The funny thing is that I'm not writing off the possibility the U.S. could make a run on home soil in 2026, I'm just using facts and logic to refute the simple idea that "Croatia making the 2018 WC Final means the U.S. can make the 20206 WC Final." There are actual reasons why Croatia made the final, so it doesn't matter if other versions of the U.S. have been as good as or better than Croatia. The fact is that it takes talent and more to do what Croatia has done, not just a similar FIFA Ranking or ability to compete with it in a one-off match. The U.S. has legit talent in the pipeline and a likely star in Pulisic, so it could be loaded in a few years. It's just a leap to assume that it will have three or four guys as good as Croatia's current best, though. Croatia's no superpower, but it does have multiple players right now that would be the best the U.S. has ever had. It's qualified for 5/6 WCs (with two appearances in the semis) and 5/6 Euros as an independent nation, so it's not some flash in the pan. And it has qualified without the benefit of merely having to finish third or fourth in a six-team group.
If nothing else, you might want to stop citing friendly results as proof of the U.S. team's quality. It doesn't bolster your stance. You're admittedly unwilling to consider anything other than your own opinion and you also keep moving the goalposts, so there's not much point here. What Croatia did in 2018 means little when it comes to the U.S. in 2026 unless the U.S. has a team composed of similar parts and/or playing similar tactics. As it stands, you're expecting the U.S. to have a better collection of players than it ever has. Maybe it will, but that's one hell of an assumption to make. Luka Modric was just named UEFA Player of the Year ahead of Ronaldo and Salah - that's a big leap for any current American player, but for all we know the next Messi could be a 12-year-old from Peoria, Illinois.
France's fate for 2010 would have been down to penalties of it weren't for a missed offside and a double handball in the build-up to their extra-time winner against Ireland.
i'm not moving anything. 1. my original point is: an unseeded team - croatia - made it to the final of the WC. 2. therefore, it should make the USMNT confident that it could happen for them, too that's it. I NEVER said....b/c Croatia made it to the final...the USA will DEFINITELY do anything. the USA could very do poorly in the next 2 WC....it could easily happen. I do not see Croatia as a better team than the USA....croatia does have 2 exceptional results that usa hasnt had yet....but the usa also has finished ahead of croatia in MOST WC..... ------------------------ if you want to talk official results, let's look at portugal...the team you apparently like. in 2014...portugal luckily tied the usa at the very last second of stoppage time. this was the same team that went on to win euro 2016....they couldnt beat the usa and were lucky to tie ...IN WORLD CUP PLAY. in 2002 the usa beat portugal....IN THE WORLD CUP.... just recently with a u23 team basically coached by an interim coach the usa tied portugal in portugal in a friendly. yet i'm sure you and everyone would probably say Portugal is a MUCH better team than USA. Sorry but the results tell a different story. ------------- who do you think will have a better result in the 2022 WC and the 2026 WC...USA or croatia.....? and how much $ would you put on it???
Ah, now you're dragging Portugal into it as if you have a clue about its squad. The Portugal team from the 2014 World Cup, especially the version that the U.S. played, was not the same team that won Euro 2016. Of the 14 players who saw the field against the U.S., six were on the Euro 2016 roster (only three started knockout matches). Of the 19 Portuguese that started a match at Euro 2016, five saw the field against the U.S. in 2014. Same team? Not even close. That Portugal team was a shambles - unfit, undertalented and/or past its sell-by date. Eight Portuguese who played against the U.S. - and the manager - were dropped from the squad for good within one match of the World Cup. You don't seem to get the difference between the quality required to get a good result in a match - especially a friendly, which apparently counts to you and nobody else - and the quality required to reach a legit cup final. Portugal lost a friendly to Bulgaria in the lead up to Euro 2016, so I guess Bulgaria is a team to watch and possibly on the same level as Portugal too. And congrats on the U.S. playing so well against a fellow experimental Portuguese side last fall. The young talent is there, so it'll be interesting to see how it continues to develop. The fact of the matter is that you can pick and choose U.S. friendlies as proof of quality, yet the most recent matches that mattered for the U.S. and its opponents were a collection of performances that netted three wins out of 10 in the hex. It's just an awfully weird time for you to be so bullish about the USMNT in comparison to Croatia, which has a steady, consistent track record over two decades and just reached the WC Final on the back of one of the best players in the world and a handful of guys whose quality is clearly beyond what we've ever seen on one U.S. team.
