Why the US Men Will Never Win a World Cup by Beau Dure

Nope. My posts were in reaction to his quacking to other posters about the number of times the Dutch did win titles and they both failed to be in 2018 WC.
If you call it arrogance when I remind him about the facts of our achievements in the WC, then I cannot keep you from it.
A response however is different from going into this thread without a reason and then start lecturing this poster about our achievements.
He dissed us without a reason, so he needed to be kicked in the nuts.
His (invalid or not) points concerning the actions/tactics of Berhalter could be made to the posters he addressed without dissing the Dutch team.
By the way, quote my posts in which I give an impression we won it.

 

is that some dutch idiom?

 

Dissing is showing disrespect, dunno if it is Dutch, but I guess not.

 

if the template was simply run out big league players then JK would have been a second cycle star.

it obviously is not that easy.

and as i said a few weeks back if the NT players believed your theory -- at least to the extent you do -- then they wouldn't have revolted circa guatemala at perceived favoritism for bundesliga players, but instead thrown a parade. their belief he was playing favorites, taken slightly differently, is a belief i am as good as those guys and not getting the same chance. ergo they don't buy what you're selling either. even they think it's not as simple as run out the b.1/b.2/EPL people.

 

my point re holland, distilled, is that if we are deliberately abandoning past approaches in service of "winning ones," then i want "winning ones." i don't see the point in a team that has reached the quarters adopting a semifinal-type strategy. that's not enough status climbing to justify the risk.

i want a winner's strategy. there is a list of winners and they don't change that much. follow them.

you're trying to offer Euros instead but i showed that in 30+ years 1 team has won both tournaments in succession. thus it's not really a signal of world dominance. i showed teams winning the euros actually tend to exit the next world cup before the finals.

it is a tough trophy to win, no doubt, but doesn't correlate to world cup success. you can't simply say best in europe and then europe wins most world cups ergo best in the world. there is a separate tournament that decides that and holland never wins it. we cannot compete in the euros and need a world cup strategy.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/oct/31/why-us-mens-soccer-will-always-be-chasing-the-pack

Guardian article which is the book distilled.

"If you’ve spent any time at all in US youth soccer, you know that hundreds of coaches have brought European soccer techniques to young American players for generations."

The pretense is we need to turn to Europe except I had a European trainer of one sort or another throughout select. But they taught organization and defense. So we're "looking to Europe" still but what that means has changed.

"No one’s going to argue against developing a good feel for the ball, both dribbling and passing at short range, at a young age. But that’s not really a “style.” That’s simply teaching fundamental skills, like an elementary school teacher teaching multiplication or subject-verb agreement."

I agree with what he is saying, that good on the ball works with anything. But I think we are trying to force a style now, which is a poor fit. I think the current Dutch style 433 is inherently flawed. It is a "punch down" formation. I can boss around lesser squads. But the reason it doesn't win at the highest level is it is naive. Good teams will not sit back and let you play keepaway all day. And the more positionless variants leave one unsure where their outlets are. The formation is then naive on defense, too few mids, too much green space. The passive defensive variants seem to assume they are dealing with weak teams who will make mistakes and routinely hand the ball over, when the better ones won't. And to me pressing can be a very naive approach against elite skilled opposition.

I think people love how this looks but to outplay everyone and run the table requires exceptional once in a century type talent concentrations. How many teams are like so far above everyone they can pass all day? Can slough defense? That doesn't happen naturally through learning the formation. That's a development miracle. Spain retired its stars and the bubble burst. Spain is now Spain again.

Furthermore, I feel like a more balanced formation with emphasis on team defense insulates us from talent ebb and flow. If you play to strengths and work from inherent work ethic, you could be in a down talent period and the formation protects you, keeps you in games, maximizes what little you have. If you instead try to be something you're not, you better be a well-developed pool because you will need all the help you can get, and the formation is not going to save you. If anything, Bradley on an island trying to defend by himself -- when he didn't even need to be out there -- was indicative of tactics that exposed the team as what it was. GB is merely continuing that recent trend. How about a formation that makes us better than the sum of our parts rather than gives the coach -- the one who is supposed to make us better -- some running excuse he can only work with what is at hand? If you feel like you can say that, then whatever your tactics are, they aren't pool-maximizing. If these tactics were any good they would already be elevating the team beyond mere sum of parts.

