USMNT Path to the World Cup Final | Unfiltered Soccer
5/29/202616 min
What if the USMNT make it to the 2026 World Cup Final? Join U.S. Soccer legend Landon Donovan as he lays out all the potential matchups should the Americans win their group or finish 2nd. Who would we face in the knockout stages? What teams would make getting to the final the easiest? Get ready to get educated! New episodes of Unfiltered Soccer with Landon and Tim drop every Tuesday. Subscribe to the show on YouTube and follow on all your favorite podcast platforms. For bonus content, follow on all social media platforms @UnfilteredSoccer. Send your mailbag questions to feedback@unfilteredsoccer.com (https://www.unfilteredsoccer.com). This bonus content is brought to you by Coca-Cola and Carnival Cruise Line. Hot Takes, Cold Coke, Open Seas – your Carnival cruise is waiting! Visit Carnival.com/unfiltered and stay tuned for more information on how you could win a Carnival cruise! This episode of Unfiltered Soccer with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard was shot on site by Adam Braunstein, Sammy Strittmatter, and edited and mastered by Jeremy Steinkamp, with engineering support from Eric Newell. Our producers are Jordan Rizzieri and Andrew Gundling. Our social media lead is Dan Armelli and our social editors are Kyle Curley and Finley Skelton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLandon Donovan· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This bonus content is brought to you by Coca-Cola and Carnival Cruise Line. We are here in Long Beach, California, beautiful sunny day, on the Carnival Radiance cruise ship. The World Cup is drawing closer, and it's always fun to go through all the permutations, all the possibilities of what your run could look like to the final. So, I've got my trusty iPad here. I'm gonna walk you guys through all the different scenarios. It's a lot, so stick with me here. Even when we had 32 teams, it was a complicated process to get through. Now there are 48 teams, so it's even more complicated. So we're gonna take you through all the paths. If the US finishes first, great. If we finish second, okay. God forbid we finish third, there's still a path to get to the final there. It'll be more difficult, but we're gonna walk you through all that. Just a note, these projections are based on the current FIFA world rankings, so we're gonna assume the higher team wins in all these scenarios to get who we're going to play against. Now, unlikely that happens in actuality, but we're gonna walk through that and see what that looks like. All right. So group stage matches for the US. That begins Friday, June 12th, here in LA, against Paraguay. Then go up to Seattle, June 19th, on a Friday