The fluid tactical details that made the USMNT's World Cup opener so devastating

LOS ANGELES — There’s a common refrain that echoes through the chambers of international soccer: keep things simple.

With so few training sessions between games in each FIFA window that allows players to leave their club teams and join up with their national sides, it’s not easy to drill detailed tactical instructions. Add in the fact that those windows arrive so infrequently — there were only five such windows available for every nation in all of 2025 and just two allotted in 2026 before the World Cup — and you have an unstable base on which to balance true tactical instruction.

“When you only have a few days to reunite and to play, you only select players, but you cannot coach players,” U.S. men’s national team manager Mauricio Pochettino said last week.

Perhaps, though, you wouldn’t have known the United States was operating under those strict parameters after an opening 4-1 World Cup victory over Paraguay. That quartet of goals was the most ever scored by a U.S. men’s team in a single World Cup game. Some xG models gave the U.S. a comprehensive 2.46 to 0.57 advantage over their South American foe. And, as per Opta, the USMNT’s 53 touches in the attacking box were inside the top 10 in World Cup matches in the last 60 years, in addition to being a new team record in that span:

“Only in this type of tournament, like the Gold Cup, and now the World Cup because you have a preparation of two, three, four weeks — that is the only moment that we can coach,” Pochettino added after his team’s record-setting showing.