 

i am not against allocating more training to technical work. when i was in select ball skills drills disappeared around the time we start junior high or high school. do adult or later age group baseball teams stop doing fielding practice? do adult or later age group basketball teams not do dribbling drills? i always found the skills drills productive as a player when i did them on my own. and a lot of the stuff we go gaga over is basically someone actually bothering to execute some skill drill. pullbacks, etc. they aren't doing something we never practiced. they are doing something we didn't master and stopped allocating time to during formal practice.

but you can give pure skill more practice time through all the age groups and still play a balanced formation with physicality and less naive tactics. germans, italians. to give skills 15 minutes of practice doesn't mean discipline and physicality get removed from the curriculum. that is just to replace one naive weakness with a new one, to swing the pendulum too far across the other way. go from physical, defensive, but not quite technical enough, to technical, but not physical or defensive enough. surely someone with a brain can divert off the fashion cycles and meet all the needs in the middle someplace.

we instead tend lately towards the brazilians (in their naive cycles) and dutch. brazil is actually a very physical league but their NT in its more naive time periods will show up intending to play pretty and opened up so bad tactically that when they reach their level, it's not a close one, it's a 7-0 roasting. at a point you meet an opponent better or as good as you, and you need not keepaway but speed or an incisive risky pass. you need not positional defense but something that can body and stop an elite offense.

 

As far as I can tell you havenot got a winning ones strategy ever, as you always lost when it mattered. Maybe that's the reason it's being re-examined as it obviously was a "losing ones" approach in the past.

Not that either approach will make a difference as long as the USA players are sub standard in comparison to the teams that do make it past the last 16.
Sub standard as measured in number of players in the team with CL experience.

 

You really havenot got a clue what your talking about, do you.

 

Why is this guy still posting in this thread?

 

You really lost the plot, don't you?

 

For once you're correct, as Holland never participates.

 

you're missing my point. there is zero debate we haven't "won" yet. but if you are adopting new tactics for the purpose of "winning" a world cup then by definition the set of teams to look to are world cup winners. you don't look to american samoa or nicaragua or even holland to figure out how to win the world cup. no matter how innovative or pretty a bridesmaid team looks. are we trying to be "cool" or are we trying to "win?" i wonder sometimes whether we claimed to want to "win" in order to sneak "cool" in the back door. because many of us would have opposed "cool" for the sake of novelty and prettiness but might be convinced by "winning." having played upon our practicality, you then need to offer something that practically works.

whether US players are sufficiently technical is a separate issue from their tactics. i can train them to be better on the ball but then demand a more german or italian rather than dutch approach to the game. if you watch Juve, Diego Costa and Cristiano Ronaldo can ball. but their technique is then housed within a disciplined structure. ditto many good German teams including Leipzig where Adams plays. yes, offense with technique, but more organization and physicality. we won't win without being more technical, but we also won't win without a defense. it's not an on-off switch where i am either technical or physical. the two can be mixed. one can be adept at both. most of the world champions are. and most pure technique teams are pretty bridesmaids. just as flawed as a thug squad. a false duality is being sold.

rather than rehash my CL arguments, which have been made 20x, i will say that your CL argument strikes me as loathing rather than helpful. self-loathing when an american makes it. we have a ton of people signed at CL teams and how many play? we have zero control over that once the cookies are baked. "tactics" aren't going to make some finished 21 year old sufficiently attractive to a CL side that they don't just sign him but play him. we are already trying and with little luck.

we should instead concern ourself with what separates the reynas and pulisics from the aribiyis and nagbes. that's back in development somewhere. cause otherwise it feels like just dissing america to diss america. "haha not enough CL players." it's not like we aren't trying. since we are already playing your game and it's not working, your advice isn't really useful. it is obviously not as simple as encouraging your U20s towards CL signings, or all the effort that direction would have fixed things. and i get bored and annoyed of listening to people diss my NT implicitly with their arguments when they seem actually disinterested in HOW YOU MAKE AN ELITE PLAYER. i see zero advice how to actually create the CL players you then throw in our face. it's not by just signing at City or Chelsea. they aren't going to be interested unless you are x level, and then they aren't going to play you unless you rise to y level. you are emphasizing a lagging indicator at the end of the process when we need a real fix back in youth ball.

since you're not saying how to make CL players you're really just sneering at our pool. the alternative is you're naively telling me we need to all sign CL which is impossible, and which in current practice within the numbers who do sign, rarely results in CL play. your argumemt is thus judgment -- "not good enough" -- posing as advice -- "sign CL." cause we did what you suggested in decent numbers and the facts are what they are.

don't waste my time.

