Everyone has their own pet theory or burden they carry in a sack around their neck, here is mine: You know a team by its midfield. Germany, Spain, Brazil, Italy, France. Games are won and lost in the middle of the park: No midfield possession leads to defenses being overworked; No midfield passing leads to no service for strikers. Each country slices this differently, from Brazil loving that 4-2-2-2 where they can press and pass and attack through possession or counter. Spain in order to beat Italy created a false 9 to make that fourth pass to beat that all consuming defense. Germany managed to blend attacking passing with possession relying quite a bit on Ozil and Mueller to 'figure it out,' and make plays and deadly diagonal runs and passes. For me the 'signs' started outside the US. Spain and Germany were in full systemic review on how to improve their programs. The US was still winning in Cacacaf, but with aging players. Bruce in his wisdom just kept on playing vets. 2006 was a disaster with Reyna saying: players need to be more brave and show for the ball. Incidentally MLS analysis after the 2018 loss to italy was: the US needs to be more brave and show for the ball. Bob Bradley is where it all fell apart. He essentially bypassed midfield play. 4-2-4, in my opinion created so that his son could play every minute of every match for 6 years. Donovan's speed, Dempsey's finishing and a squadron of fill in midfielders from Rico to Edu, to Benny, to sasha, to Holden to Adu, manned this or that covering position. Fast forward to 2011, and BB realizes, to his credit, his enormous mistake, kind of. He started playing more passers in midfield. He still refused to play a dedicated defensive midfielder. So in essence you have two to three complete cycles, of undermanned, underperforming, under coached midfields relying on two great player to save the team in virtually every match. It is no surprise that Michael Bradley and Altidore cannot carry the team. After nearly a decade of feeding off the table scraps of two enormous talents, they were found out. So was Arena. JK placed a defensive midfielder. He forced MB to attack rather than swing between Howard's legs. He cut Donovan to force the team to play as a team. He brought along young players. He also made some serious mistakes (in hindsight with good reason, he couldn't find enough talent) in personnel and lineups. Recently the USSF cut ties with the American who modernized Japanese football (watch highlights of their matches, they are playing very good soccer right now). At both a micro and macro level, United states soccer is unstable, unable and unwilling to turn itself into an organization to win soccer matches. We simply do not know how to coach a solid style of midfield play. Whether it be pressing, possession, attacking. Until we manage the midfield, the USMNT will be a mediocre to poor team.
The sad part about all of this is if you were to present this to the USSF board of directors, especially with the amount of credible evidence presented based on past results, you would receive a thank you letter along with a representative from U.S. Soccer viewing your LinkedIn profile. This whole hiring process has been nothing but a catastrophic failure and I'm betting that there was already a candidate chosen long before Earnie was even hired as a GM. We had exactly a year headstart from other federations to fix our problems, we are now behind a year.
And then they would promptly throw that evidence in the garbage bin and go along their merry way, doing what they want anyway.
Why would anyone expect USSF to do the right thing: they're basically Americans trying to grow a sport that trails behind at least three other sports in this country. There's not a lot of expertise. Look at MLS: crammed with foreign players (not really the best) and coached by inferiors (either foreign or domestic); expanding way too quickly to areas that aren't really sold on good soccer.
Seeing the underbelly of the US soccer power structure so clearly now, the more relevant question is how had it intermittently all gone so right?
This is all BS. It falls apart because we don't have quite the quality player+quality soccer brain to play the type of soccer we strive for. Folks like to dump on Bradley or Reyna or Mathis or Stewart or "pick your whipping boy" but the fantasy that Trapp or Adams or Pulisic or Wes or pick your "young savior" is going to magically transform a pool of pretty good, but not great, international players is magical thinking. Coaching is a part of it, especially coaching at the younger levels, but there are many, many small issues that make things difficult. But the hardest/most debilitating thing has been the attempt to move from an athletic "absorb and counter" team to a proactive "posses and attack" team has been challenging as it take more players with top skills. Absorb and counter require 3-4-5 skilled attacking players. Hoof the ball up to them. Attack fast and hard. Lose possession, collapse, play tough. I'd love to see analysis of touches under pressure by the CDs/FBs under Arena's 2002 team and JK or Sarachan's 2012+ team. There were a few times, when Sanneh was playing well, when Pope was healthy, when JOB dropped back etc. we tried to play out of the back a bit, but mostly it was get Reyna the ball, send Frankie blasting down the wing... Remember that Hondo game at RFK where we tried pushing Dolo up the wing and being all "strategic?" Yeah... Remember trying to convert Albright to a wingback so we would get possession/dribbling speed? The reality is Lando, Bease, Reyna, Stewart, Mathis, Demps even Lewis- and McBride, whose particular skill-set we have not been able to replicate, oddly enough, as he has to be the most 'American" style player we've ever produced - were very good players who complimented each other in unique ways. We have not had a team jell as well in a while - and even then, we still could not get past Ghana.
We need a competent Manager. We need a new Carlos Llamosa and Eddie Pope. And a new Keller and Friedel. We also need to make better decisions. Playing Costa Rica in New Jersey was one of the dumbest moves ever by our Federation. There is no excuse for it. Also, not playing one 2018 WCQing match in the soccer hot beds of the Pacific North West or in Kansas is simply unacceptable. Those are some of our best home fields ever and we decided to play Los ticos in Red Bull Arena. Simply insane.
