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USMNT World Cup prep shifts from ‘City That Never Sleeps’ to … a former cow pasture

World Cup
USMNT World Cup prep shifts from ‘City That Never Sleeps’ to … a former cow pasture

FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. — For 25 U.S. soccer players, the 2026 World Cup journey began this week in the “City That Never Sleeps.” Manhattan’s breathtaking skyscrapers appeared outside airplane windows, then swallowed the players as they gathered for a roster reveal. On Tuesday afternoon, the Brooklyn Bridge was their iconic backdrop as Fox unveiled them as America’s World Cup team.

Then they boarded a bus, crawled through New York’s concrete jungle to an airport, flew to Atlanta, and rode south toward another America.

They rumbled down two-lane roads, through a carved-up pine forest, past long driveways and single-family homes, some ultra-modern, some deserted. They zipped past farmland and horses, or perhaps cattle, depending on which route they took away from spotlights. In darkness, Americans flags, yard signs supporting Republican politicians, overgrown fields and pickup trucks whizzed by.

And then, at last, they arrived in the town of Trilith, which used to be wheat fields. A decade ago, it didn’t exist. Then it rose from nothing around the largest movie studio outside Hollywood.

Now, it’s home base for the U.S. men’s national team as it begins World Cup preparations — because a couple miles up the road, off Veterans Parkway in Fayetteville, Ga., is perhaps the most impressive soccer facility in the world.

U.S. Soccer’s new national training center, which opened earlier this month, will host the USMNT’s pre-World Cup training camp through next Thursday. The roughly $250 million campus features more than a dozen locker rooms and pitches, a court and a gym, conference rooms and hospitality areas, plus workspace for the federation’s hundreds of staffers.

“The facility itself is incredible,” U.S. midfielder Tyler Adams said Thursday. “I mean, this is what the national team has needed for a really, really long time.”

It is the brainchild of U.S. Soccer Federation president Cindy Parlow Cone, and the product of tireless work by thousands of people. “It’s a physical manifestation of our ambition for U.S. Soccer and soccer in America,” JT Batson, the federation’s CEO, told The Athletic.

And it sits on land that, a few years ago, was a cow pasture.

So how did U.S. Soccer end up here, two weeks out from a World Cup, a world away from all the hype and buzz that trailed this team days earlier in New York?

The story begins back in 2021, when Parlow Cone, a little over a year into her U.S. Soccer presidency, sensed a “disconnect” between the business of soccer and the game itself. “There were a lot of people who worked at U.S. Soccer day in and day out who never actually saw the sport, except for on TV,” she told The Athletic.

She wanted to change that. She wanted to align all facets of the federation under one roof. “And for me, the best way to do that was a national training center,” she said, an all-in-one headquarters and vast soccer facility.

So she brought the idea to Deloitte’s Tom Zipprich, who convened a team of experts. And they pretty quickly realized that to execute Parlow Cone’s vision — for “a big, sprawling campus,” as U.S. Soccer chief strategy officer Tim Vernon recalled — they’d need to find 200-plus acres of land that satisfied a few key criteria:

  • Good weather — soccer had to be playable outdoors nearly year round.
  • Airports — the campus had to be within 30-45 minutes of a major international airport, so that all sorts of stakeholders could access it.
  • Proximity to Europe — with most USMNT players now based overseas, the facility almost certainly had to be in the eastern half of the U.S. if the men’s national team were going to use it.
  • Major cities — “it needed to be a city we could recruit staff to,” Parlow Cone says, and “we wanted a city that had an educated, diverse workforce as well.”

They realized pretty quickly that only a few metro areas fit the description. And when they got $50 million from Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United, their choice was made. They also got contributions from companies such as Coca-Cola. Next they needed land; and Dan Cathy, the Chick-fil-A chairman who’d developed Trilith in Fayette County, agreed to donate hundreds of acres at this site about 25 miles south of downtown Atlanta.

So, three years later, here we are, beyond even the strip malls and Waffle Houses of exurbia, several miles from the nearest carwash or QuickTrip.

USMNT players used to be guests at MLS facilities. They held pre-World Cup camps in 2014 at Stanford University and in 2010 at Princeton University. For youth national team camps, “growing up, we’d always go to L.A., and that always seemed like a bit of a stretch,” Adams said.

Now they are here, tucked away in the forest on carefully graded land, and it’s “really nice,” Adams said, “to have a home.”

From 2024 through 2026, workers spent six months blasting into rock, then another six months hauling in 7,000 truckloads of stone and sand. They “created” ponds and built a massive water main to sustain main acres of soccer fields. They built the headquarters, an indoor field, a beach soccer pitch, and countless amenities.

There are three levels of fields on the south side of the facility alone. The lowest ones, farthest away from the multi-story HQ, are for youth teams. The “superpitch” on higher ground is where 25 players — all except Chris Richards, who will arrive Friday morning — trained Thursday.

It is far from New York. Trilith, the master-planned community of boutique shops, restaurants, “premiere lofts,” a pet supply store (“Nutrition You Can Trust,” reads the facade above it) and a yoga studio, is far from Manhattan’s Pier 17 rooftop, where the players emerged Tuesday onto a stage, one by one, for the moment in the sun.

And that, in a way, makes it the perfect place for a team to come together.

“A little bit of a unique drive, and unique little town,” Adams said with a smile. “But I think it’s a great place to be, for us to focus and prepare.”


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