 

in the world cup?

 

this CL argument is akin to saying teams with the most .300 hitters or sub-4 ERAs win the world series. duh. but other than getting out a checkbook you wouldn't be telling me how to accumulate a team of those players. it's only slightly less lagging than telling me the team on the top podium step is the one that wins first place, and that if i wait and see who shows up, i will know who won this time......

 

the last 5 U17 world cups dating back to 2011 we have missed quali once, are 2W-4T-6L in group play, advanced just twice to knockouts (both times on 4 points). we haven't won a regional U17 championship since 2011. we rebound at the U20 age group, which these days is more of a professionalized age group, mostly pros, few college or select kids. people talk up how U20 does like development is working, but U17 is the traditional scout-the-selects YNT, and they've sucked for a decade.

that suggests an amateur development issue.

there was a period in the 2000s when we would regularly make the U17 world cup and make the knockouts, and guess what institution would have been housing and training that team?

 

Actually I've posted about that, mentioning our development pyramid. However it's not an approach within reach for other countries. When Germany, France and Belgium came over to learn about how we develop players, they chose a more centralized option to implement our methods as it was impossible, at least within decades, to build that pyramid.

I've been reading posts in several threads about the youth development and academies in the USA and I became ever more pessimistic about the realisation of a structure leading to development of top players.

Something alot of posters about development donot understand it's not rocket science. People talk and parrot each other about the academies of Ajax/Barcelona/etc.
They're not doing magic overthere. They lure the best talents when possible to their academies and put them through a drill.
But without those talents those academies would churn out just shit.
So what it's all about is scouting.
There starts my doubt about the USA catching up. The whole system before the mls academies is geared to cater to the American lust for winners and as the field before the mls academies are p2p businesses, these are geared to make winning teams in their age categories to lure parents with silverware.
So this phase isnot about scouting the most talented, but is geared to scout the in that age group most physical ahead of their age kids as these will take advantage of their physical headstart and thus deliver silverware that lures paying parents.
Alot of talents are being ignored in the US system and never get to the stage they can show their full potential.
Only outliers will make it above the mediocre level.
The reason why Germany came to us was just that they had a pond in which without much effort by clubs enough good players combined with the German mentality emerged. However that era ended as Germany was faced with opponents with as big a pond or with a smaller one, but with excellent infrastructure to make them go into a drought and even into humiliation.
So the DFB decided in 2000 it was necesary to change. It took another 14 years before that change gave fruit (logically as the kids entering that new Dutch based system were around 6 years old) with the WC2014 title after a 24 years drought.
Germany, France and Belgium could take those measures as they are matured FA's with people who know what needs to be done in a landscape of clubs that understand what has to be done.

I donot see how anything that is a must to advance development and scouting can be done in the States. The whole environment is hostile towards what's necesary.

 

This thread is like 10 yr olds discussing what they will do with their money when they get rich. Except, the 10 yr olds are having much more fun.

 

Indeed.

 

For those interested:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Das-Reboot-Football-Reinvented-Conquered/dp/0224100122
Das Reboot: How German Football Reinvented Itself and Conquered the World Hardcover – 3 Sep 2015
by Raphael Honigstein (Author)

 

here's the deal, i am curious how many teams pick formations and tactics "aspirationally." i think the implication of the "drilled in over-organized soccer" is the US played counter soccer out of habit. how about it is a rational response to comparing the levels of the teams? i am sure at some pre 90 point we tried playing toe to toe with better regional/international sides and got clobbered. you can then play the long game of keeping that approach and waiting til you match technique, or you can be honest with yourself and pick approaches that seek to negate the skill gap, and take advantage of our athletes and organization. the US rationally decided to become defensively sound and began qualifying for the world cup every time.

thus, when we play and beat spain, and have brazil on the ropes in confed cup, it's not negative soccer for the sake of negativity -- what the snobs seem to claim -- it's a rational response to "our only chance to win is......." and a decent percentage of the time it worked.

no, i agree we need to try and close the skills gap, but even the snobs acknowledge it's reality, and that's a youth soccer task. but they want us to then respond by "aspirationally" playing a formation.....

