With less than two weeks until kickoff, the 2026 World Cup—co-hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico—has not been without some headaches, including sky-high ticket prices and unfilled hotel reservations. But for Nike and U.S. Soccer, the focus has been purely on putting the national team in position to make a deep run on home soil.
Speaking at Fortune’s COO Summit in Scottsdale on Monday, Dan Helfrich, COO of the U.S. Soccer Federation, said the team’s jersey alone reflects those stakes. Designed in close collaboration with Nike, it was the result of a six-year process involving supply chains, manufacturing innovation, and, crucially, the players themselves.
“It involved putting our players at the center of it,” Helfrich said. “We actually had two years of focus groups and design sessions with Nike designers and our players—both for the aesthetic look [and] the performance feel.”
Helfrich, the former CEO of Deloitte Consulting, said all the players—which includes star forward Christian Pulisic—have described it as the best-looking and best-feeling jersey they’ve worn.
“You’re looking for an advantage,” he said. “The margins are very thin on the field… that kit holds in its performance feel, but also the energy it’s giving our players, because they like the way they look. We believe it’s a real advantage.”
Nike used obsessive procession to design jerseys for 18 soccer federations, including the U.S.
For Nike, which outfits 18 national soccer federations—including also France, Croatia, and China—the World Cup is an operational challenge measured in Olympic-scale complexity.
Venkatesh Alagirisamy, Nike’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, described the undertaking as years of preparation for a tournament that lasts only weeks.
“It takes four years of preparation to execute four weeks of World Cup games to leave a lasting impression for the next four years,” Alagirisamy said on the Fortune panel titled “Game On: The Operational Engine Behind the World Cup.”
This year, heat became a central design challenge amid concerns the 2026 tournament could become one of the hottest World Cups on record.
Nike’s solution relied on computational modeling to determine exactly where airflow vents should sit and how they should be structured to cool athletes most effectively. The jerseys are built with custom knit materials and engineered yarn designed to sit slightly off the skin, creating channels for air flow. According to Alagirisamy, the result is roughly double the ventilation of a conventional jersey.
“That’s the level of obsession that we put in place as we think about these games,” Alagirisamy said.
How U.S. soccer is using AI to find its next World Cup-ready stars
Looking beyond the tournament itself, Helfrich said a central part of his mission is ensuring the World Cup-inspired soccer obsession doesn’t become a “fleeting moment” — but instead serves as a broader jumpstart for the sport across the country.
“We feel a deep responsibility. We are a nonprofit that is charged with growing the game, making the game safe, making the game more affordable and accessible to people in every community in America,” he said.
U.S. Soccer is increasingly using AI to identify American-eligible players competing in leagues around the world—a talent pool traditional scouting methods have historically struggled to reach. On any given day, he estimated, between 50 million and 70 million boys and girls are playing soccer globally. Many may qualify to play for the U.S., but scouting them manually is nearly impossible.
“Historically, how do you get your scouts, your humans, to all of those places? You can’t,” he said. “So automatically you’re excluding 99-and-a-half percent of people.”
As video availability expands across youth sports and AI tools improve, Helfrich said U.S. Soccer increasingly sees a future where nearly every game played by an eligible athlete can be analyzed. Models can be trained to identify positional traits and performance indicators, surfacing prospects regardless of where they play.
But he was careful not to declare the human scout obsolete.
“There’s other stuff we care about that we can’t train AI on yet,” Helfrich said. “What’s the tone of voice of a player to a teammate when the teammate makes a mistake? What’s the body language when the team goes up or goes down? And how does it evolve?”
The future, he said, is unambiguously a humans-and-machines model—and one he finds genuinely energizing: “In my old job I had a lot of examples that weren’t as fun. This one is a fun one to relate to.”
The World Cup opens June 12. The U.S. men’s national team will face Paraguay that same day in Inglewood, California.
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