A group of eight American World Cup defenders locked hands in a circle on Wednesday morning at the U.S. men’s national soccer team training camp in Irvine, Calif. The players were participating in a warm-up drill; the circle inched forward as the Americans headed or kicked the ball to each other. The objective: don’t let the ball touch the ground before reaching a designated spot.  

Luckily for the United States, Chris Richards, the affable anchor for the U.S. defense who has missed all game action for the past three and a half weeks due to an ankle injury he suffered in a Premier League match in May, was part of the group. Displaying his signature Afro and smile, rather than any pain, Richards cheered his teammates on as they finished the routine, then led the soft sprint back to the starting point, where they all joined hands again and repeated the drill. 

Richards, who’s from Birmingham, Ala., has won a host of championships during his professional career, including the UEFA Conference League—two tiers below the Champions League—this season with Crystal Palace, plus an FA Cup, England’s annual countrywide knockout tournament, and a Community Shield, the game pitting the Premier League champ and the FA Cup winner against each other, with the Eagles in 2025. As a center back, Richards plays a sort of middle-linebacker role on defense, in charge of seeing the entire field and shouting directions at his fellow back-line players. “He manages the game well, he reads the game well,” says former U.S. World Cup defender Marcelo Balboa, the lead Major League Soccer (MLS) Spanish-language analyst for Apple TV. “He's a guy that can lay a tackle for you, he's a guy that can win a header between a group. He's also not afraid to go forward.”

Balboa predicts that Richards’ mere presence in Team USA’s Friday-night World Cup opener against Paraguay will instill belief. “You start thinking, ‘Oh crap, we’ve got all 11 players back,’” says Balboa. “That gives everybody a boost, because now you walk on the field and you're feeling very confident that at every position, you know you're ready to go.” 

Richards can also bring a little bit of levity to a pressure-packed situation. On the front line of the U.S. attack, the face of the team, forward Christian Pulisic, is admittedly a more intense introvert. He’s said that he will try to enjoy this World Cup experience more than the last one but knows his tendency to revert to form. While Richards will hold himself and his teammates accountable, he has a lighter touch. “When you look at him, he's overall just a positive guy, and that's what you want on your team,” says Balboa. 

Before the biggest game of his life, for example, Richards enjoyed playful interaction with an X account that has gone viral in the World Cup lead-up: a soccer fan purportedly from Germany discovering the finer points of American Southern culture, like Waffle House, Buc-ees and large college-football stadiums. Richards made a plug for Milo’s Hamburger’s, a regional chain based in Alabama. “If there’s any @milosburgershop near you please stop. Trust me,” Richards wrote to the fan. 

Richards has said he felt like an outsider playing soccer in the football hotbed of Alabama, especially as a young Black player. (His mother is white, and his father is Black.) “Kids that looked like me weren’t playing soccer,” he told reporters before his training session in Irvine. “[There were] a few hurdles I had to jump over to get here, but I’d do it every day of the week.” In the HBO documentary on the American men’s team, U.S. Against the World, released in May, Richards says, “I kinda felt too Black for my soccer friends and felt too white for my basketball friends … I already kinda feel like the odd man out on both sides of the spectrum.” 

He stuck with soccer, joined the FC Dallas Academy, and signed a homegrown contract with the MLS team just after he turned 18. Within just nine months, Richards was off to Bayern Munich, the legendary German club, and made his senior-team debut in June 2020. He moved to Crystal Palace a couple of summers later. 

A hamstring injury cost Richards an appearance at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and after he had to be carried off the field without his left boot in May following Crystal Palace’s 2-2 draw against Brentford, he feared he might miss another. “My ankle was huge,” he says. “I was devastated.” He tore two ligaments but attacked his recovery. 

Richards is “doing everything possible to make sure he's in the best shape possible coming into this week,” says Mark McKenzie, a fellow Team USA defender. “Whether it's on the field working with performance coaches, trying to get that ankle exposed to as many different actions as possible, and then off the field, we're talking about recovery, we're talking about every modality you could possibly think of, and modalities you probably don't even know about.” 

U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino expressed frustration that Richards couldn’t suit up for the team’s last World Cup tune-up, a 2-1 loss to Germany last Saturday. “I got a little annoyed and I am not happy because Chris Richards is an important player, and we all know that,” he said before the game. At this point, Richards insists that he can play through any pain to move in any direction, which should please his coach. “I look good on the pitch now,” says Richards, with a confident grin. If that form holds on Friday, the U.S could be on its way, locking hands for a long stretch this summer.