Christian Pulisic #10 of the United States looks on after Belgium’s third goal during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Round of 16 match between USA and Belgium at Seattle Stadium on July 06, 2026 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Carl Recine/Getty Images)
An In Play look at the USMNT’s 4-1 loss to Belgium, told from inside the crowd.
For about ninety seconds, the energy was too high to sit down.
I watched from a sports bar, packed shoulder to shoulder, everybody locked into the same screen. When Malik Tillman’s free kick curled in to tie the game in the 31st minute, the whole room came up off the ground at once, and I was so wired I couldn’t make myself sit back in my chair. I just stood next to it, certain this was the turn, sure the whole thing was about to swing our way and stay there.
There’s a graphic they show in the corner during games like this, a little momentum tracker. Most of the time you don’t really need it, because in a game like this you can feel the momentum in the room you’re standing in. And for those ninety seconds after Tillman scored, you could feel it everywhere.
Then De Ketelaere scored again to put Belgium back ahead, and I sat down. So did everybody else.
That was the whole night, in miniature. Up out of the chair, then back into it, ninety seconds apart. And the thing I keep coming back to isn’t the goals. It’s how little there was in between. How rarely, across ninety minutes, that room had a reason to stand.
Because the real story of this game isn’t a tactical breakdown or a single mistake. It’s that the energy never caught. Not on the field, not in the stands in Seattle, not in the bar I was in. A World Cup game is a shared circuit. The players feed off the crowd, the crowd feeds off the players, and everyone watching from everywhere else plugs into the same current. When it’s working, you can feel it building on itself, a run of pressure lifting a stadium lifting a team. In this game against Belgium, it just never got going, and you could feel the absence of it as clearly as you’d have felt the presence.
“It’s a bit of a downer for us being out here now after this loss, but I felt like they lost the game before they even stepped out onto the pitch,” said Carli Lloyd in Fox’s postgame coverage. “I’m not sure why, and I don’t know the reasons, but just from the beginning, just chasing, tentative, scared, just not confident on the ball. And I think big-time players— you wanted some of those big-time players to step up in big moments.” Even a great like Carli with all the soccer experience you can imagine, couldn’t connect the feeling with a concrete reason. It was just the energy, and anyone who was watching could feel it to come capacity.
It started flat and stayed flat. Belgium scored inside nine minutes, off a US defense that looked half a step slow to the moment, and from there the Americans couldn’t get a foothold. The midfield couldn’t hold the ball. Folarin Balogun had ten touches in the entire first half, the fewest of any player on the field. Tillman had three in the opening sixteen minutes. A team that had played loose and free through the group stage suddenly couldn’t string four passes together, and you could see them gripping, receiving the ball and immediately playing it backward, nobody wanting to be the one to take the risk.
That’s the part worth sitting with, because tired teams and tense teams look the same from a bar stool, and this was the tense kind. When a team plays scared it doesn’t look dramatic. It looks quiet. It looks like there’s nothing to feed on. And a crowd can only carry a team so far when the team isn’t giving it anything to answer.
Tillman’s goal was the one moment the circuit closed. For ninety seconds everyone was plugged in at once, the bar, the stadium, the team. And then Belgium answered almost immediately, the way good teams do right after conceding, and the current just cut out. You could hear it in the bar, a whole room’s worth of breath going out at the same time. Though it’s great we answered with a goal, the only one we ever got in the game was from a free kick; we never were able to put a real scoring drive together properly through the entire 90 minutes.
The second half brought the errors that made the score ugly. In the 57th minute Matt Freese came out to deal with a ball over the top, hesitated, caught his foot on the turf, and put it straight to Belgium. Hans Vanaken finished from thirty-plus yards into an empty net. It’s the kind of mistake that follows a young goalkeeper around, and it’s worth remembering he’d made an outrageous one-handed save in the very first minute of the same match. The distance between the save nobody remembers and the error nobody forgets is about that thin, and both happened to the same person inside an hour. Romelu Lukaku added a fourth in stoppage time that didn’t change anything except the size of the wound.
And somewhere in the middle of it, Christian Pulisic came off. He’d been managing a calf injury for weeks, wasn’t right, and it showed, an uncharacteristically rough night, eleven first-half turnovers, no shots, no chances created, none of the things you expect from him. Then a leg injury took him off entirely in the 59th minute, and the cameras caught him in tears on the bench. It’s a hard image, and it’ll get used as the picture of the night. But he didn’t lose this game and he couldn’t have saved it alone. His face on that bench was just the most visible version of a feeling that was everywhere by then, in the stands, in the bar, in every room that had been standing an hour earlier and was sitting now.
There was also some drama about Balogun’s red card debate leading uo to the game, but it’s only conjecture to assume that made a difference in what happened. Even Mauricio Pochettino said there was no way to really comment on if it was a factor because at the end of the day, they just didn’t play their game.
None of this is to spare the team the honest verdict. They didn’t rise to the moment, and Pochettino more or less said so afterward, admitting it wasn’t the way they normally play and that the responsibility was his to sort out. There’s a real conversation coming about a group that keeps going quiet when the pressure climbs. That conversation is fair.
But the nuance that got lost in the wreckage is this. As much as the crowd wanted to lift them, and we did, all of us, in that bar and in that stadium and everywhere else, you can’t manufacture the current by yourself from the outside. It has to run both ways. The team needed to give the crowd something to answer, and for one free kick in the 31st minute, they did, and the answer was deafening. It just never came again. The energy everyone brought had nowhere to go.
That’s what I’ll remember about this one. Not the scoreline, and not the bench. The ninety seconds I spent standing next to my chair, believing, in a room full of people doing the same thing, and how quiet it got when we all sat back down together.
The talent will keep coming. Tillman is 24 and will be back for the next one. But some nights the current just doesn’t catch, and everyone plugged into it, the eleven on the field and the thousands who came to lift them, all feel it. “Today we didn’t show our real qualities.” Pochettino said in the postgame. But the real qualities are there, we got to enjoy it for the last few weeks, and we’ll surely enjoy it again in 4 years.
