Roughly four months and 120 miles away from the Los Angeles-area stadium, where he will likely make his World Cup debut, Matt Freese was staying in the moment. In that particular moment, it was probably just as easy said as it was done – there were fire pits and palm trees in his line of sight, he and his New York City FC teammates trading one of the East coast’s most brutal winters in recent memory for comfortable days in Palm Springs with a week and change left to go until their MLS season opener at the LA Galaxy.
It is a perfect place to settle back into the rhythms of professional soccer, but far from the only pocket of North America where the cadence is shifting. A new MLS season finally begins on Saturday, one that will keep a wide range of people busy, each of them saddled with a variety of tasks, all of it in the shadow of this summer’s World Cup. The world’s biggest sporting event returns to the continent for the first time since 1994, the circumstances and spotlight as different as it gets from the last time around. MLS’ decision makers will have their hands full with capitalizing on an event that rarely comes to their shores, all while hoping the arrival of global superstars like Lionel Messi and Son Heung-min creates meaningful momentum along the way. They will balance those tasks with implementing the finishing touches on their switch to a fall-to-spring calendar that will be complete next year, a move that brings them in alignment with many of the sport’s top leagues.
For a selection of players, though, the timing is more pressing. The start of the MLS season marks a final chance to impress national team coaches before roster selections are due in late spring, a feeling that is especially pertinent for American players. Since taking charge in October 2024, U.S. men’s national team head coach Mauricio Pochettino has picked frequently from MLS’ talent pool and is slated to bring a healthy number of players from the domestic league to a World Cup on home soil. The odds of earning a role that only comes around every four years naturally vary from player to player, but they share both a common goal and the unique balancing act of club and country responsibilities in a World Cup year. In some sense, the two tasks go hand in hand.
“[I’m] incredibly grateful for that opportunity,” Freese said about his reps with the USMNT before pivoting, “and really, really just focused on staying as present as possible and doing as well as I can and improving every day so that I can pay them back for that trust they’ve shown in me.”
Freese seizes his opportunity
Freese was a regular fixture with NYCFC before he received his first call-up to the national team last January and did not earn his first cap until June, his rise up the USMNT’s goalkeeper depth chart hard to predict. It happened all at once, though – successive starts en route to the Concacaf Gold Cup final and some penalty heroics along the way mean the job has been his ever since, a quick turn of events. If it has felt like a whirlwind, the 27-year-old does not show any signs of it.
“I think a lot more opportunity presented itself and a lot more minutes but it wasn’t necessarily unexpected because I had been training for that and working for that moment, so that when it came, because I had faith that it would come, just to be ready for it,” Freese said. “It happened quickly, but it was what I had been working for and what I had been preparing for and so no, I didn’t do too much reflecting on that or anything like that in the offseason.”
Heading into his eighth MLS season and his fourth as a regular starter, the new campaign will be his first with a World Cup on the horizon, which comes with a new workload – but not with new priorities in the offseason. He did not have a specialized training regimen during the winter and instead stuck to familiar patterns, including a chance to unwind after the 2025 campaign came to a close.
“I think it would be a mistake to change the way I prepare for a season just because of the potential of such a big moment in the middle of it,” he said. “The first 10 days of every offseason for me and many of the guys is really just absolutely no soccer conversations, nothing – no soccer-watching, soccer playing, no working out, nothing. Either you go on vacation or you just hang out. I had been on the road – I think I was in a hotel like 170 days last year, so I didn’t really want to travel. I just chilled at home in my apartment, I saw friends. I just tried to keep it as low-key as possible because I wanted the reset to be refreshing rather than tiring.”
The way his season ended, with a 5-1 defeat at Inter Miami a week before the Florida side won their first MLS Cup, keeps him just as motivated to perform for NYCFC as a chance of impressing during his first World Cup does.
“I want to win a trophy,” he admitted. “I look at our new sporting director, Todd [Dunivant, a four-time MLS Cup-winning player], and he has so many trophies in his cabinet and when I heard about him and quickly read up on him when he was named the sporting director, my first thought was, ‘Oh my god, he has so many trophies and accomplishments,’ and that example kind of shows how trophies live forever and that really just your name or your team’s name in history so that is, on the club side, a massive, massive goal from me this year.”
Freese’s ambitions are lofty, which only reinforces his need to stay focused on what’s directly in front of him.
“I’m a pretty old-fashioned, stay in the moment-esque guy,” he said. “I don’t use my phone a lot. I really try to just avoid the distractions that come with being a professional athlete in the 21st century and two more things. I meditate a lot. I don’t sleep in the room with my phone in it. I like to be really just ingrained in what is currently and presently happening, and what currently is presently happening is I’m in preseason with my team and trying to just focus on my team and spend time with them and gel off the field and on the field and FaceTime my loved ones back home when I can.”
