United States men’s national team star Tim Weah expressed no regrets over the comments he made in a Paramount+ docuseries episode released last month, calling critics of the team “evil” in an escalating war of words between the current iteration of the USMNT and its alumni.
“[I] don’t regret anything I said,” Weah told reporters Thursday, ahead of a USMNT training in New Jersey.
Weah also said he stood by his comments “a hundred percent.”
The USMNT will play a friendly against South Korea on Saturday at Sports Illustrated Stadium in Harrison, as the club prepares for next summer’s World Cup — which will be hosted, in part, by the United States.
Weah had taken aim at some of the former USMNT players who had been critical of the current team and some of its star players — specifically Christian Pulisic.
Pulisic got a lot of pushback from some alumni — including Landon Donovan — after deciding not to participate in the Gold Cup over the summer.
During one episode of the docuseries “Pulisic,” Weah accused those who had been critical of Pulisic and the squad of “chasing checks” of being “really evil.”
“They’ve been players, and they know what it’s like when you’re getting bashed,” he continued in the episode. “Those are the same guys that’ll turn around and shake your hand and try to be friendly with you at the end of the day. Don’t get me wrong, I respect all of them. They were players I looked up to.
“But quite frankly, the guys before us didn’t win anything either. … Christian himself has had a better career than every single one of the guys that speak negative on us.”
But Weah said Thursday that he was focusing on the “positives” and that he was pushing past all the negativity.
“I think right now it’s important to kind of shift the focus to what we’re doing as a group, and what this team is doing, and how we can execute performances and kind of take our game to that next level in order to be prepared for the World Cup,” he said. “And I’m a hundred percent focused on that and if that means blacking out all the noise, that’s what we’re going to have to do.
“And yeah, we’re just focused on what our main goal is and we’re here at each camp trying to build and I’m so happy to be back with the boys.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
