Mark McKenzie returns to U.S. men’s soccer team amid centerback injuries

Chris Richards and Cameron Carter-Vickers were forced to withdraw due to injury issues that U.S. Soccer’s announcement called “minor.”

Mark McKenzie hasn’t been with the U.S. men's national team since February, and hasn't played for the squad since last October.Read moreAlex Goodlett / Getty Images

by Jonathan Tannenwald

Published Sept. 18, 2022, 4:48 p.m. ET

Former Union centerback Mark McKenzie has been recalled to the U.S. men’s soccer team for the first time since February.

The Bear, Del.-raised 23-year-old will be part of this week’s training camp in Cologne, Germany and the games that follow it, thanks to injuries to a pair of centerbacks ahead of him on the World Cup depth chart. Chris Richards and Cameron Carter-Vickers were forced to withdraw due to issues that U.S. Soccer’s announcement called “minor.”

But better to be safe than sorry with the World Cup two months away. So McKenzie and Erik Palmer-Brown were summoned Sunday afternoon.

McKenzie hasn’t been with the national team since February, when the Americans played their next-to-last set of World Cup qualifiers. He hasn’t played for the squad since last October, when he started and played all of a 1-0 qualifying loss at Panama.

At club level, McKenzie had a difficult first year-and-a-half at Belgium’s Genk, the team he joined from the Union in January 2021 for $6 million. But under new manager Wouter Vrancken, McKenzie has had a strong start to this season. He has played every minute of Genk’s last six games, racking up five wins and a tie including three shutouts.

Vrancken is Genk’s third manager in McKenzie’s time there.

U.S. manager Gregg Berhalter announced Carter-Vickers’ absence on ESPN on Sunday, and said he counted five players who were out of the camp due to injuries specifically. He didn’t name them, but it was known by then that four of them were Carter-Vickers, Yunus Musah (replaced by Johnny Cardoso), Tim Weah, and Antonee Robinson. U.S. Soccer announced Richards’ absence a few hours later.

As such, the math does not include Zack Steffen, the Downingtown-bred goalkeeper who was assumed to have not been called up because he’s been dealing with a knee issue for the last few weeks.

Surprisingly, Steffen returned to the starting lineup for his club, Middlesbrough of England’s second division, on Saturday. He recorded one save, four defensive recoveries and 20-of-26 passing in a scoreless tie at home with Rotherham.

There remains no indication that Berhalter will invite Steffen to camp just to be there, even if he doesn’t play in Friday’s game against Japan (8:26 a.m. ET, ESPN2, UniMás, TUDN, ESPN+) or next Tuesday’s game against Saudi Arabia in Murcia, Spain (2 p.m., FS1, UniMás, TUDN).

Nor has Berhalter budged on not inviting striker Jordan Pefok, who scored his fourth goal of the season for Germany’s Union Berlin on Sunday. The swell of reaction on social media included Union’s official account tweeting a hand-waving emoji at the U.S. men’s team’s account.

When Berhalter was asked about Pefok and other players on the outs in that ESPN interview Sunday, he avoided naming any names.

“There probably will be an opportunity for guys that aren’t in this camp, just because of attrition, and that’s something we’re expecting to happen” Berhalter said, “We hope it doesn’t, but it’s likely, with what happened in the past, that it will.”