Getting too far ahead of himself is not his style, joking that he will reflect on his career when he’s 40 and retired. It is not the only thing he’s saving for a conversation a decade and change from now.
“It’s a long story,” he said apologetically in reference to a remark about penalty kicks “being his thing” during last summer’s Gold Cup. “I don’t really want to get into it. Sorry … That’s another thing, when I’m 40, I’ll talk about it.”
The push and pull of the World Cup
While Freese is likely to be a headliner on a list of MLS players who will be World Cup-bound in the summertime, the league’s 30 clubs are full of players who will take a very different approach to the upcoming tournament. There’s Cade Cowell, a one-time U.S. youth international who is the New York Red Bulls’ marquee signing ahead of a rebuilding season. Reminders of the senior national team are all around him, even if he has not been in camp for roughly two years – the World Cup is top of mind for most, while the Red Bulls’ new head coach Michael Bradley comes with a decorated USMNT pedigree of his own.
“I think every American player, it’s still a goal to be on the World Cup [roster] and last year, I didn’t get a chance to go to any camps,” he said. “I know the window’s tight, but it’s in God’s hands and whatever happens, I’m going to work my hardest to get there … When you’re in the camps it’s a very, very good culture. Everyone is very nice. It’s very, very fun. I do miss it and it’ll definitely be back.”
Pochettino’s project to cast a wide net with his player pool means players like Cowell still hope for a World Cup roster spot, even if there are only 26 to go around every four years, the dream at least providing “motivation to keep [going],” in the player’s words. Pochettino’s open-door policy comes with a hint of added incentive for someone like Cowell, a winger hopes to integrate seamlessly into Bradley’s version of the Red Bull way that hopes to attack quickly and settle into a defensive shape just as fast.
“I would say help defensively a little bit more, I can always do that,” he said. “Every attacker doesn’t like to do it but it’s something we have to do and finishing off plays, whether that’s a shot or a cross and just making the right decision once you’re in front of goal.”
Then there’s LAFC captain Hugo Lloris, for whom World Cup experiences are unforgettable – and in the rearview mirror. He captained France to their World Cup triumph in 2018, took part in their run to the final in 2022 and retired from the national team soon after, now in a fully different phase of his career ahead of his third MLS season.
“I’m more relaxed than I used to be,” he noted. “I take football in a less intense way, I would say, and that’s also one of the reasons I come to discover a new football, a new environment and in a way, I can also enjoy my time with my family so it’s a good mix but I still want to compete and I still want to challenge myself but I would say in a different way. It’s very different than [what] I used to face in Europe but my motivation is still the same.”
He has chosen the route of focusing solely on the club game, no small tasks ahead of him. LAFC, now under the steward of former assistant and new head coach Marc dos Santos, are angling for silverware as they balance the demands of MLS, the Concacaf Champions Cup and the Leagues Cup in 2026.
“I think we used to be really good and we developed a strong reputation the way we used to play, especially in transition, using the speed and the pace from offensive players,” Lloris said. “I think today we want to keep this strength but at the same time, we want to get more control of games so we try to be more in possession, try to occupy our opponents’ field in a better way, so by bringing more discipline in terms of positions with and without the ball. Also, we want to keep something that we used to do well the last two years, the way we used to press the opponent, we want to keep the same philosophy but I think we just want to become more dominant and manage games in a way we really want and it doesn’t matter who we are facing, who is the opponent, we just want to play in the same way.”
Lloris’ World Cup days are behind him but as he contemplates at age 39 if this will be his final season as a professional, he embodies the multi-pronged approach many in North America have taken with this summer’s tournament in mind. The ex-France international is an ambassador for soccer in a country that’s still learning to embrace it, choosing to carry out his duties by sharing his experiences with players and other club staff eager to integrate any lessons in their day-to-day.
“For me, it’s very simple,” he said about his objectives for the year ahead. “It’s to keep enjoying football, the competition. There is no limit. I’m also here to share my experience in football so I have this responsibility to lead the youngest players in a roster. I’m here to help but the main thing is to keep enjoying my football. I know that I don’t see further than next year and I don’t want to see it so I just enjoy day by day.”
He is, at times, an influential observer of soccer’s grip on the U.S., boasting the expertise to know what a successful run for the USMNT could mean for the sport’s future in the country. Lloris, though, feels that things are already trending in the right direction.
“I really see a development,” he said. “I see my girls competing, playing soccer [at school] and I see parents, I will say, dedicated to the game and I think it’s coming. It’s growing in terms of popularity. It’s growing in terms of demand and I think for the American national team, it’s also a big challenge ahead of them because they [have a] responsibility, they are the face of soccer in the U.S. and they have to perform and show a great identity towards their fans but I’m quite comfortable about the future of soccer. I’m sure it will continue to grow in the U.S.”
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