Top 50 USMNT players by club form: USMNT Player Performance Index returns for 2025-26 - ESPN

What a difference a year makes, huh?

Well, it's not like U.S. men's national team fans were happy for all of 2024. Remember, Timothy Weah punched a guy, and then the U.S. got knocked out of the group stages of the Copa America. But then U.S. Soccer decided to move on from head coach Gregg Berhalter, and fans were pleased. And then U.S. Soccer decided to hire Mauricio Pochettino, and fans were ecstatic.

Fast-forward to today and yeah… I don't know. Pochettino continues to baffle all of us with roster decisions, and there are, like, three or four or maybe five players who I would confidently say will make next summer's World Cup roster.

Beyond Christian Pulisic, Chris Richards, Tyler Adams, and Antonee Robinson, everything is in flux. And if it's not in flux — and Pochettino is just experimenting with new players while maintaining a settled roster in his mind — then we still haven't seen that settled roster, and we certainly haven't seen it play well.

So, instead of trying to read through Pochettino's confusing messaging and even more confusing roster decisions, let's just take a look at the entire player pool. And to do that, we're bringing back the USMNT Player Performance Index for the 2025-26 season, where we rank every American based on their club performance, and then cut the list down to the top 50.

Each edition of this ranking consists of three inputs: (1) Playing time, (2) team quality and (3) wisdom of crowdsourced salary data. However, we'll lean on different parts of that input at different stages of the season. The main purpose of our USMNT PPI is to look at which players are playing a lot, which players are playing for good teams, and then combine those two aspects.

This methodology provides a simple,