Summer of Soccer best bets: The USMNT kicks off its Olympic challenge

Welcome back to the Summer of Soccer. Were 83 matches across two simultaneous continental championship tournaments not enough for you? Fantastic! Same here! Thankfully, we've got 32 more games on the way in the form of the Men's Olympic Soccer Tournament.

Regular and casual sports viewers will know that the Olympic Opening Ceremonies take place on Friday, July 26. But the Games themselves actually start two days earlier, with men's soccer and rugby sevens kicking off on Wednesday, July 24.

The men's soccer tournament looks similar to the Copa America in structure: 16 teams sorted into four groups of four, with the top two teams of each group advancing to the knockout phase. That's where the similarities end, though. There are a few key differences worth noting before the tournament begins:

The Olympic men's soccer tournament is largely a youth event. Forget the headlining stars of the Copa and the Euros earlier this summer: the Olympic men's soccer tournament is for junior players, and teams are restricted to athletes under the age of 23. They're allowed a maximum of three "senior" players above that cutoff, but many teams aren't even bringing that many.

Because it's a global youth event, the teams competing aren't necessarily the ones you'd expect. If we were to pick the top 16 youth soccer teams from around the globe, we'd be pulling pretty heavily from Europe and South America. (The USMNT might make the cut, but only just.) But the Olympics are a global event, and that means every continent must be represented within the 16 squads in this soccer tournament. That's why teams like New Zealand (Oceania), Mali (Africa) and Uzbekistan (Asia) have made the cut: they're the strongest young teams on their respective continents.

The USMNT's group features France, Guinea and New Zealand. It's a tough draw, but it's nowhere near the toughest: Group B, featuring Argentina, Morocco, Iraq and Ukraine, looks downright deadly.

The U. S. Men's National Team is here, and it has a genuine shot of challenging for a medal. The USMNT qualified for this Olympic tournament on the strength of its performance in youth competitions over the past few years. Longtime youth coach Marko Mitrovic is leading this squad, and he's been working with these players regularly since getting hired in 2022. The USMNT has a favorable draw here and features completely different players than the USMNT that disappointed in the Copa America. It should have a decent shot of making the quarterfinals, and any advancement beyond that stage will put it in medal contention.

So: it's young players, it's a global group and the USMNT has a good shot at doing well. That's all well and good! Where's the catch?

The catch is the USMNT's opening game, kicking off on Wednesday, July 24 at 3 p.m. ET. It's against France, the host nation and presumed gold medal favorite, and to put it mildly, it is not expected to go well for the USMNT. This France team is coached by pundit and former MLS legend Thierry Henry, a man who is a legitimate candidate for the USMNT senior coaching spot vacated by Gregg Berhalter, and it's stacked with talented kids just breaking through in the senior market.

It's bound to be a tough one for this junior USMNT. But where are the best bets hiding? We think they're here:

Goals on both ends of the field. France and the USMNT are fielding new-look defenses and relatively untested goalkeepers at the Olympics. We think they'll pull through just fine — we're especially excited to watch USMNT youth goalkeeper Patrick Schulte shine — but we do think they'll even out the playing field when it comes to goals. We think France will take this one, but we'd be surprised if the USMNT didn't find the back of the net at least once: we're backing a France win with at least one USMNT goal at +220.

A Crystal Palace reunion. When it comes to France, we've got our eyes on the pairing of Michael Olise and Jean-Philippe Mateta. The two played up top together at Crystal Palace last season and closed out the year in fine form. (No one will remember that better than Aston Villa fans: Palace hammered Villa 5-0 at the end of the season and Mateta scored a hat trick along the way.) Palace used to put Mateta up top and Olise on the wing, but Henry is expected to sink Olise behind Mateta, opening up more opportunities for Olise to leverage his stellar positioning skills. We're backing these two as anytime goalscorers ; Olise's available at +187 while Mateta is available at +110 .

The own goal supremacy. The top scorer at the 2024 European Championships, by a quite significant margin, was Own Goal. A whopping 10 of them were scored across the tournament's 51 games. (The actual top scorers, by way of comparison, only managed three goals apiece.) Could this rash of own goals be a sign of a larger trend? We think yes — higher-pressing soccer teams have led to more bodies in the penalty box and more chances for unintentional deflections. This one might be a long shot, but we're backing at least one own goal in this match at +1000 . If the Euros are anything to go by, it's not as far-fetched an outcome as the odds make it seem.

The USMNT will kick off its Olympic medal challenge against France on Wednesday, July 24 at 3 p.m. ET.