USMNT Chief Scout Thomas Rongen: Messi's "lack of high soccer IQ makes him average w Argentina"

How the hell are you an official member of our soccer media

 

So many who post on this board seem to forget that football was being played for more than a hundred years at a high level, before US soccer crawled up out of the swamp of its prehistory. There were great players back then, many probably much better than Messi. Eusebio, Di Stefano, Meazza, Cruyff, Platini and so many more apart from the great Pele and Maradona. On his best days Messi deserves to be put on that level, but the best of all time? No way!
That being said, Rongen is delusional if he thinks that any of our American "star" field players has even reached the top level of international players. Subotic would be one of our all-time greats. Donovan couldn't hack it in Germany or England. Dempsey was adequate for relegation fodder Fulham, rejected at Tottenham. Bradley likewise at Roma.
Only Pulisic has a real shot at breaking this barrier.
Rongen embarrassed himself and our whole program with his self-important gaffe.
The only way the USA will be able to go back to the spirit of Bora's team and our 2002 campaign and win by being more than the sum of our parts because of unity, humility and hustle.

 

Messi is good but def overrated, I have seen him choked in 3 finals already, feel sorry for his fanboys.

I don’t think his IQ is low, he may be a top 10 of all times but def not a top 5, the Maradonas and Peles didn’t choke in 3 finals.

 

Boys coaching in US is poor, but girls have it much worse. Many of the male coaches that focus exclusively on girls are in it for the money as opposed the challenge.

 

The level of play is so much more advanced that once your start going back about 30-40 years it is not even the same game. Go to any highlight and the speed of play resembles the 85th minute of a blowout game in the noon day sun in Houston in mid-summer playing on 3 days rest with no water breaks.

 

Its hard enough to compare the qualityMLS and European leagues today, but comparing the play of last century to now can't really be done. My first exposure to football was the 1970 world cup and I can certainly state that the game was different. Subs were new, and cards had just been introduced. Offsides was interpreted differently and there were no zone defenses to speak of. That being said, there was probably a lot more emphasis on individual skill. Children in South America and Europe grew up rougher then, playing with improvised balls in vacant lots and streets, not in development academies.
I would guess that if our kids today never set foot on a grass field or played organized soccer until age 13, many would develop the sort of instinctive skills that the US development system can't seem to instill

 

Street soccer is still played by kids everywhere. It builds character when the rival defender tries to stop you by breaking your nose.

 

"USMNT Chief Scout Thomas Rongen's messy low Soccer IQ makes him sub Hackworth w. America"

Corrected for Truth.

 

Rongen was part of the shitshow Klinsmann inflicted on TFC along with Winter and Mariner.

He was made academy director and then went to piss off and alienate pretty much the whole of the Ontario soccer community. It's taken years for TFC to recover relationships after the damage he did.

 

Just when you thought you were done being Rongened, he is trotted out to go on TV and explain the epic failure of losing Jonathon Gonzalez:

https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/ne...ts-top-young-players-to-mexico-national-team/

 

Makes you wonder if he wasn't involved in this too.

Wrong Again! As usual.

 

If his point was to try and say Argentina will never be as successful as Barcelona because Barca is completely built around Messi whereas Argentina hasn’t been structured for 10 years to maximize Messi’s talent and that he’s missing some sort of nous to make that transition between the two setups better and just relied on his (transcendent) talent...I can listen to that argument because I think there might be merit to it.

Rongen just went and said it in the most Dutch way possible.

But one thing for the record: Nevin Subotic never wanted to play for the US. While Rongen didn’t handle the situation well, we were Subotic’s 3rd choice behind Germany (which was never gonna happen) and Serbia. He was pretty clearly using the US to put himself in a better position professionally and in the shop window for one of those 2 NTs to come calling.

 

Did you just call the Dutch idiots?

 

I don’t think calling the Dutch arrogant know it alls when it comes to soccer is any sort of news flash but ymmv

 

The Dutch can be pretty blunt. I was changing planes in Schiphol and the PA system announced "so-and-so, go immediately to the gate, you are holding up the flight". A very functional announcement, but probably not one you would hear in the US, much less Japan.

 

As I have said many times;

Of all the Dutch Coaches in all the world we end up with Wrong Again!

The fact he keeps getting recycled is one of the biggest tells about the incompetency of USSoccer and what is meant by the GOB club that USSoccer has been through the years..

