Max Bretos Talks World Cup, USMNT Red Card Controversy & More

Max Bretos walked into the show straight off a red-eye of emotion. The voice of MLS on Apple TV had been in Santa Clara the night before, watching the U.S. men's national team win a World Cup knockout match for the first time since 2002, and he wanted everyone to understand what they had just witnessed.

"You kind of have to pinch yourself," Bretos said of the win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. He framed the moment the way a wrestling fan frames a classic, something people rewatch for years. "When you see Malik Tillman hit that free kick, you go, we're going to be watching this over and over again." For a sport that gets its biggest stage only every four years, he argued, staying alive is everything. "If they lost that game, you wipe away all the goodwill, because this tournament goes on for another two and a half weeks."

Then came the flashpoint, the red card that will shadow the next match. The U.S. lost striker Folarin Balogun to a suspension, and Bretos refused to give a clean answer because, he said, there isn't one. "This is really quite complicated," he explained. The challenge itself was ugly. "That could break his ankle," Bretos said of the tackle on Bosnian standout Tarek Muharemovic, whom he described as the country's most valuable player. On the merits of the contact, Bretos was clear. "When I see it, it is a red card offense."

The problem is how the call was made. Bretos said the Brazilian referee leaned on slow-motion replay to issue it, which the rules do not permit for that kind of play. "You're not allowed to use it. So that makes it null and void," he said. In other words, a defensible outcome reached through a process the sport forbids. And Bretos would not let a certain global icon off the hook while he was at it. "Lionel Messi should have gotten a red card because you got to protect these players, too," he said, noting Messi made a similar play and was not even carded.

What frustrated Bretos most was the absence of any way to fix it. FIFA, he said, confirmed after the game that no appeal or review process exists for this. "It's just kind of a cautionary tale," he said, one that will not help Balogun for Monday's round-of-16 meeting with Belgium in Seattle, a game the sportsbooks see as a coin flip.

For all the buzz around upsets and the U.S. run, Bretos kept his eyes on the sport's aristocracy. Pressed on his favorite, he did not hesitate. "It's France," he said, and by a wide margin. He praised their attacking trio and made a pointed call on the tournament's best player. "Kylian Mbappé gets the headlines, but I think his teammate Michael Olise has been the outstanding player of the tournament." Add Ousmane Dembélé, he said, and no one matches them.

The bigger picture, in Bretos's telling, still belongs to the usual powers. "It's Argentina, Brazil, plus five big European teams," he said. "Those are the teams that are favored to win the World Cup and in all likelihood will win it." He softened his stance on the Americans, having once declared they would never win one. Now he believes they will, just not yet. "Not in 2026. Maybe 2034," he said, pointing to the conveyor belt of young talent coming through MLS academies. A quarterfinal this summer, he added, is the realistic ceiling. "Anything beyond that would be seismic."

By the end, even Seth Rollins had caught the fever. "You locked me in," Rollins told him. Bretos, it turns out, is very good at exactly that.