Only five members of the USMNT’s World Cup squad play in the Premier League, but England’s top flight may be finding new ways to embrace American talent
The post-World Cup transfer is a fleeting concept these days. A player can enjoy a breakout month but to the sport’s experts, someone with newfound star power is hardly an unknown quantity. If anything, a few weeks of visibly strong form only reinforce the machinations of the sport, so it should come as no surprise that U.S. men’s national team forward Folarin Balogun was linked to Tottenham Hotspur a few short weeks after the tournament came to an end.
The move is unlikely to happen and it is unclear if Balogun will find a way out of Monaco before the Sept. 1 transfer deadline, even if the many invested in the forward’s career may want a better club setup for him than the team that finished seventh in Ligue 1 last season. The 25-year-old would hardly be the first USMNT player subject to this type of tension – as the U.S. continues its years-long quest to break into the elites of the men’s game, the conversation usually rightfully steers towards the work that gets done between World Cups. National team endeavors are essentially sports’ most prestigious side hustle, the bulk of their working hours – and their professional evolutions – instead resting with their clubs. There’s a very reasonable argument that the USMNT’s top players like Balogun should find themselves in the most competitive club environments, especially as they enter their peak years and with plenty of time on the clock until the next World Cup.
A theoretical move to Spurs would have checked off a lot of boxes, chief among them the fact that Balogun would find himself in the Premier League. England’s top flight is unrivaled in its competitive value, several superclubs occupying the top spots while a series of midtable teams with impressive financial might make up the numbers. A handful of USMNT standouts have competed in the Premier League for several years now – midfielder Tyler Adams and defender Chris Richards are longtime regulars at Bournemouth and Crystal Palace, respectively. The Premier League is not exactly hoarding American talent, though; the player pool is made up of players who play in different European leagues and several who are based in MLS. The variety reflects the USMNT’s status as a clear competitor in the international game but still outside the top tier for the time being.
Premier League-based players are arguably a status symbol for a national team on the rise, so much so that it almost forces the question: As the USMNT turn the page on a World Cup where they fell just short of realizing their potential, do the players need to break into England’s top flight to make history in four years’ time?
The Premier League and golden generations
The Premier League is not exactly a predictor of eventual World Cup winners – England’s teams understandably skew heavily towards players in their domestic top flight on a regular basis and have not won the World Cup since 1966, almost 30 years before the Premier League was even created. English clubs, though, have consistently sent the most players to the World Cup since the 1998 edition and the concentration of wealth in the Premier League meant that Crystal Palace had more players at this summer’s tournament than Real Madrid. The competitive advantage means England’s top flight has a decent track record in recent years of projecting which of the national teams might be well-poised to make history.
Perhaps no team in recent memory exemplifies this more than Belgium, who missed out on the 2006 and 2010 World Cups before their golden generation took shape. Eleven members of the 2014 team, who impressed in their World Cup return by reaching the quarterfinals, played for Premier League clubs at the time and another five moved to England in the subsequent years, including future Chelsea and Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois. The bulk of that roster then followed it up with a third-place finish in 2018 and the dying embers of that golden generation managed to demolish the USMNT this summer with a 4-1 win en route to another quarterfinal finish.
There have been similar trends over the last decade and change. The Netherlands team that went to the 2010 World Cup final had five Premier League players and another three went to clubs in England’s top flight in the coming years, several of whom returned to the 2014 team that finished third place. This summer’s Norway team boasted nine Premier League players, headlined by Manchester City’s Erling Haaland as the Vikings returned to the World Cup for the first time since 1998.
Why USMNT players shouldn’t prioritize the Premier League
It’s a simple hypothesis to spell out: develop enough Premier League-caliber players and your national team might just be on their way to an impressive World Cup performance when the time comes. The idea, though, nearly strips all the nuance that naturally defines a player’s career.
There are certain tried-and-true methods to player development but no matter the national team, a lot of it comes down to certain intangibles that are hard to recreate like natural talent. Even if the people in charge of youth pathways get everything right, though, that does not exactly mean a Premier League club will always come calling – or that it would be the right fit. Adams and Richards found happy homes at a pair of England’s midtable teams, both leaving Germany in search for more playing time and then eventually earning key roles on their teams. In retrospect, the moves to England look even better – Adams is about to play in Bournemouth’s first-ever season in the UEFA Europa League, while Richards was an important part of Crystal Palace’s FA Cup and UEFA Conference League wins. While Adams settled in quickly enough first at Leeds United and then at Bournemouth, it was a slow burn for Richards, who had to wait his turn in his preferred center back role and first broke out as a defensive midfielder.
