Sixteen years is a long time in football. The last time Paraguay appeared at a World Cup, they reached the quarterfinals in South Africa and were eliminated by Spain on a penalty shootout that still stings in Asunción. Now they're back — and head coach Gustavo Alfaro has made a deliberate, philosophically loaded choice about how to get there: trust the continent.

Of the 26 players named to Paraguay's World Cup roster, 15 ply their trade in South American club football. That is not an accident of circumstance. Alfaro, the Argentine tactician who previously managed Ecuador and Costa Rica on the international stage, has consistently argued that players immersed in the physical, tactically demanding environment of CONMEBOL leagues carry a competitive edge that mid-table European football cannot replicate. His squad selection is a living brief for that argument.

The headline name for a global audience is Miguel Almirón, the former Newcastle United midfielder whose move away from the Premier League did nothing to diminish his status as a fan symbol — a player who ran himself into the ground every single week and earned it honestly. Almirón's inclusion anchors the squad's identity: technically sharp, tireless, emotionally invested. He is not here as a legacy pick. He is expected to perform.

The subplot that generated real anxiety in the weeks before the announcement was Diego Gómez. The Brighton & Hove Albion midfielder landed awkwardly on his right knee during a Premier League fixture in late April, and the images circulating immediately after that moment looked bad. Gómez himself acknowledged publicly that he didn't know what the damage was. The relief, then, when Alfaro confirmed his inclusion, was audible. At 22, Gómez represents the clearest bridge between Paraguay's present and its future — a technically gifted, high-press midfielder developed in the MLS system at Inter Miami before Brighton paid real money to bring him to England. His fitness is not fully guaranteed, but Alfaro has bet on him.

Defender Omar Alderete also features. The Valencia centre-back brings European league experience and has been a consistent presence in Alfaro's defensive setups. That combination — Alderete's European-calibrated reading of the game alongside a majority of players who deal in the speed and physicality of South American football weekly — is the tension Alfaro is trying to turn into a tactical asset rather than a liability.

For the United States Men's National Team, the draw has placed Paraguay directly in their path during the group stage, and the Americans would be foolish to approach this as a favorable fixture. The USMNT will be playing in front of their own supporters, under enormous pressure, at a tournament they co-host. Paraguay, by contrast, arrives with nothing to lose and a coach who has made a career out of organizing well-drilled, defensively compact sides capable of punishing transitions. Alfaro's teams do not come to exchange pleasantries.

The broader context here is worth naming plainly: CONMEBOL's qualification process is arguably the most brutal in world football. There are no minnows, no guaranteed points, no nights off. Every single fixture across the ten-team round-robin is a test. Paraguay navigated that process well enough to return to the tournament for the first time since 2010, and they did it by leaning into the same South American football infrastructure that forms the backbone of this squad. That is institutional coherence, and it matters when the knockout rounds arrive and legs go heavy.

Alfaro has 26 players and a point to prove — not just about Paraguay, but about a school of football that the European-centric conversation consistently undervalues. Whether the squad's South American-heavy core translates into results on North American pitches will be one of the genuinely interesting tactical questions of the group stage. The answer starts whenever Paraguay step onto the field.