I blame the fact that I wrote that a few minutes before teaching a class . I have no idea why i included Greece. I don't view them that way at all. I actually give Romania a better chance against them than most people seem to, though Greece is reasonably the favorite. Nah, that was idiotic. Agreed, Greece is not better than us, period. They might give our attack fits, but they definitely are not better than us.
So true! Turns out, when you nullify all our achievements in friendlies, play up all of our losses in friendlies, and ignore our qualifying and tournament form than yeah, I guess we're pretty shite. Thanks!
I have to strongly disagree with this statement. It is not exactly 1-1 of course, but I think looking where the players play their club football is a pretty reliable indicator of the quality of a national team. More reliable than FIFA rankings or friendly results for sure. As evidence lets look at the world cup finalists. Spain Netherlands France Italy Brazil Germany Argentina England Those are the sum total of Finalists since 1966. So we can agree that these are teams with a pedigree of International football, and a pretty good chance the 2014 winner will come from this list too. A quick look at their rosters and you will see big club after big club. If we want to look at the semi-finalists from the last few world cups, '10; Spain, Netherlands, Uruguay, Germany (Uruguay had players at some big European clubs) '06; Italy, France, Germany, Portugal (no debate here) '02 Brazil, Germany, South Korea, Turkey (closest to upholding your argument S.K. had a residency program, Turkey had players at top clubs) '98 France, Brazil, Croatia, Netherlands (Croatia had players in top leagues and clubs) Seems there is a correlation with where players play and how good your team is.
I think the point is, you can't simply look down a list of the flags next to guys' names on a national team's Wikipedia page and make a determination that way. For instance, a few of the best US players play in MLS (Donovan, Dempsey). Brek Shea and Maurice Edu play in the premier league for stoke. Not knowing anything about our team, one might think Edu/Shea are superior players, but they would be wrong. How often you play, the role you play, and how that translates to the national team is as important as the club that owns your rights. Yes, the countries you listed have dozens of players with pivotal roles on champions league clubs. But then again, we don't need that data point to tell us we aren't as good as Brazil or the Dutch, do we? The question is more whether club affiliations are a good metric for comparing us to Greece or Croatia.
I think coaching, team chemistry, ego's all factor into this equation though. I think that is why the USMNT is a better team than the talent would indicate. More talent doesn't necessarily mean a better team. Thats just my opinion though.
The beauty of SPI is that this is actually part of the data set. They consider what club the individual players play for and how often they play in their calculations. (The other thing is that they don't assign an arbitrary coefficient to friendlies; they rate it by how many of the Best XI played for each team.) And it turns out the US only drops a couple spots from that type of consideration.
Guess it was the necessarily that I didn't see on the original post. Have seen some crazy posters on here claiming the US is as good as the top European sides and that a players club resume has no bearing on International football.
Is the USA as good as Spain or Germany? No, of course not. Those two countries outclass the USA in the talent department and are at least equal in the coaching, team chemistry, lack of ego's department. Is the USA as good as France or England? I think its very possible that the USA is the better team. The USA doesn't have better talent than either country, but I think the USA has a significant leg up in the coaching, team chemistry and lack of ego's department.
Is the US better playing as a TEAM than France or England? Possibly and potentially. Do they have better players? Absolutely not. Not in your wildest imaginations.
What are you talking about? I clearly stated that both countries had superior talent to the USA. There is a difference between having a better team and having better talent.
We can quivell about whether or not Croatia and Serbia are nobodies. But, I've seen many of their qualifiers and neither of them sniff the top twenty-five international football clubs, imo. Where is the big Belgium win any time in recent years? It's just not there.