I'm not sure what you are arguing and why a single game at this point in the cycle would have anything to do with world cup results. Your statements are bit all over the place. These two in particular look to be saying different things. SInce you cant be convinced that the Croatian team is on another level. I'll leave here the wiki page on the team for a country that came to be about the time our modern program came on the scene. Their best performances look better than ours and their top end talent is well above what we have produced so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatia_national_football_team
Portugal is one of those teams called in Romance languages "temperamental" --when they show up, they're very good; when they don't, they're lamentable. The USA, because of our style, has the right tools to frustrate them enough to make them look bad. But they're a good team, on the verge of being one of the Big 10.
lessons from the 2018 world cup... imo.... an non-seeded, non-top-10 team made the finals..... the usmnt should take heed...especially as a soon-to-be host country. there's a select group that goes far/wins world cups....so seeing a "new team" breakthrough (somewhat) should be encouraging for usa. thats it. i'm shocked that people think croatia is too good for the usmnt to see their success as inspirational. my personal opinion is that many of the all-time usmnt greats would also be among croatia's best....dempsey donovan reyna etc are just as good, imo as anything croatia has/had. there's a tier of countries...brazil, germany, italy, france, argentina etc that is clearly better than the usa....imo, croatia is not in that league. i would put the us in the same tier of countries as usa. apparently most of you would put croatia in a higher tier than the usa. i am surprised by this. i dont buy the narrative that croatia is up here and usa is down there. i think in the next 10 years the usa is much more likely to be considered elite than croatia. spain's absolute destruction of croatia just confirmed my minority opinion. i dont think the us will ever lose a competitive match 6-0 like croatia did....i know its just one match but it made me remember how everyone in this thread tried to argue how great croatia is vs usa.
This was probably one of the most mismatched finals I can remember. Consider, the toughest team Croatia had to defeat was England, narrowly advancing on penalties against the likes of Denmark and Russia. Their path to the final was fortunate and they got brushed aside when they faced a truly top team. So the #1 lesson the USA should learn is to give up on the idea of making a scrappy, underdog, "Miracle on Ice"-type run to a World Cup final or championship. Even for a country like France, which always has great players, the stars must align for them to rise to the top of winning a WC finals, so that they have several of the best players in the world in great form along with a top coach, playing a style that other teams simply can't contend with. We should strive for nothing less than that.
I think Croatia are in a higher tier for the short term, but they also had a lot of luck. If Caballero doesn't gift them a goal in that group stage game, they possibly go into the other half of the bracket and lose in the R16, and Argentina maybe makes a second consecutive final on the easy side, massive warts and all.
It seems you forgot that only 2 years ago, it was actually Croatia whom defeated Spain at group stage, for the first place in their group in the last Euro. One bad day can happen to anyone. And Croatia, the same as everybody else, is no exception to this rule. Oh, and let me remind you that Italy beat the USA for the 1934 WC by 7-1 at the first round of that WC, which in context is about the same as losing by 0-6. So also, never say never.
okay....that's great. i'm so surprised that this "lesson" has sparked such debate. my point is not about 2018 usa vs 2018 croatia. yes, clearly, 2018 croatia is better than 2018 usa....if anyone thought that's what i meant then they were reading not well or i wasnt writing well. my point is overall....over 10, 20, 30 years etc...i see usa and croatia as roughly in the same general tier of countries. SOOOO...seeing a team "bubble up" from the second tier to the top of the game - and make a world cup final - should be evidence that it is possible if things go close to perfectly and the "stars align" for a team that is generally between 10th and 20th best like the USA to do something similar. how people can take issue with that blows my mind. it really has nothing to do with debating who is better croatia or usa. BTW....I think Chile was easily one of the best 32 countries in 2018 and would have had a great chance of doing well in the russia WC, imo....they just had to come out of a very hard region and didnt make it. so, overall, i think people see the WC results and take waay too much away in terms of relative strength of teams...they are all much closer to each other than a few results might indicate. and i think that's exactly what people are doing here with croatia....they made a run and all of a sudden they are unbeatable and amazing. my point is just that the gap between all of the teams isnt as huge as it has been and that many teams can make a run with a little luck....usa included (provided they get their ish together and get a coach, etc)