"as though we were skilled like we want to be," which is absurd. teams do not pick tactics based on wishing they were something else and trying to force it that direction. teams pick tactics based on what they have, to maximize their results.

this is like i am a bad college football team that has a bunch of wideout small skinny sprinters and decide i am going to play the "I" formation because i wish i was a running football team. you don't do that unless you are crazy. you recruit the running backs before you even bother.

the northern irelands of the world do not play defensive soccer because they looked deep into the national psyche and made some determination they want defensive soccer as an identity. "identity" is oversold. they play defensive soccer because they sucked for a period trying to play opposition toe to toe and made the rational decision that their chances of success increased by not pretending they were on equal footing, and instead trying to play controlled, defensive games.

conversely, the smart teams that open it up more play that way because they already have the components on their offense to put the fear of god in the other side. they may also emphasize defense to simply close off all avenues of loss.

emphasizing pretty for the sake of pretty even when you know you aren't as skilled is an emotional, aesthetic response, not a concrete, rational one. rationally if mexico is more skilled and i have a skills contest i will lose. rationally my move is to defend their team and negate that gap, then hope i am skilled enough to get my goals. rationally i should be training my kids to close the skills gap but i am a rational moron if i change the senior team tactics one minute early while i am catching up on skill. what is the point in pretending, other than locking certain officials and their policies in place, and aspiring to be something we aren't yet?

 

you don't know what you're talking about re "physical," part of the reason france won was nothing more than the speed of mbappe. you are confusing a values argument with truth. truth is a team depending on his speed won the world cup. i think you find it irksome that someone can win soccer just by running by you. but that's reality. deal with it.

a lot of our best players were athletes first like landon. when we have tried "slow and technical" we tend to find we aren't as technical as we think and then get beat by athletes. Gold Cup 2011.

my personal experience was that i could handle the speed of play increases every step up, in part, because i was fast. i can work on my skills. they cannot get fast enough to stay with the play. i knew technical players who as we got older became useless because they weren't athletes and wouldn't defend. it's a running sport. people like you tend to underrate precisely how SKILLED you have to be for it to be a difference maker. you also ignore the need for physical tools on defense. that opposing offenses aren't just going to hand you the ball for being in a smart position. that you need to be able to not just run with but out run teams. or do we forget what kante does? and he's not useless on offense, but he can run down anyone on offense and that matters more.

i am not anti-skill. we should be hoarding skills guys just the same. i just think you have a Berhalter-esque naivete about the skill needed to present yourself as a skill team. i also think you're ignoring that sometimes tall, fast, defensive minded, good catching the ball, good shooting, good distributing, are as valid attributes as skill. focusing on skill alone is reductionist, and as i have said, often done naively.

sending us a link to the german book is pointless. if you can't spell out the argument and defend it, it's a waste of time. it's a footnote with a citation but no actual statement to verify.

and my experience is they play closer to a 1324 which is less risky, and they won't put you on the field unless you work hard and tackle. what i have seen so far from GB is we make ourselves vulnerable in the 433 and then seem to have encouraged softer, positional defense, basically wait for the other guy to screw up. push over soccer. let them dictate the play and then hope they let us build back up when we finally get a ball. waste of time.

 

re world cup 2018 "Löw admitted his mistake to hold on to his possession-based approach without finding the right balance between offence and defence."

"Indeed, Germany struggled with preventing counter-attacks and thereby conceded goals right after losing possession."

i am not talking about germany 2018 soccer, which went over like a lead balloon but you seem to be oddly advocating.

i am talking more like leipzig plays.

 

Yes, there's the short term fit the roster tactic, which is legit and rational.
I'm not against that, on the contrary. The Orange team folded back to conservative play with a roster less deep in quality than our top formations. Dutch purists blasted van Marwijk for his "defensive" tactics, which I found sound and fitting to the crew.
We, however still had a few top players in the squad to get us into the final and only the toe of Casillas kept us from winning it.
When one however adopt it as the core business of the team without those few top players in it, you may win the odd upset match, but not the war=the battles to get into the final and then win the final battle.
So to adopt it as the long term strategy isnot sound if the aim is to eventually win it. To adopt it while being in the process of grading up is fine and not something I can criticise at all.
One shouldnot subject the players with top spec qualities to align to a style that renders them useless. The rest of the team should be molded to support those qualities by bringing what you refer to as toughness and fighting spirit to make it possible for a Pulisic to give the team his special qualities on the pitch.
But still the odds will be that a sporadic upset win against top teams is all it will deliver, not winning the whole tournement. For that the long term investment in talent development is essential.