NEW YORK (AP) — Alexi Lalas doesn't want to hear U.S. players citing pressure ahead of playing in a World Cup at home and says Christian Pulisic, the top American, is “never going to be the leader.”
“Cry me a river, OK, when it comes to the pressure. Bunch of whiners, that they’re whining about the pressure,” Lalas said Thursday at a Fox event to promote its World Cup coverage.
Lalas, 55, played for the U.S. when it hosted the 1994 World Cup and has
been Fox's top soccer analyst since late 2014.
American players, hoping to reach the quarterfinals for the first time since 2002, haven't complained about pressure but have said it exists.
“There’s pressure, I feel it. Yes, it’s there, but it’s nothing that I can’t handle,” Pulisic said in March. “I’m going to, yeah, attack it head on. We are as a team. I don’t need to do it by myself.”
“Allow me to grumpy old man a little bit here,” Lalas said. “This is a generation that has been given absolutely everything both on and off the field in terms of resources, in terms of opportunities, in terms of pathways. And I don’t think that I’m being unrealistic. I don’t think I’m being unfair by saying that we should expect more from this group. We should expect this team to win this group.”
Lalas expects a turnaround from Pulisic, who hasn't scored in 18 Serie A matches for AC Milan since Dec. 28 and a career-worst eight straight U.S. games since November 2024. Lalas said Pulisic, a 27-year-old with 32 international goals, is “well on his way to becoming the best male American soccer player in history.”
“He’s a fascinating player in terms of his talent. He’s a frustrating player in terms of his personality,” Lalas said. “He’s going through a period right now from a football perspective where it’s not going well and so this is going to test my form-is-fallacy theory. I have to believe that when that door closes behind him and he's on that plane, that he will feel a sense of relief and I think you will a sense a comfort coming to a team and, obviously, a country, that wants him to do well, that believes that he can do well.”
“He’s never going to be the leader that people want him to be,” Lalas added, “and that’s OK because I think there’s others that can do that, but he needs to be the star that this team needs.”
Lalas said the U.S. should win in the new round of 32 and reach the round of 16, where the Americans were knocked out in 2010, 2014 and 2018. With home-field advantage, Lalas said the team could then hope to advance to “kind of rarefied air.”
“Whether you’re a Christian Pulisic or whether you are a Weston McKinnie or whether your are a Diego Luna or an emerging player, this is the platform for your brand,” Lalas said. “If you star this summer, and this team does well this summer you will be remembered forever.”
Lalas spoke alongside fellow retired stars Stu Holden and Carli Lloyd of the U.S. and Javier “Chicharito” Hernández of Mexico along with studio hosts Rob Stone and Rebecca Lowe and Fox vice president of production Zac Kenworthy. Fox's main network will televise 69 games of the expanded tournament, which runs from June 11 to July 19, and 35 will be on FS1.
Hernández predicted England will win the title if not Mexico, while Holden and Lloyd said France. Stone went for Spain, Kenworthy with Portugal and Lowe went with England.
Lalas said he was rooting for “anybody but England,” especially because it was the 250th anniversary of American independence.
“You think that they are insufferable now? Can you imagine if they came over and won that World Cup and it’s coming home through our country?” he said. “As much as it pains me to say, they are very, very good, and the soccer gods have a wicked sense of humor.”
Stone said the quarterfinals likely were a U.S. ceiling put perhaps home-crowd patriotism could lift the Americans to a semifinal.
“I would love a ‘Miracle on Ice’ moment,” he said. “I think that’s just too far and too soon.”
Retired Swedish star Zlatan Ibrahimović, a Fox analyst for the first time, joined by video and chastised his colleagues for a lack of boldness in their U.S. predictions.
“You don’t have the courage to say U.S. is going to win the World Cup,” he said. “I hear you: ‘Yeah, if they win the group, if they go to the next stage, if they’re lucky.’ Oh, show some courage and say: ‘We’re going to win it.’”
Mexico and Canada are co-hosts of the tournament, and Hernández said El Tri players also face pressure.
“They say I think we can win a tournament, they all call us crazy,” he said. “But then the first game happens, and they expect you to play (as if) you are going to win the tournament.”
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AP World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup
