The Run-Through with Vogue
Team USA’s Chris Richards on Preparing For His First World Cup
04 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Run-Through. I'm Chloe Mell. And I'm Gemma Nardi. And today on the pod, we have a conversation that I am very excited about between two of our Vogue football fiends, Taylor Antrim and Teen Vogue's Alyssa Hardy, and the U.S. soccer star Chris Richards. The World Cup is upon us, Choma!
I'm sorry, but U.S. soccer stars, no. I don't know.
Chapter 2: What is Chris Richards' journey to the World Cup?
I think we're going to crush you in the World Cup. I think that's probably true. But you know what? I think Germany and France and Spain are going to crush all of us. True, true.
We just had a big sporting moment here in the UK, Arsenal fans. Oh, I know. Of which Mondami is one. I know.
He wore a special Eid Arsenal kurta. That was very exciting.
He did. Spike Lee is also an Arsenal fan. We had a huge parade. It took over all of London and everybody was watching the UEFA Cup. So it's been pretty much football mania here ever since. All the time.
How does the football song go? We were playing it. Graham did a presentation of the World Cup to Arthur's kindergarten class. And this morning he was reading the book to the kids and playing the British football song. How does it go again?
Yeah, it's coming home. Yeah, it's coming home. Yeah, it's coming. Yeah, exactly. Coming home.
It's coming. OK, well, I can't sing that right now, but I mean, for you. Yeah. But Chris Richards is coming home and he will be... He, we hope, is going to be playing in the World Cup, but he's injured. So it's a very... Newsy moment for Chris because there's a U.S. team-friendly game against Germany this weekend that he won't be playing in, but we then hope he will be playing in the World Cup.
And we had a really fun soccer-ish shoot in our summer issue featuring...
a handful of some of our favorite members of the us men's national team and we shot it with iman haman who is a huge soccer fan herself she is dutch moroccan and so she is a team morocco fan but she also plays soccer on a brooklyn rec league which i thought was super charming and um harry lambert styled the shoot and it's such a delight and so that will be the shoot will be out next week but we are hearing from chris today that's so fun i can't wait to see that
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Chapter 3: How does Chris manage his ankle injury before the World Cup?
But she did say she loved Rees and I should say hello to Julian because I'm interviewing him tomorrow evening. Oh, fun. For what? I'm traveling to Antwerp for a talk with Julian, which I'm really excited. Krausner, who is the new, well, recently, not so recently appointed, new-ish. I guess he had to step into, he had big shoes to fill. So he's still considered new. He's filling them.
Yeah, he's more than filling them.
I love his work.
Chapter 4: What does Chris think about the pressure of playing for the U.S. Men's National Team?
I'm so jealous. I love Julian. He's also, he's so cute and charming.
He loves you. The first thing that he said on our call was like, oh, I just love that, like, you know, like the likes of Chloe and you guys wear my clothes. And I thought it was like, he notices that. And I thought that was really lovely. And obviously we, we met, I told him about your, your, your biannual trip to the Drees.
Our pilgrimage.
Our religious experience.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, it was really cool.
Choma and I make a point to go to the Drew store once a fashion month.
Very important. We fit it into the sketch. We make sure. We make sure. But I've got other big news this week. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner are getting married at the same place that my mother-in-law got married. No way! Yeah, it's actually not far from my home. It's very trendy now for people to get married. I guess it's Marylebone Town Hall. So there are pictures of my parents on the steps.
My mom wasn't wearing anything like what Dually the Wall.
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Chapter 5: How did growing up in Alabama shape Chris Richards as a soccer player?
And for me, I remember sitting, I was laying on the ground in my living room waiting for the call. And it was 6pm, still didn't see a message. And I was like, Oh, no, please tell me this doesn't happen. It was just because the coaches were tardy. But regardless, you know, it was a nerve wracking 12 or so minutes before I got the message.
Chris, what are the pre-World Cup jitters like? I mean, I was thinking about this question and thinking, okay, this is a guy that's played in the FA Cup final. You know, early in your career, you played for Bayern Munich, which is nuts. Like, that's one of the biggest clubs in the world. And so you've been thrown on big stages in your career, but I just wonder what the World Cup feels like.
We're, you know, a week out from you guys playing.
Yeah, it almost doesn't feel real. It's crazy hearing you say we're almost a week out because... I haven't even thought of it in that light yet. I think it'll really hit us once we hit LA. But for right now, we're in Atlanta getting ready to play Germany and I just feel like another national team camp. But I know once we set foot in LA, it'll be a completely different
kind of journey from then on out. That's when the World Cup starts. Right.
What Chris is referring to is like this weekend, there's a friendly against Germany. USA plays Germany in Chicago, I think. Is that right? Correct. Yeah, correct. So that's like the last like warm-up friendly before the real action starts next week.
Yeah, exactly. It feels like everybody's still kind of pulling their breath, waiting for the first steps in LA, and then everybody can just exhale and be in the moment and understand that, no, this is the World Cup. That's so exciting.
So you grew up in Alabama. I would love to hear about, like, was it weird to be a soccer player in your town? It's a big football, American football town. What was that dynamic like?
man it was so weird like uh yeah we probably had what three clubs in birmingham and we had maybe five like i guess bigger clubs in all of alabama so it's a very small community everybody knew everybody but a lot of kids that played soccer were also like the kicker for the football team or the honor for the football team and the high school i went to was a huge huge huge football school hoover high school and um
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Chris face while pursuing a soccer career in America?
But you're saying that was like, it was a different world that you were growing up in, in Alabama.
Yeah, completely, completely. I mean, I even... So I left my family at 16. Right after I turned 16, I moved to Houston to live with the host family. And I remember when I was leaving, a director of a soccer club in Birmingham told me like, oh, this would be the worst decision of your life. Like, you won't make it. I mean, I had, you know, like teachers laughing at me.
I told them I want to do this for a living. I had everything, you know. But I just kept my head down and decided that I wanted to prove them wrong. And I think I've done pretty well at that. You certainly have.
That's amazing. It's so interesting because there's so much discourse around men's and women's soccer in the U.S. too. And I always find that to be really an interesting piece of this. Like the women's team, of course, they've won World Cups. There is like, you know, kind of a built-in structure for women's soccer. Did you ever follow that at the time? Like, was that part of your purview?
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I remember going to a women's national team game. They actually had a, I believe it was a friendly in Birmingham. And I must have been 10, 11, or 12 around that age. And again, like that was around the time when I even started hearing about the men's national team.
So when the women's national team came to town, I remember going to the game and it was just an amazing atmosphere, you know, understanding that you can play for more than your club, you can play for more than your region or your school, whatever the case is, you can play for your country.
I've already mentioned my son, William. So he supports Arsenal, sorry to say. I know, I know, I know. But he had a tough Saturday because of the championship league final. But he also supports NYCFC, which I do too. And we're psyched about your teammate, Matt Fries, being on the team. So big props to him.
But I asked William, I told William I was going to talk to you in this podcast, and he was so psyched for me. And he was like, please ask him, like, what was the hardest thing you had to get through in your journey to be on the – U.S. men's national team? Like, was it the injury keeping you out of Qatar 2022, or was there something else in your career that you had to kind of, like, get through?
For me, I think it was all the setbacks I had. I mean, you mentioned my injury before the last World Cup. I remember the summer I decided that I only wanted to play soccer, I tried out for FC Dallas, actually, and I didn't make it. Oh. And that was the first step that I wanted to take into pursuing my dream, my career, and it didn't work.
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