USMNT-Belgium at the World Cup: Remembering Tim Howard's legend-making 2014 performance

The United States Men's National Team's 2026 World Cup journey continues on Monday with a do-or-die Round of 16 fixture against Belgium. In honor of the occasion, let's flash back to the last time these nations met at this stage: 2014. 

On July 1 of that year, the USMNT fell 2-1 to Belgium to exit the tournament at the Round of 16. The game was a tense, close affair and a scoreless 90 minutes begat a wild 30 minutes of extra time that ultimately tipped the clash in Belgium's favor.

When talking to the players after the game, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Belgians had lost. They were shell-shocked and shattered from the effort, and they were full of praise for one USMNT player in particular: goalkeeper Tim Howard.

Belgium substitute Kevin Mirallas summed it up well. When asked about the Howard that day, he was direct and unequivocal. 

"That has to be the best performance I've ever seen," Mirallas said.

A winnable fixture

American goalkeeper Tim Howard woke up on the morning of July 1 with a knot in his stomach. 

"I was just nervous as hell," Howard recalled. "I couldn't have been more nervous."

The USMNT had made the World Cup's Round of 16 after posting a win, a draw and a loss in its group stage. That 1-1-1 record wasn't great on paper, but it came from the tournament's Group of Death, featuring Ghana (the USMNT's longtime bogey team and an opponent that had eliminated it from the past two World Cups running), Portugal (led by Cristiano Ronaldo in his prime) and Germany (the team that would go on to win the tournament outright). Becoming one of the top two teams of that elite foursome was no small achievement—and it earned the USMNT its knockout-round duel with Belgium.

"There's that euphoria of getting through the group stage," Howard said. "It was excitement, and it was also this kind of bravado.

"We looked at Belgium and thought, they play a similar style to us. They're strong, they're athletic, they're fast, which we match up well against. Granted, they have some incredibly world-class technical players. But we just felt like if there was a piece of the game that we could get a foothold in, athletically, we could match them."

The Secretary of Defense

From the opening whistle, though, Belgium proved itself to be a fiendishly difficult opponent. Howard was forced into action within seconds and made a crucial save just one minute into the fixture.

It was his first, but it was far from his last. By the time the night was over, Howard would rack up an astonishing 16 saves against the irrepressible Belgians. It set an all-time World Cup record for the most saves in a single match—a record that was finally broken by Curacao's Eloy Room in 2026.