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The U.S. men’s national team will begin their 2026 World Cup campaign at SoFi Stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, which will mark their first World Cup game on home soil since 1994.
SoFi Stadium officially won the rights to host the USMNT during the competition on Sunday, during FIFA’s show announcing the sites for the 2026 World Cup. The match will serve as the kickoff of the World Cup’s slate in the U.S. on June 12, while the USMNT will play at Seattle’s Lumen Field on June 19 for their second group stage match. They then return to Southern California to wrap up the group stage on June 25.
The USMNT’s group stage schedule allows the team plenty of time to recover in between matches thanks to both the number of days in between matches and the minimal travel. Head coach Gregg Berhalter said FIFA’s selection reflected the feedback he and U.S. Soccer were able to give the governing body before the venues were locked in.
“The one piece of input was really about travel, trying to minimize travel so for that, it’s huge,” he said in a press conference on Sunday. “Whether you’re on the east coast and you don’t have to travel often or on the west coast and don’t have to travel often. I think it gets tricky when you talk about four or five-hour flights in between games, different time zone shifts.”
Though the USMNT’s plans for 2026 are not confirmed yet, Berhalter expects that the team will use the Los Angeles area as a base camp during the group stage and travel to Seattle for the one game in the Pacific Northwest. Before the games begin, he also anticipates that the hosts will spend time at U.S. Soccer’s national training center in Atlanta, which is currently under construction but is expected to be open before the 2026 tournament.
Don’t miss an episode of Call It What You Want where Jimmy Conrad, Jesse Marsch and Charlie Davies talk all things USMNT and the state of the beautiful game in the United States.
The World Cup returns to North America for the first time since 1994, when the U.S. hosted the tournament. U.S. Soccer has treated the 2026 event as a seminal moment in the history of the sport in the country, both to showcase the progress that has been made since 1994 and to catapult soccer’s popularity into a new era. The centerpice of that plan is a strong outing from the USMNT come 2026, something Berhalter has not shied away from admitting since returning to the post in September. He notably admitted that the team’s recent and upcoming schedule, including competing at this summer’s Copa America, is part of an effort to raise the team’s level and not just outperform the 1994 team that made it to the round of 16 but set a new benchmark for the U.S. men’s team.
“The objective is always to perform really well and to always go as far as you can,” he said. “You always want to do great. We wanted to do great in 2022 and when you look at it, we performed well but there’s better levels to reach and now, on our home soil, we know how much home fans can help and how home fans can push the home team so for us, it’s about making our nation proud and when I think about the dreams that our players had of growing up and playing in their local clubs and now they’re at some of the biggest clubs in Europe and coming back and uniting and trying to grow the game, one way to really grow the game and change soccer in America forever is to perform well and to do something that no U.S. team has done before.”
The 2026 World Cup will be the first to have 48 teams, more than the 32 that took part in the 2022 edition of the tournament in Qatar. The competition begins on June 11 at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, when co-hosts Mexico will play, and it end on July 19 with the final.
See below for a list of host venues and key dates during the 2026 World Cup, as well as the USMNT’s group stage schedule.
United States
Mexico
Canada
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Images by Getty Images and US Presswire
