As soon as FIFA finalized its 2026 World Cup qualifying timeline, March 24, 2025, was poised to be a milestone day for the New Zealand men’s national team. When Chris Wood exited its match that day in the 54th minute, however, tensions were impossible to ignore.
New Caledonia entered the final of Oceania Football Confederation (OFC)’s bracket as a heavy underdog, given New Zealand’s regional dominance and the fact the match was staged in Auckland. The visitors put in a spirited first half, marking Wood — the Nottingham Forest striker who is New Zealand’s all-time leading goalscorer by a considerable margin — with two or three defenders and dependably clearing crosses into the box. Nine minutes into the second half, Wood took a kick to the hip, forcing him to depart with the match still scoreless.
“We were all wondering where the goal was going to come from,” defender Michael Boxall told The Athletic in the aftermath of the result.
Everyone in the stadium likely assumed the scorer would be anybody but Boxall himself.
The 36-year-old has been a regular part of New Zealand’s program since debuting in 2011, a year after the nation’s most recent World Cup appearance. Only three active members of the All Whites’ pool have earned more caps than his 55, but Boxall entered the OFC qualifying final without an international goal on his ledger. His job had been to prevent opponents from rippling the net, not to score of his own volition.
And yet, a well-rehearsed corner kick routine in the 61st minute put Boxall in a rare position. Francis De Vries looped his kick over the congregated hoard and toward the far post, just beyond the goalkeeper’s hopeful reach. Boxall timed his jump to perfection, rising above his defensive mark to nod the ball into the net.
Boxall opens the scoring at @edenparknz 🇳🇿💪 pic.twitter.com/6eheeMnb2J
— New Zealand Football 🇳🇿 (@NZ_Football) March 24, 2025
A day shy of 14 years from making his senior international debut, Boxall’s first goal for New Zealand had effectively secured the nation a place at the 2026 World Cup. For a veteran who has come to thrive in one of the sport’s least glamorous roles, it was a hero’s turn that left him uncertain how to react.
“As I saw it hit the net, I guess I didn’t really realize the moment, until Marko Stamenić and Liberato (Cacace), how they reacted around me,” Boxall said. “Seeing their reactions kind of set me off, and we had a good, good home crowd there. Just hearing them erupt was a pretty special moment.”
At last, the favorites found their breakthrough. New Zealand doubled the lead five minutes later, and New Caledonia failed to present a compelling response in what wound up a 3-0 result. As Boxall put it, “the last 20 minutes were a lot more relaxing than the first first hour or so.”
Culturally, New Zealanders are characterized as being considerably humble. Whether it’s reliving his latest career milestone or speaking about his team’s efforts across qualifying, Boxall’s answers are largely in that spirit. However, New Zealand’s status atop the OFC hierarchy since Australia joined the Asian Football Confederation in 2006 meant that completing the qualification process was a simple act of meeting expectations.
Few teams in international soccer, if any, have a claim to regional dominance like New Zealand has earned in Oceania. Since Australia’s departure, the All Whites emerged from World Cup qualifying in the top position in each of the last four installments of the 32-team era. In the last three, they ultimately lost in an inter-confederation playoff. So as FIFA’s expansion of the 2026 World Cup — growing the field to 48 — hatched hopes around the world, Oceania suddenly had a guarantee of a place in the field for its top combatant.
“Once this was announced — not to count our chickens before they hatched — but we were like, ‘OK, that spot’s ours’,” Boxall said. “But we have to obviously take care of business, and make sure we dominate Oceania, make sure it’s ours. There was probably a few players who thought it was almost a guaranteed spot for us, as long as we don’t do something disastrous, and I mean, that was pretty much the case.”
New Zealand didn’t sweat many moments of its qualifying path beyond the first half against New Caledonia. In its group stage, New Zealand won all three games against Tahiti, Vanuatu and Somoa 19-1 combined. In the semifinal against Fiji, it logged a 7-0 win. So while Jordy Tasip managed to score for Vanuatu, it was the only blemish in a 29-1 demolition job to enter the 48-team field.