 

The dutch don't go in much for manners and politeness, but I think characterizing it as arrogance is not entirely fair, it is a propensity for unvarnished truth delivered without tact, in many ways it can be as much a positive in dealing with them as a negative.

For example were I to summarize my thoughts on the Dutchman, Thomas Rongen, and deliver them in a Dutch manner I might say something like:

Thomas Rongen's lack of interpersonal communication IQ, makes him a below average head scout and his consistent bungling of important relationships with premium dual national youth talents should preclude his ever being employed by the USSF again in any capacity, or being used in the media to try and explain the bungling of the USSF in general, or in particular the case of Jonathon Gonzalez.

 

We all have good reason to bash Rongen, but he did do some good work.........

Everybody should know about his contribution of "The List."
http://www.whatahowler.com/httpswhatahowler-com201401foreign-aid-html/

I'd also point out that Rongen was the first to identify and call up a whole bunch of dual-nationals like John Anthony Brooks.

 

Rongen said exactly what I want to hear about the Gonzalez situation and of course people on this thread somehow see it as proof that Rongen and US Soccer as a whole don't know what they're doing.

We failed to qualify and it was an Epic Fail, but it was bound to happen someday. Because we're not Germany, and it's a funny old game where minnows often beat giants and the ball does weird stuff and so do refs.

But one of the main reasons we failed is - through ambition and impatience and arrogance - we tried to disrupt a national team program that wasn't broken. We hired a carnival barker "change agent" with tons of ego and not much substance, and he shit where we eat. Now there's any number of such figures who will be looking to run the Federation and the national team program their way.

As a result, we are not going to get better, not by ousting Gulati, exiling Arena's ilk dispelling SUM, weakening MLS, and discrediting anything indigenous. We are going to miss the era when we had American soccer entities more or less on the same page and moving in the same direction.

 

Maradona is the best I've ever seen. Simply unstoppable. Messi takes better care of himself and is a more prolific scorer, but he has a lot of help at Barcelona, while Maradona made a mediocre Napoli team the best in Serie A. Keep in mind that Maradona played in the era of legbreakers. It's a comparatively walk in the park in today's football.

 

It wasn't bound to happen and it shouldn't have happened. The T&T game was poorly managed, and in the bigger picture the US youth development has been poorly managed.

 

Mario Kempes:
Legbreakers, good point.

Management of T&T game, totally agreed.

But I think we were bound to have a bad cycle eventually where we lost our mojo and may things went wrong. The fact that Mexico got to play in the 2014 World Cup was lucky for them and the fact that we'll miss 20178 was somewhat unlucky for us. I don't think it really came down to US youth development.

 

Doing nothing substantial to communicate with Gonzalez AFTER the epic qualifying meltdown is what you expected?

Nope, unlike Germany we get to qualify out of Concacaf where we absolutely should always qualify and it would take actively detrimental incompetence from leadership to prevent us from doing so.

Not at all, it has been broken for a while and just as we brought in one of the worst possible Dutch imports in Rongen, we brought in one of the worst possible German imports in Klinsmann and then we doubled down by bringing in a domestic regime that time had passed by in 2006. IN 2006!

Klinsmann however had little bearing on the absolute disaster that was this qualifying campaign, all the virtuous old forces of US Soccer old boys club that you are praising were all in perfect alignment and had all the time and resources in the world to accomplish the exceedingly easy task of qualifying out of CONCACAF and they absolutely crapped the bed.

I agree with you in one respect, the only way to improve is the "American Way", competition, free markets, transparency, merit based promotion (and relegation), borrowing and improving upon the ideas of others who have done it longer and better, rather than being close minded provincials insistent that we know better, etc. It should not be couched as a struggle between domestic and foreign ideas, that is the most unamerican idea possible. It should be an open competition amongst the best leaders, with the best ideas, based on track record.

Gulati, SUM, MLS, Arena and the general Old Boys Network were at one point young, innovative, successful and above all more open, transparent and inclusive. As happens to so many such anachronistic people and institutions they become calcified, more interested in maintaining the status quo than progressing or improving and eventually it becomes apparent to everyone that time has passed them by and we must evolve beyond them and thank them for their service as they step aside.

 

You make your own luck. There simply aren't enough top class players in the US pool. That's the bottom line. Something needs to change. That's why we didn't qualify. But on a micro level, we still had Russia in our sight, if we had only executed a defensive game plan against T&T.