After years of questions round its ahead line, the U.S. Men’s National Team spent 2025 delivering solutions. AS Monaco’s Folarin Balogun and Coventry Metropolis’s Haji Wright emerged because the USMNT’s strongest, most constant and most dependable goalscorers below the tutelage of coach Mauricio Pochettino.
There’s only one downside: Pochettino is more likely to carry three strikers to the World Cup, not two, leaving one hotly contested spot out there for one more American attacker. Three gamers look to be in rivalry for that place. With the World Cup simply six months away, listed here are the questions these gamers should reply to make it theirs.
Can Ricardo Pepi keep his health?
On paper, there isn’t any query about who will fill the USMNT’s third striker spot: it is PSV’s Ricardo Pepi. The Texas-born attacker took some time to heat up, however he is quietly put collectively a stellar season within the Netherlands. His eight home league objectives tie him with Haji Wright as essentially the most prolific American striker overseas, and he is scored in each single one in all his previous 5 Eredivisie begins.
There’s only one downside in the case of Pepi, and that is match health. He missed the again half of the 2024-25 season — and the vast majority of the USMNT’s 2025 calendar — due to a torn meniscus he suffered final January. And this previous weekend, proper when he was actually selecting up steam for PSV, he fractured his forearm in a freak accident on the sector.
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