Minnesota United’s Michael Boxall sends New Zealand to the 2026 World Cup. (Photo by David Rowland/AFP/Getty Images)
Often, teams with New Zealand’s profile — top performers in the world’s less-hallowed confederations — are treated as filler in tournament projections, the teams left hoping to test true contenders in the group stage as Saudi Arabia did to Argentina in 2022. However, much has changed about New Zealand’s player pool since 2010. The All Whites aren’t just heading to North America next summer for a lark; they want to show that they’re more than the biggest fish in a small pond.
“How do I say this … If our expectations aren’t to be at this World Cup, then we were selling ourselves short,” Boxall said. “For us, it was never about just getting there.
“A lot of our the players on this team got inspired by the 2010 World Cup team, and so they’re in the national team, having grown up watching the 2010 team. I think now that the tables have turned, they can hopefully influence a lot of younger players in New Zealand. I think that’s what we want to do. How we’ve begun to play over the last cycle can change the representation of how people see New Zealand as playing football. That’s kind of the direction we’d like to go down.”
That 2010 squad became something of a legend, drawing all three of its group games (including against defending champion Italy) to turn Group F on its head. However, its spirit was less of a plucky and proactive underdog and more in line with a staunch defensive unit that just wouldn’t quit. It’s a sentiment that Boxall echoes as that group’s enduring legacy.
“I think they saw themselves as not as talented (as their opponents), but they had a ton of grit to grind out games,” he said.
So while the rising wave of talent grew up with fond memories of the showing in South Africa, they’re going about it in a style all their own. The five most-capped midfielders in the final OFC qualifying squad are all 25 or younger. Cacace (aged 24) and Wood (33) play in Serie A and the Premier League, respectively, while the midfield quintet represents clubs in Austria, Denmark, Greece, Norway and the Netherlands.
“Technically, we’ve got so many more ball-players than what we used to have,” Boxall said. “I remember my first few years in the national team, we were obviously pretty direct, pretty industrial: defending deep, relying on counterattacks and set pieces to win games. Now, we’ve got so much more talent, especially in midfield with creative pieces, where we’re trying to take it to the teams that are ranked far higher than us. I think we’re excited by that challenge, that we can play in a different way to what I grew up watching and playing.”
A 29-1 aggregate walloping in qualifying can’t happen without some well-executed creativity, but the team knows it’ll face tougher draws even in the increasingly diluted World Cup field.
Michael Boxall marks Christian Pulisic in New Zealand’s friendly vs. the USMNT in September 2024. (Photo by Dylan Buell/Getty Images)
On either side of The Athletic’s interview, the conversation drifts to the state of qualifying in other confederations as Boxall starts to project possible draw outcomes for the 2026 World Cup. Even as Paraguay continues to shock CONMEBOL and Africa’s state of qualifying has sprung some surprises, New Zealand, 86th in FIFA’s world ranking, will need to incorporate at least some of the hard-nosed approach that made 2010 a galvanizing moment.
“I think that’s the biggest thing we have to we have to take from those teams,” Boxall said. “Yeah, maybe we have a bit more talent than prior teams, but we’re not going to win games on talent alone. We still need that Kiwi grit and determination and to just be a bit of a dog sometimes. We’re not going to just connect 40 passes and bang goals in.”
These days, the sport’s congested calendar and a slew of newly launched competitions for club and country can make international duty feel like a burden. After the U.S.’s calamitous showing in last month’s Concacaf Nations League, some questioned whether Mauricio Pochettino’s squad felt an intrinsic desire to be part of the national team. Even storied Brazil is in the midst of its own reckoning, as its stars seem more driven by success on European clubs than restoring the Seleção back to the sport’s summit.
It isn’t a feeling with which Boxall can relate, and not just due to New Zealand’s ongoing identity revamp.