The pair plus Leeds’ Brenden Aaronson, who also patiently worked his way into a starting role, are examples in best-case scenarios. Haji Wright, another World Cup participant, took a different approach by playing a sizable role in Coventry City’s promotion campaign and now awaits his first season in the Premier League. The USMNT’s recent history in the Premier League is not only made up of success stories, though – a 2023 loan to Leeds has so far been the low point of midfielder Weston McKennie’s career, while 2022 World Cup starting goalkeeper Matt Turner wasted three years on the books at Arsenal, Nottingham Forest and Crystal Palace. Turner never earned a regular starting spot and though he returned to MLS’ New England Revolution a year before this summer’s World Cup, he watched New York City FC’s Matt Freese snatch the starting spot in the year building up to the tournament.
If there is one tried-and-true rule when it comes to finding a new team, it is this one: regular playing time matters more than anything else, no matter the destination. It helps that USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino has not discriminated against players based on the leagues they play in, so much so that eight MLS players cracked the 2026 World Cup team. Consistency is the only way to level up, be it by earning national team call-ups or securing a move elsewhere – Sebastian Berhalter and Max Arfsten left MLS for Premier League promotion hopeful Middlesbrough just weeks after the World Cup ended. The benefits do not end there. McKennie entered the World Cup in the form of his career and now enters his seventh season at Juventus, a club that has offered him plenty of exposure to European competition. On the flip side, the hope with midfielder Gio Reyna’s move from Borussia Monchengladbach to Strasbourg is that he can finally get the regular playing time he has been in desperate need of for years.
The USMNT’s future is bright
Balogun might not necessarily be on his way to the Premier League but as the USMNT’s focus pivots to the 2030 World Cup, England’s top flight may have a role to play. A batch of the team’s rising talents will find themselves in and around Premier League environments in the next few years, some of them boasting the same – or even more – promise than the players who competed at this summer’s World Cup, considered to be the USMNT’s most talented generation.
Richards will reportedly be joined by winger Zavier Gozo, the 19-year-old from Real Salt Lake who is finalizing a move to Palace after a breakout campaign in MLS, making him the first of several American teenagers who will migrate to England. The Philadelphia Union’s 16-year-old midfielder Cavan Sullivan has already committed to join Manchester City when he turns 18, while 15-year-old FC Dallas winger Benji Flowers and 16-year-old LA Galaxy midfielder Vicente Garcia will do the same at Chelsea. Sullivan, Flowers and Garcia would be charting a newer path for USMNT-eligible players in England, only a handful of whom have passed through English youth systems – Fulham‘s Antonee Robinson is an exception, but he was born and raised in England so his path is a unique one.
Moves to England at a young age come with the necessary caveat that a pathway to consistent playing time is still of the utmost importance, and Flowers and Garcia in particular will have cautionary tales waiting for them. Chelsea already have two other young Americans on the books in 21-year-old left back Caleb Wiley and 22-year-old goalkeeper Gaga Slonina, who joined the Blues years ago and have not gotten close to first-team minutes at Stamford Bridge, the pair instead racking up loan spells across Europe that have not turned into consistency anywhere just yet. Neither has a loan move lined up just yet for the upcoming campaign and Slonina was resigned to a spot with Chelsea’s U-21 team last season, forcing questions about whether or not he has developed much since leaving the Chicago Fire in 2022.
Even then, the growing number of U.S. youth internationals committing to European teams before making their professional debuts – a list that includes 18-year-old midfielder Dylan Vanney, who just began a loan spell at Spain’s Real Betis – marks a notable shift in the USMNT’s youth set-up. It is becoming increasingly common for USMNT prospects to break out in Europe, so much so that McKennie, Reyna and Christian Pulisic already did it within the last decade. Germany seemed to embrace young Americans before the rest – McKennie passed through Schalke’s set-up while Reyna and Pulisic each came up through Borussia Dortmund’s academy – but England might be next if this summer’s deals by Palace and Chelsea are anything to go by.
Gozo’s early months at Palace will be the first of several litmus tests over the next four years, though it will not be the last, only adding to the intrigue around the U.S. team after attracting the attention of a nation during this summer’s World Cup.
