U.S. Soccer’s CEO wants USMNT games to be ‘huge events’ leading up to the 2026 World Cup

CHICAGO — For almost a quarter-century, U.S. Soccer has had a routine with men’s national team games.

They’re often played in MLS stadiums with limited capacities that lead to higher ticket prices. And they tend to be in the same cities — like Cincinnati or Orlando — to a point that feels a little too coincidental.

Philadelphians certainly need no reminding of that. The U.S. men haven’t visited the nation’s birthplace in 5½ years, despite the many players with local ties on the team.

But with the 2026 World Cup on the horizon and a different regime in charge at U.S. Soccer these days, it seems that things might finally be changing. There aren’t many games left before the tournament arrives, and CEO JT Batson wants them to be big deals.

“We want to play in the biggest stadiums possible, in front of the most people possible, full stop,” Batson said at last week’s United Soccer Coaches convention, coincidentally in the same city as the governing body’s headquarters.

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“Our national team events should be huge events,” he added. “They should be parties, they should be celebrations of soccer, and they should be something that everybody looks forward to. That’s our ambition of where we want to get to.”

Batson didn’t go into detail about what cities or stadiums the program is looking at for games. But multiple sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed to The Inquirer that the U.S. was planning to host England at Lincoln Financial Field in June until the Three Lions’ World Cup qualifying schedule got in the way.

It remains to be seen if the U.S. men will come to town some other time before the World Cup. (Or the women, for that matter, who haven’t been to Subaru Park in nearly three years and to the Linc in over five.)

But that’s just one of many things Batson, president Cindy Cone, and their colleagues have to deal with these days ahead of cohosting the biggest sporting event in human history.

“One of the things of the work that we’re very focused on at U.S. Soccer is how do you use 2026 to go get people to do big things now that are going to benefit American soccer for the long haul?” Batson said. “The 2026 World Cup being here is an incredible forcing function for people to come together and go do something that’s never been done before in this country.”

The work started as soon as the bid was won in 2018, and it’s been constant since.

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“We have a whole team at U.S. Soccer that’s working on this day in and day out — I’m updated probably every other day,” Cone said. “I think there’s a lot of people, even in the soccer world, that don’t really grasp how freaking massive this is going to be. It is going to be multiple Super Bowls every single day, for five weeks, spread out all over our country and in Mexico and in Canada.”

Batson added: “I think a big part of the legacy of ’26 will be all the things that happen ahead of time to make sure our country is in a position to take advantage of it. That’s an area where I think we collectively need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of every moment.”

Those words needed to be said aloud, and need to be heard across the sport. There’s a growing perception that not everyone involved is doing the most possible — especially FIFA and MLS, in separate ways.

“A lot of us in this room know that there’s been a lot of growth, but that growth hasn’t always happened in a way where everyone’s rowing in the same direction,” Batson said. “So I think the No. 1 priority is, how do we get the American soccer family going all in the same direction?”

He also emphasized the work to be done at the grassroots level.

“How do we make sure that communities all across this country have the fields, have the programs, have the resources?” he said. “And then how do we help people in every market across this country advocate to their local governments, to the local philanthropic organizations, to local businesses, on why support soccer? … This is an incredible opportunity for us to galvanize so much in order to be able to drive that into the future."

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Batson doesn’t mind being blunt abut how much money this will cost. He has seen it in his job, he saw it in the Silicon Valley venture capital previously, and he saw it as a soccer referee and referee organizer in his native Georgia.

“We want to make it to where it’s accessible for everyone to play soccer? That requires the money,” he said. “How do we make sure that people are investing in this sport? How do we broaden the pool of resources that can go to our game?”

U.S. Soccer has pushed to raise its revenues in two major ways. One was started by Batson’s predecessor, Will Wilson, in 2022: bringing commercial rights in-house after two decades of letting MLS’s marketing arm run them. That led to the biggest TV deal in U.S. Soccer Federation history and a wide range of new sponsors since then.

As 2026 approaches, U.S. Soccer wants to leverage those gains to tell the nation about its men’s national team so that people know the players before the World Cup.

“I really do feel that in the buildup to ’26, we need to do a great job at elevating the backstories of the players,” sporting director Matt Crocker said. “[That] we don’t just leave it to chance or to after the World Cup, when hopefully one or two of them does exceptional and scores key goals. … We want to start to tell those stories now. We’re doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff, but could we do more? Yeah, absolutely.”

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There also has been a major push into the philanthropic world for an entity that’s officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. U.S. Soccer now fundraises like a college athletic department, at an increasingly similar scale.

Arthur Blank, the owner of MLS’s Atlanta United and the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, gave $50 million to put his name on the door of a new national training center in suburban Atlanta. Michele Kang, owner of the NWSL’s Washington Spirit and multiple European teams, gave $30 million for the women’s national team program from the senior to youth levels, as well as female coaching and referee education programs.

“Necessity is the mother of all invention, and, rightfully, you all hold us accountable to go do big things,” Batson said. “We don’t get government support; we don’t have legacy commercial interests like the FA Cup [in England] that throws off hundreds of million dollars to be able to invest, so we have to do things that we can do.”

So far, the strategy is working.

“Sharing our vision of what soccer in this country could look like and being an organization that they believed that if they invested in us, we could go do big things,” Batson said, “has opened up a whole new world of possibility around how we can resource the things that matter to everybody.”

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