“My whole time with the national team, that environment’s always been super positive,” Boxall said. “We’ve got guys from so many different walks of life and the top leagues around the world, and then everyone comes back and something about the New Zealand kind of humility, and down to earth— it’s great to be around. Once you adjust from the travel and the jet lag, then it’s pretty awesome.
“I love seeing different parts of the world that I would never otherwise be able to see. Twelve months ago, we were in Egypt, and getting to go see the pyramids and the Sphinx and stuff, I would never have that opportunity otherwise. The little kid of me still geeks out about seeing those places. But also, the challenge of international football, I still really enjoy.”
He won’t quite scratch that tourist’s itch in 2026 if he’s on New Zealand’s squad, though. Boxall has played for MLS’s Minnesota United since 2017, serving as one of the squad’s most important members for nearly a decade as well as its captain. He helped author another clean sheet this past weekend in a 0-0 draw with Toronto FC, the club’s fourth in eight MLS matches in 2025. During pre-game lineup announcements at Allianz Field, Boxall’s name routinely draws one of the loudest vocal endorsements from the team’s supporters.
Michael Boxall has been with Minnesota United since 2017. (Photo by Peter Aiken/Imagn Images)
It isn’t a bittersweet payoff for a qualifying goal — as he puts it with some jest, “a World Cup here would probably be more enjoyable, travel-wise, than one in Qatar.” He won’t have to worry about adjusting his sleep schedule, nor with the cross-continental travel that New Zealand could face after the group draw. Now, the focus is on keeping himself in contention to make the final squad.
Boxall, who will turn 37 in August, has continued to refine his routine between games to stay in peak fitness. Understandably, the ability to represent his nation in a World Cup where his family currently lives is an undeniably motivator. Boxall also credited the expertise of his wife, Libby, a registered nutritionist and naturopath who founded ingestible supplements company Dose & Co., with altering his diet to ensure peak performance.
“I’ve always kind of struggled with long-term goals when, especially in team sports, so much is out of your control,” Boxall said. “I kind of planted that seed out there: it’s like, OK, the goal is to make the 2026 World Cup. I think having that there, it’s all the little things you do day-to-day that will get you there. Picking up the little habits, bouncing off nutrition and dietary things off my wife has helped as well. Nothing too crazy, it’s nothing too complicated. Alcohol is pretty much cut out.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the funds to do the LeBron ‘million dollars a year on my body’ kind of thing, but just picking up a few habits here and there, so far, seems to be working.”
Boxall has put himself in a good position to realize that ambition, between his defensive acumen, his leadership shops – and his timely goal contributions.
“I still haven’t truly accepted that I’m, like, an older kind of leader, but I think I’m trying to look at it through the eyes of like how other people may see me, and try to be a bit more influential in those ways,” Boxall said. “I’ll speak up when it needs when it needs to be done, but I think just making sure my level of consistency and intensity is there every day, I want that to become infectious. I’d rather like lead with actions than have to give some kind of speech. During my 15 years or so of playing, you notice that good leaders and bad leaders, they all say the same things. They say the same words. The difference is their actions. That’s how I try and influence a group.”
Still, the hard work is still left to be done in spite of over a decade of dependable service for his national team. Simply making the squad isn’t the aim for the veteran — it’s to play, and to deserve those minutes on the back of his recent performances. He remains a starter for a Minnesota side that has lofty ambitions – “I think we’d be selling ourselves short if we thought we couldn’t finish in the top four,” he said – which should allow him to maintain a high standard of play.
The rest will largely be intrinsic. As New Caledonia learned, it’d be foolish to bet against Boxall once he gets into the right spot.
“I think the World Cup will be a month or two short of my 38th birthday, so I’ll leave no stone unturned trying to make sure that I’m there,” he said. “I don’t want to be added to the squad as, like, a kind of cheerleader or leadership role. I want to make sure that I’m competing for a starting spot and earning it, rather than having it based on goodwill or my career. It’s something I want to make sure that I’ve earned.”
(Top photo: Joe Serci/SPP/Sipa USA/AP)