Best Belgian (football) team ever is tantamount to saying best Uruguayan hockey team ever. And they are probably best four to five teams? No. THEY HAVEN'T BEAT ANYONE TO DESERVE THAT DISTINCTION! What'd they do in their toughest test? A 0-0 tie to 22ndish ranked France team who were in the midst of a six game scoreless streak. At least Switzerland beat Brazil. I'd take my chances with Belgium over Switzerland, frankly. And I find Switzerland's inclusion in Pot One to be highly questionable. "No way am I celebrating Belgium, I'd slot Belgium in right behind Brazil, Germany, Spain, and Argentina in that order, and I might even rate them ahead of Argentina." - That's exactly what you're doing is celebrating Belgium. You're borderline giddy about their alleged high talent level and over-hyping their accomplishments while making a case that they could even be better than Argentina. I've never seen a team have to do less to get so much praise, ever! None of this is to say that Belgium couldn't reach a quarterfinal or semifinal. I think we all agree that they're in the requisite top fifteen to twenty teams. And many of us legitimately believe they're a top ten team. But, that's still giving them the benefit of some doubts.
It's kind of unfair to make excuses for other teams like they were missing players, while we didn't have a full team for most of those either. I mean, we played Danny Williams at RM against Italy and Maurice Edu against Mexico. We weren't really going for impressive, attractive football.
Meh. Using U-whatever results to forecast senior results is about as effective as using minor league results in baseball to forecast major league results. I try to pay attention to it more than I have been to see what may be coming up the pike; but that's about it. I don't think the actual results mean much if anything at all.
I think s/he means Brazil's u-23 squad creamed the us senior team. You probably can use that result to forecast how the us senior team stacks up against brazil.
Belgium beat the Netherlands 4-2 in August of 2012. I think that was really Belgium's coming out party. Since that point, they've had 11 wins, 3 draws and 1 loss. I think it's natural to be skeptical of Belgium because they didn't qualify for the 2010 World Cup or the 2012 Euros. But it seemed to me even before they went on their tear over the last year that they were going to be a team on the rise. Looking at the talent they have, it was just a question of whether they would put it all together. Now the results are starting to match that. But yes, it will be interesting to see them in their upcoming games. In November they play Colombia and Japan, and in March they play the Ivory Coast. All just friendlies, and all at home, but still, it's high quality competition and a chance to show the world they are worthy of the seed they got.
They are friendlies. I have learned not to put too much worth into the results. We beat Italy in Italy in a friendly in the lead-up to Euro 2000 and then lost in Brussels at the actual tournament.
A fair point. But I still think it will be interesting to see your side play 3 well regarded non-European sides. We beat Argentina in the group stage of the 1995 Copa America. Beat Germany at the 1999 Confed Cup. And beat Spain in the the 2009 Confederations Cup semis.
1995 is going back a bit far, no? Our latest "great" feat was probably beating a very talented Czech side in the WC play-offs back in 2001. That should have been their tournament, as most of their stars were still in their primes. Two years, later, when they reached the semis at the Euros, they were already a bit past their best.
Erm, you do realize that we have a bit of history in the game? We made the final of the 1980 EC and the semis of the 1986 WC. This current team has a long way to go before they can be deemed equal to that generation, let alone superior.
I was merely answering your question. I.E. when has the US beat Brazil, Spain, Argentina, Germany, Italy, France, Netherlands in a competitive match. I have no agenda in regards to whether that proves anything. I don't happen to think it's all that useful a metric. Teams don't get chances all that often to play top teams in competitive matches. I think the Belgian team of today is much better than the one that lost to Germany twice for Euro 2012 qualifying. Since that point, your team has been very solid, but has no way of "proving" it if the standard is beating top sides in competitive matches. Indeed. People have short memories. Your team didn't qualify for the last couple World Cups so people seem to think Belgium doesn't have a rich football history....completely forgetting that Belgium qualified for 6 straight World Cups from 1982 to 2002, and got out of the group stage 5 of those times. I see people sometimes refer to Belgium's current team as a "golden generation. Sometimes I wonder if it's meant as a backhanded compliment, implying that they will soon regress once the current abnormal group of talent ages. In Belgium's case it seems more like there was a temporary drop off than this current group is unprecedented.