And....under Garber, they got rid of the only proven program to produce and advance young talent in this country - Bradenton! To save a pittance in the grand scheme of things. MLS didn't want the competition with their own "academies". The problem with the structure is it was put in place back when soccer was a regional and "cult" sport. Such sports are always run by "insiders" who have their own agendas, rarely based on what is best for ALL soccer players, clubs, etc. Anyone who is objective and has had experience with nearly any USS state or regional entity can tell you this. It is a bunch of fiefdoms that banded together to protect each other and the national structure is based on the same fiefdom methodology. It is insular and not subject to any ourtside pressure, cause the "voting" systems are inbred and closed. Thus there is nothing anyone outside the system can do to affect it, and if you try to get inside to effectuate "change" you either get ridden out of town on a rail by Chicago House OR you get co-opted and become part of the problem. Frankly, I just don't see how it gets any better without some sort of outside force coming along that is strong enough to open things up. What would that force be?
Keepers and Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey. Without these, we see that the wheels at best spun since 1994.
I'm not sure that it went all wrong. We are in a transition phase of moving from an athletic team who at times was more than the sum of it's parts to a skilled team who can control games and actually compete for a WC Final. Unfortunately, we have taken a step back rather than forward for multiple reasons (coaching, players, USSF). In order to complete, we need to improve in all areas.
man, we're really bad and not just in one place or another. We're bad all over the park. we cant dribble. we cant pass. we cant defend. we cant keep possession. we cant shoot and we cant score. about the only thing we're good at is running fast to chase a ball, then with head down, hit it as hard as we can and then...hope. We do ok on set pieces because it require literally no thinking. The stage is already set.
Yeah, I have to admit to some head scratching on how bad players have been in all areas. Are they trying to hard? Don't care? Just suck? Now we are not in the 1990-1994 time frame where we literally could not complete a pass the whole game, but we have taken a significant step back which has caught me somewhat by surprise.
This is why I am trying to piece it together. Does the downturn start when MLS started bringing in a stream of Latin players to win games against US players? To consistently get worse over the last 12 years needs many people doing many things wrong. I prefer to look at field. For me the US simply can't and has not played a consistent midfield style for 12 years. Side foot sitter a poster on these boards would eviscerate Bob Bradley at every turn. I think in hindsight he was 100% correct. We lost the midfield in 2007 and Dempsey, Donovan and Jones held it together .
Dam, I had forgotten about sidefootsitter. Ah, to the good old day's of Bigsoccer. To your point, I'm not sure that the US had ever had much of a midfield. Our goal keepers and solid defense along with individual effort from a few players allowed us to be successful (at least play to our skill level or above).
You write that, but we had Dempsey and Donovan, both midfielders at the same time. We had Feilhaber, a relatively gifted ACM by US standards and we had Holden for 3 years. Benny? LM. Holden? RM. Huh? Then we compounded the problem by never having a dedicated DM, just this floating 2 man CM that worked great at leaving the middle of the pitch open and launching Donovan to the races, but not much more. There was a chance to build a pretty good style of possession and attack, instead with Bob it was always bypass everything and launch into attack. And this trickled down to the younger teams where the components of possession were bypassed as well: first touch, first touch passing, movement with and without ball in a controlled fashion...we just said, meh, why pass when we can run fast and shoot? (Incidentally that was EXACTLY Bayern Munich's critique of Donovan: He can run and he can shoot but not much more)
Why in the world would we force a style onto our team? We didn't and don't have the players to execute that style at the WC level. Players first, system second.
Fair enough. But we are looking always to replicate items that are almost by definition inimitable: Dempsey's desire and improvisation and Donovan's otherworldly endurance and pace.
We have a "lost generation" between the ages of 26 and 30. If the crucial years in player development are between 12 and 16, that lost generation are those guys in such range during our "best years ever," 2002 to 2006. Then we had made a World Cup quarter finals, pushed Germany to the limit, and the overall feeling was that we were going to win the WC soon. That arrogance permeated the youth system: we had found the formula to pull ahead of everybody else. It was pure arrogance. When did it all go wrong? The day we beat Mexico 2-0 in Jeonju. Instead of taking it as what it was, a tight win against a rival we knew well and that didn't have a good day, we took it as a sign of Manifest Destiny.
Whenever the crucial moment was that didn't lead to a soccer league developing on roughly the same time scale as the big four leagues.
Our coaching, system wide, has almost always hovered between primitive and inept. Arrogance does not help that but it sucked anyway. What changed was the talent environment based on the relative cultural import of this niche sport. ‘94 drew more kids imagination to the game. Our best talent generation (until now) were between 10-12 then. ‘98 was a failure and a cultural blip. ‘02 was a success but happened in the middle of the night, well past little kids’ bedtimes. ‘06 was a failure for our team but had more interest. ‘10 was a minor success but had a great moment and was a mass viewing, cultural event aided by the internet. Pulisic and Wes were the same age in ‘10 as Donovan was in ‘94. That’s the overall macro environment that this sport, competing against others has had to deal with.