ESPN’s Taylor Twellman Talks World Cup Upsets, USMNT & More with Rich

Taylor Twellman called into the show from the parking lot of MetLife Stadium, cooler in the back, barbecue going, and immediately started riffing about hydration breaks. Then he got serious about why this World Cup has taken over his summer.

"The competition appears to be wide open," Twellman said. "It really feels like anybody can win." The number he kept returning to was 25 stoppage-time goals, which he called riveting. Some of that, he admitted, is math. Referees are adding real time for delays, sometimes 10 or 12 minutes, and that pressure cooker produces drama. But you still have to deliver in the moment, and that is what grabs everyone.

Rich, who confessed he has watched far more than usual thanks to a time-zone friendly schedule, wanted to know if this tournament is an outlier or genuinely better. Twellman could not pin it to one thing, but he pointed to the day's biggest result. He was in the building for Paraguay's upset of Germany, and he did not spare the Germans. "There was an arrogance by how they approached the game," he said. Paraguay, the same team the United States handled with ease, frustrated Germany into oblivion, then won on penalties behind a towering goalkeeper.

That set up the math Rich could not resist. If the United States beat Paraguay, and Paraguay beat Germany, then by grade-school logic, is this US team as good as or better than Germany? Twellman would not argue for the Germans. He traced their decline in detail. Since winning the 2014 World Cup, Germany has been grouped in 2018 and 2022, and Bayern Munich has won 94% of the Bundesliga titles in that span. "They lack personality," Twellman said. "There's no juice to them." The American team, by contrast, plays with hunger, and Twellman believes the gap that once loomed large has closed.

The US now faces Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Twellman waved off any notion of an easy out. This is the team that knocked Italy out of a World Cup playoff and sent the Italians to a third straight tournament miss. Bosnia will be tactically sharp and technically clean. The variable, Twellman said, is emotion. It is their first knockout game, and they will walk out to a stadium of red, white, and blue rooting for the other side. The first 25 to 30 minutes are everything. An early US goal, he said, blows the doors off the building.

For all the parity talk, Twellman held a line. He does not expect a first-time champion to hoist the trophy. Greece won the 2004 Euros scoring almost nothing, and upsets happen, but the cream rises. He still has France, Spain, and Argentina as three of the last four, and he was headed into the building to watch France dispatch Sweden.

What excites him is how global the talent has become. He pointed to Ivory Coast's Diamande, worth north of 100 million now, who was playing high school soccer in Florida three years ago. He noted Norway riding Erling Haaland back to relevance. Diamonds, he said, are everywhere.

As for the Americans, Twellman set the ceiling high. Multiple knockout wins would make history, since the US men have won just one knockout game since 1990. Beat Bosnia the right way, he said, and belief builds. Then comes Senegal or Belgium, then maybe Spain in a quarterfinal nobody thinks you can win. "That's sometimes when Americans are at their best."