Real Salt Lake star Diego Luna shaping next generation of USMNT heroes

A team-wide initiative

Salt Lake looms large in MLS history (its championship-winning 2009 side is the stuff of legend), but it's long been one of the league's smallest and lowest-spending markets. This is not, and has never been, a franchise capable of signing Lionel Messi or Son Heung-min. If Salt Lake wants superstars, Salt Lake has to create them itself—and create them it has.

Luna is Salt Lake's biggest breakthrough yet, and his journey through the team's taught coach Pablo Mastroeni that consistency, communication and simplicity were necessary to help more young players like him make the first-team jump.

"I think the most important thing is to understand your audience," Mastroeni said at the start of the 2026 MLS season. "Knowing that we're going to have another young group, how do we take sophisticated, complicated tactics and make them as simple for a six-year-old to understand? And I think that's our challenge, and that's what we spent a lot of time on in the offseason, really honing as a staff.”

Mastroeni streamlined his tactics across all levels of Salt Lake's teams. If the senior team played one way, the youth team would do the same, and that way, young players had less to learn on the fly as they transitioned between the two.

"It becomes an RSL way," Mastroeni said. "That helps younger players clearly understand expectations, and there shouldn't be much change when they move up."

That simplicity makes it possible for the older set of prospects—Luna in particular, who is still just 22—to mentor the younger ones in real time. That's a boon for Salt Lake's teenagers, but it's an even bigger one for Luna. He's getting the kind of leadership opportunities most players wait a decade to seize.

“I think he’s pretty easy to play with,” teenage starter Zavier Gozo said of Luna. “He finds you wherever you are. Obviously, I’ve learned from him as a player. Playing with him has made me better. He makes the team better.”

"That's the beauty of youth"

With pressure and expectation lifted from their shoulders, and support from their teammates never questioned, Salt Lake's young players get to run free in MLS. You can see it clearly when Gozo (19 years old) and Aiden Hezarkhani (18) link up in attacking play. They play with speed, aggression and the best kind of arrogance, and they're not afraid to take one-in-a-million shots if the moment is right.

"There’s not a shot that Gozo turns down,” Mastroeni chuckled, “but that’s the beauty of youth. They’re not worried about what their teammates are going to say. They take a shot from 25 yards out from a very difficult angle and it goes in.”

For better or worse, it's those moments that resonate with the American soccer fanbase. They see Luna scoring from pressuring a keeper and call for him to play for the U.S. Men's National Team. They see Gozo hit wonder strikes from distance and wonder when, not if, he'll join Luna on that stage.

The USMNT's gain

Luna, for his part, has been quiet in 2026. He's been laser-focused on earning his spot in the USMNT's World Cup roster. But a series of strong performances in MLS, coupled with the rapid rise of Gozo and Hezarkhani under his mentorship, should make it happen for him.

USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino has been explicit with players, fans and media members about what he needs from his World Cup roster. Grit. Belief. Leadership, from all sides, and the arrogance to believe you've seen enough to provide it. Luna's journey with Mastroeni at Salt Lake has given him all of those qualities, and if Gozo and Hezarkhani follow Luna's lead, they'll enter the national team system with them, too. Whether on purpose or not, Mastroeni's youth pipeline for RSL has turned into a natural youth pipeline for the USMNT, and other franchises around the league should be taking notice.

Salt Lake will return to MLS action on Saturday, May 9, away at FC Dallas.