When the United States walks out at SoFi Stadium on Friday night to open the 2026 FIFA World Cup against Paraguay, the man in the No. 8 shirt will be carrying more than the hopes of the national team. He will be carrying Little Elm's.
Weston McKennie, 27, was named to head coach Mauricio Pochettino's 26-player roster on May 26 alongside captain Christian Pulisic and Tyler Adams. The official roster sheet lists his club as Juventus and his hometown as Little Elm, Texas. It is his second World Cup, and the first one staged in his own country, with nine matches just down the road at AT&T Stadium in Arlington.
This is the story of how a military kid from a lakeside Denton County town ended up in the engine room of American soccer.
It started in a German village
McKennie was born into a military family on Aug. 28, 1998. His father, John, served in the Air Force, and when Weston was about six the family transferred from Fort Lee, Virginia to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. They settled in Otterbach, a small town outside Kaiserslautern, and it was there, at a gym across the street from the family's home, that a youth coach named David Muller spotted a six-year-old American who would not stop playing. Muller brought him to FC Phonix Otterbach, the village club, in 2004. It was McKennie's first team.
The family spent about three years in Germany before military life brought them back to the United States, and to Little Elm.
Growing up in Little Elm
McKennie has said that when he was growing up here, soccer "wasn't such a big, big thing" in town. It did not slow him down. In 2009, at age 11, he joined the FC Dallas academy and began a seven-year climb through the most productive development pipeline in North Texas.
He has told the story of training on Field 2 at Toyota Soccer Center while the professionals worked on Field 1, close enough to watch, far enough to dream. Coaches moved him up one and sometimes two age groups to keep him challenged. In 2013 he spent a year in U.S. Soccer's under-17 residency program in Bradenton, Florida, then returned to help FC Dallas win back-to-back Development Academy national championships, with the under-15/16 side in 2015 and the under-17/18 side in 2016. In his final academy season he was named the league's Central Conference Player of the Year.
The bet
In the summer of 2016, FC Dallas offered McKennie a Homegrown professional contract. He turned it down. On Aug. 28, 2016, his 18th birthday, he signed instead with German club Schalke 04, returning to the country where he had first kicked a ball, with no first-team guarantee.
The bet paid off fast. By May 2017 he had made his Bundesliga debut at 18, and over four seasons in Gelsenkirchen he made 91 appearances in all competitions, growing from academy prospect into one of the most energetic young midfielders in Germany.
Turin
In August 2020, Juventus, the most decorated club in Italy, brought McKennie to Turin on loan, then made the move permanent the following March for a base fee of about 18.5 million euros. There was no novelty to it. The Texan earned a place in one of the most demanding midfields in Europe and has kept it for six seasons, a run interrupted only by a half-season loan to Premier League side Leeds United in early 2023.
The numbers have piled up. When Juventus announced his contract extension through June 2030 this past March, the club put his tenure at 220 appearances, 26 goals and 26 assists, including his 200th appearance in a Coppa Italia win over Udinese in December. This season, under head coach Luciano Spalletti, he has been close to ever-present: 36 of 38 Serie A matches with five goals and five assists, plus four goals in 10 Champions League appearances. The club's own profile describes a player capable of filling, in its words, "literally any position," and Spalletti has used him everywhere from central midfield to both flanks.
In red, white and blue
McKennie's national team career announced itself inside 21 minutes. On Nov. 14, 2017, the 19-year-old opened the scoring in his U.S. debut, a 1-1 draw with Portugal in Leiria, and was named man of the match. At the time, only two modern-era American men had scored on debut at a younger age.
Two years later came a record he still owns: the fastest hat trick from the start of a match in U.S. men's national team history, three goals in the first 13 minutes of a 7-0 Nations League win over Cuba in October 2019. The first of them took 32 seconds.
Heading into this World Cup, his official U.S. Soccer ledger reads 66 caps, 12 goals and 7 assists. He was the 2020 U.S. Soccer Male Player of the Year and the best player of the 2019-20 CONCACAF Nations League, has worn the captain's armband three times, and owns three Nations League titles, won in 2021, 2023 and 2024. At the 2022 World Cup in Qatar he was a fixture in the American midfield as the United States reached the round of 16.