t," he told GOAL with a smile. "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 had no such runway. A late hamstring injury at Crystal Palace cut him down weeks before the squad announcement. The margins were cruel. He stayed in London, rehabbing, watching his club teammates and his national team from a distance.

"I'm in London watching the boys kill it at the World Cup," he remembers. "I was so, so happy for them, but for myself, it was lonely."

He ducked into a pub for one game. It wasn’t the same.

"I didn't want anything to do with soccer," he says. "It felt like it just got ripped away from me right before it."

Mark McKenzie’s pain came from a different place. He was fit. He was in the mix. Then he wasn’t selected.

"Missing out on the 22 World Cup? It ripped me apart, bro," he says. "It was gutwrenching because I was so close."

That phone call cut deep.

"It's a punch to the stomach," McKenzie says. "It's an important feeling to have… because it puts everything in perspective. Maybe I put too much onus on this… I lost focus on the small areas of my game or my life that I need to improve."

From prelude to main event

The landscape has shifted since Qatar. Berhalter is out. Pochettino is in. Another 26 names are about to be written into World Cup history, this time without a long-haul flight.

The tournament is coming to them.

For the veterans of 2022, the magnitude of what they did only really hit when they went home.

Adams felt it in New York.

"People all of a sudden knew who I was walking back home in the streets of New York City," he says. "It's a city that I never imagined I'd get recognized in."

He was juggling a new level of fame with something far more personal: his first child on the way.

"It didn't become a challenge," he says, "but it was just something I had to figure out and navigate."

Now the entire program has to navigate something bigger: a home World Cup in a country where the sport is still growing, not fully grown.

"It's an amazing feeling, but also a responsibility at the same time," McKennie says. He thinks of the kids watching, the way he once watched players on TV and in magazines.

"Hopefully, people see that there is a pathway out there for them," he says. "It may not look exactly like mine or Christian's or Chris Richards… but the ultimate thing is to believe in yourself and bet on yourself always."

Some of the 26 who hear their names this time will be Qatar veterans. Some will be debutants. Some will become central figures. Others will never leave the bench. All of them will leave with their own version of the same story: a few weeks that change everything.

For the class of 2022, that winter in Qatar will always be a shared tattoo. For some, it was a chapter. For others, it was the defining act. Either way, it sits there, close to the surface.

"I can understand how people call it emotionally draining," Wright says. "After it was over, it felt like soccer had changed me, in a way, and now you find yourself chasing that same feeling."

The fever dream hasn’t faded.

"It all just feels like yesterday," he says. "Now, the next one's already here."

Turner feels it too.

"I had some amazing experiences," he says. "That's why I need to get back there, because I really want that feeling again."