U.S. men’s soccer team to play England, Iran, and Wales, Scotland or Ukraine at World Cup in Qatar

After missing the last World Cup four years ago, the U.S. men’s soccer team got a warm welcome back to the world’s biggest stage Friday at the group stage draw.

The Americans were drawn into Group B with England, Iran and the winner of an upcoming European playoff bracket involving Wales, Scotland and Ukraine.

The U.S. will start with the playoff winner on Nov. 21, the tournament’s opening day; play England on Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving; and face Iran on Nov. 29. All three games will kick off at 2 p.m. ET, a boon for fans and U.S. TV broadcasters Fox and Telemundo.

The clash with England naturally will get the most attention, since England’s Premier League is the most popular soccer league on English-language television and English expats have long had vast influence over American soccer. (Having the game on Black Friday, when many fans will be off work and able to flock to bars, won’t hurt either.)

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“I think that’s a game that always has a lot of attention around it because of England and their fans and their established place in soccer,” U.S. manager Gregg Berhalter said in a news conference after the draw. The remark immediately went viral for invoking “soccer,” a word abhorred by the English, even though they invented it.

“For sure, this is an opportunity for us to show what we’re made of,” Berhalter said. “They have a good team, but so do we. We have a young team, we have an athletic team, we have a team that doesn’t have a lot of fear.”

For all the Three Lions’ dominance of the culture here, they’ve never beaten the Americans in a World Cup. In 1950, Philadelphia’s Walter Bahr led a 1-0 U.S. upset win in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; and in 2010, Clint Dempsey helped the Americans earn a 1-1 tie in Rustenburg, South Africa. (The U.S. women also are undefeated vs. England in World Cups, with wins in 2003 and 2019.)

Coincidentally, the draw took place on what would have been Bahr’s 95th birthday. And the Americans’ current biggest star also is from eastern Pennsylvania: Hershey’s Christian Pulisic. He’s already had some banter with English teammates at Chelsea, including Mason Mount.

“To be in this position now and having a big game playing England in a World Cup, it just makes me smile,” Pulisic said. “I’m just excited for it. I think we all are and just counting down the days, really.”

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Berhalter has been friends with England manager Gareth Southgate for a few years, and they were able to spend some time together at the draw.

“I picked his brain early on at the end of 2018, as soon as I got hired,” Berhalter said. “I met with him and we talked at length, and we stayed in touch ever since then. I consider him an excellent coach, and I have a lot of respect for what he’s done with the program.”

Southgate returned the compliment when he spoke to reporters in Doha: “It was fate that would happen. They’re a nation whose football is improving hugely, with a number of players around Europe.”

The Iran game undoubtedly will be politically charged. When the nations met in 1998, then-U.S. Soccer Federation president Robert Contiguglia called it “the mother of all games.”

Berhalter was one of the last players cut from the 1998 team. He still recalls watching the game from home and hopes peace will prevail in Qatar as it did that night in Lyon, France.

“Coming off of political tension between the two countries and the governments, it was a way to say, ‘Us on the soccer field, we’re still friends,’” Berhalter said. “If we were friends back in ’98, 24 years later, I don’t see it any differently. We have a ton of respect for Iran and their team, and we don’t see them as rivals — we see them as colleagues and two teams that are competing in the World Cup and trying to do well for their country.”

Berhalter also said he’s rooting for Ukraine to get through the playoffs.

“If Ukraine makes it there, it’s a wonderful accomplishment,” he said. “If the people of Ukraine can get some hope by their team playing in the World Cup, it’s amazing, and I think it will be more of a celebration … We’re all pulling for Ukraine. We’re all behind them We’re all supporting them, and we hope that the situation resolves as soon as possible.

All eight stadiums that will host games are located in and around Qatar’s main city, Doha, with the longest travel time between any two venues around an hour. Geographically, the nation is smaller than the state of Connecticut.

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The compact scale will be great for the hundreds of thousands of fans and media who flock to Qatar in November and, of course, for the competing teams, too. The tournament was moved to late autumn because of Qatar’s searing summer heat.

But the spectacle will be clouded by many controversies, from years of allegations of human rights abuses to long-standing claims — including by the U.S. Department of Justice — that Qatar bribed its way to the hosting rights when they were awarded in 2010.

There also are concerns over a lack of hotel room capacity in Qatar, which World Cup organizers have acknowledged. Only around 90,000 rooms are likely to be made available to the public, a number that the Associated Press pointed out last December is nearly the same as the total number of fans from the United States who went to Russia in 2018 — a tournament the U.S. wasn’t even in.

Games will kick off at 5 a.m., 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Eastern time in the first two rounds of the group stage, then at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. for the group stage finales. Fox and Telemundo will spread the games across their over-the-air networks and cable channels FS1 and Universo.

Let’s start with the other Concacaf teams. Mexico was drawn with Argentina, a perennial World Cup nemesis and a star-studded team led by Lionel Messi. El Tri will open its campaign against Poland, led by striker Robert Lewandowski, and also play Saudi Arabia.

Canada is in its first men’s World Cup since 1986, and unfortunately will face long odds of advancing. The Canucks were drawn with Belgium, one of the title favorites, 2018 finalist Croatia and Morocco.

If Costa Rica wins its intercontinental playoff game against New Zealand in June, it will have the toughest draw of any Concacaf team: Spain, Germany and Japan. That Spain-Germany clash, set for Nov. 27 (a Sunday), will be one of the most-anticipated games of any group.

Union fans will have an eye on Group G, because that’s where Olivier Mbaizo’s Cameroon landed. The Indomitable Lions were drawn with Brazil, Serbia and Switzerland, which means Mbaizo could play against Neymar. Perhaps he’ll ask Union teammate José Andrés Martínez for advice, since Martínez played against Neymar in last year’s Copa América.

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Host Qatar’s first-ever men’s World Cup game will come against Ecuador, and its biggest game will come against the Netherlands. But the other team in Group A, Senegal, could be the most intriguing — the reigning African champions with stars including forward Sadio Mané and goalkeeper Edouard Mendy.

Other games to highlight include France-Denmark in Group D and Portugal-Uruguay in Group H, with Cristiano Ronaldo likely to face Luis Suárez and Edinson Cavani in the last World Cup for all three.

You’ll see that three spots in the tables below have multiple teams in them. Along with the European playoffs, the two intercontinental matchups are set to be one-game playoff matchups in June.

The European playoff will see Scotland host Ukraine first, in a game that was postponed because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The winner will then play at Wales. The dates of both games are still to be determined.

In the intercontinental playoffs, the United Arab Emirates will play Australia on June 7 to be Asia’s representative, then the winner will play Peru on June 13. The next day, Costa Rica will play New Zealand. All three of those games will take place in Qatar.

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