Carli Lloyd reflects on Pulisic and U.S. men’s World Cup: ‘This group was supposed to be the one’

Carli Lloyd has never been particularly interested in softening her opinions.

As a two-time World Cup winner and FIFA Player of the Year, she built a career around demanding more from herself.

So when Christian Pulisic said he planned to take time away to rest after the U.S. men’s national team’s World Cup exit in the round of 16, Lloyd’s response was equally critical.

“You rest when your playing career is over. Period,” she posted on X after the U.S. men’s 4-1 loss to Belgium on Monday.

For Lloyd, the debate is not solely about Pulisic’s need to rest but about the fact the USMNT did not rise to the occasion. U.S. Soccer later confirmed Pulisic sustained a microfracture in his leg during the game, which will require several weeks of recovery.

“It’s been tough because this group was supposed to be the one. Call them the golden generation or whatever you want,” she told The Athletic, “but if there was ever a World Cup where the U.S. men were going to break through, it was this one.”

Playing a home World Cup and drawn into a favorable group, many believed this was finally the tournament that would move the men’s program beyond its historical ceiling. For years, this squad had been billed as the “golden generation” of American soccer, the most technically gifted collection of American men’s players ever assembled. The Athletic’s writers who followed this team before and during the tournament described the hype around the team as it grew closer to the first whistle in Seattle against Paraguay three weeks ago. At the Seattle Mariners game they attended, they were introduced as “American heroes,” as they paraded one by one onto the field.

“If there were any World Cup where a group was going to break that threshold, it was this one,” Lloyd said.

Instead, something was missing long before the final whistle in Seattle’s Lumen Field.

“It was almost like men against boys. Everything felt off,” Lloyd said of the U.S. in that final match. “I said on air that it looked like they had lost the game before they even stepped onto the field. They lacked confidence. They were tentative and timid, things you can control. That’s what made the loss so hard to watch. It finished 4-1, but it easily could have been six or seven. For former players and people who’ve been part of the program, it’s especially difficult because the expectations for this team were so high.”

Carli Lloyd not mincing words on USMNT or Christian Pulisic pic.twitter.com/EahB27vG4J

— Dan Wetzel (@DanWetzel) July 7, 2026

Lloyd doesn’t believe the United States’ shortcomings are rooted in technical ability. If anything, she argues this generation is more talented than many of its predecessors. What it lacks, she says, is grit.

“When you look at previous men’s national teams, you could look into people’s eyes and see fighters,” she said, pointing to former U.S. stars Clint Dempsey, Jermaine Jones and Michael Bradley. “I don’t really see that with the current team. “When the going got tough against Belgium and Turkey, who stepped up? You don’t really have many people rallying one another. I think Mauricio Pochettino tried to instill that mentality, and we saw it at times. But when it mattered most, we didn’t see enough of it.”

Lloyd is familiar with that mentality. One of the most decorated players in U.S. soccer history, she won back-to-back FIFA Women’s World Cups in 2015 and 2019 after helping the U.S. finish runner-up in the 2011 Women’s World Cup. She scored the winning goals in the gold medal matches at both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics and added a bronze medal at the Tokyo Games in 2021. She retired with 316 caps for the U.S, second-most in program history, along with 134 goals and 64 assists. Her defining moment came in the 2015 World Cup final against Japan, when she scored a historic hat trick, becoming the first player to net three goals in a Women’s World Cup final and earning the tournament’s Golden Ball as its best player.

Even after scoring one of the most famous hat tricks in U.S. soccer history, Lloyd did not hang her cleats and take a break.

“My mindset was, I still haven’t achieved anything. I’ve got to keep going,” she said. “Every athlete deals with pressure. You succeed. You fail. You play well. You don’t play well. The most important thing you can do is let your play do the talking.”

Though Lloyd didn’t back down from her criticism of Pulisic after he left the Belgium game in the 59th minute, she did clarify that her comments were not limited to reacting to the 27-year-old saying he needed rest in his postgame interview.

Pulisic chose to sit out the Concacaf Gold Cup last summer to manage his workload for the club season and the World Cup. While he opened the campaign brightly with AC Milan in Serie A, his form dipped significantly after January 2026. Injuries from his club minutes carried into the World Cup, where, aside from an impressive opening half against Paraguay and an encouraging stint against Turkiye, he did not influence games the way the U.S. fans expected.

I don’t owe anyone an apology. My comment wasn’t about his post game interview. He skipped Gold Cup last summer because he wanted to rest and be ready for WC. He ended up resting the whole year. That’s the facts. Nothing personal against him.

— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) July 9, 2026

Other former players shared similar criticism of Pulisic following Monday’s loss, including former captain Becky Sauerbrunn and Sydney Leroux. The latter posted to X saying that Pulisic “rested the entire World Cup.”

While the U.S. men are still working to earn a place in the grander American sports landscape, the women’s team has carried a different kind of pressure. In less than a year, the U.S. women will head to Brazil for the 2027 World Cup carrying a very different responsibility.

Lloyd doesn’t see it as pressure to outperform the men. Instead, she sees something more internal. “It was never us against the men,” she explained. For the women’s program, the standard has always been self-imposed. “They want to uphold the legacy within the women’s team.”

Lloyd rejects the idea that the 2026 tournament was an overwhelming failure for the U.S. “Now that I’ve had time to reflect, I still believe this World Cup was a success,” she said.

“You’re only as good as your last game, and everybody remembers that last game. But we cannot forget everything up until that point,” she said.

According to Lloyd, the love of the team, the passion inside the stadiums, the pride, the postgame “Country Roads” singalongs and the sense of connection around the team should still be part of the 2026 World Cup’s legacy.

“It united our whole country, and that’s what this beautiful game can do,” she said. “It can unite not just our country, but unite the world. Especially in a time where we kind of needed the country to come together, nobody was talking about anything other than the World Cup and what the U.S. was doing and how they were playing and winning games, but also the way in which they were winning. That will always be their legacy, and that was a success.”