As a Croatian-American I can tell you this: it's difficult to compare the Croatian and US programs because they're so very, very different. For the majority of the time over the past 20 years, Croatia genuinely has NOT been better overall than the United States, but they've always had 1-3 players of a caliber that we almost never or flat-out have never developed. This past summer, however, one one of those times when not only were they better, they were WAY better. To re-iterate what I'd explained to a bunch of England plastics and a couple of Englishmen in a bar this summer who were unreasonably surprised to see England losing, this Croatia team isn't simply some small team against "powerhouse" England, but rather a team made up of the key midfielder of Real Madrid, one of the keys of Barcelona, a star forward at Juventus, important guys at Atletico, Inter, Liverpool, etc., vs the core guys of Tottenham Hotspur and Huddersfield Town, plus the also-rans of Man City, Chelsea, Liverpool, etc. Now, the key is that Croatia, being the small nation that it is, is not going to be the same level of team this cycle. Rather, this was their 2nd golden generation, the last being 20 years ago, and the tournament happened right at their peak, right as the team was peaking. They already lost a few key players to international retirement, and nobody kids themselves into thinking that the replacements are equal. They'll be competitive because several of those key players are still there, particularly the two big stars, but over the next few years they'll probably regress back to their mean, which is somewhere around the same rough caliber of team that we have generally been in. Hosting 2026 is a big chance for us, but in order to make some real noise we WILL need a couple of genuine World Class players at least. Croatia just had three-plus, one of which is one of the best players in the world, and a few others which while not totally "WC" were nevertheless excellent players who peaked at the right time, a la John O'Brien in 2002.
yeah we see things pretty much the same. i do think it is harder for usa players to have club success in the EU than it is for EU citizens. so i think you have to take comparing EU success of USA players with a grain of salt...as Dempsey said...for a us player in EU I have to be great just to be considered okay. the path to the top of eu footbal is much easier for a croat than for a usa player, imo. but the benefits for being there are equally great for both....so maybe it shows that being able to play in top teams helps players more than anything about the quality of usa players. i think just looking at the clubs of players doesnt tell the full story when comparing an eu team vs the usa b/c clearly the eu teams are going to be on better clubs just based on citizenship and access, imo. but overall my point was also about how it often seems there is the elite...with an actual chance of winning a world cup - the countries who have won before - the italy's, brazils germany's etc - and then everyone else is a TOTAL OUTSIDER WITH NO CHANCE. so my point was not really trying to compare croatia vs usa...but more to say, LOOK! an "outsider" team - not really a team in the "royalty" of the sport - got very close to winning the WC! i think the gap between the elite and the rest of the world has narrowed and i think that it will continue to narrow...i think the shift is permanent and the croatia result is indicative of that, imo. this should give hope to the usa - granted, and i already said this earlier - that they can develop a few star players - a couple more pulisics and they will be right there - and i think by 2026 that the chance are higher of that happeneing than most seem to think. and, mind you, even if that does happen, and the usa can get a couple of star players, it will still need A LOT of luck - which most countries that go far in a WC get.
I think aspiring to make the 2026 WC Final on home soil is a legitimate goal. When you're hosting, everything changes. And by that point the U.S. could have a team like the one Croatia has now. I merely think the if/then nature of your original claim was a bit simplistic and lacked nuance. It seems like we can all agree that Croatia 2018 has players that the U.S. does not currently have (talent + experience + proven ability at the highest level) and needs to make a similar run. It's a weird time to analyze the USMNT because it just strung together a number of terrible performances and/or results to miss the World Cup, yet we know there's more and more talent coming through the pipeline, there's real hope for the future, it never should've missed the WC, and there's no doubt it's the class of the region alongside Mexico and Costa Rica and can compete with the Croatias and Portugals of the world. I do think we have less evidence it can do so match after match after match as is required to reach a cup final, but we may have it by 2026. The U.S. has more room to grow and a higher ceiling than Croatia for obvious reasons. It's not as if Croatia came out of nowhere last summer, though. It entered the Euro 2016 knockout stage off a match and group win over Spain and was expected to reach at least the semis. I actually saw Croatia making the 2018 semis prior to the tournament and once it got there was certain it'd beat England. Luck of the draw helps, but Croatia is a better team than any opponent it faced prior to the final, and not due simply to a weak path, but due in large part to its own high quality. It has qualified for 10 of 12 tournaments overall, previously reached a semi, won groups over the likes of Spain and Germany and the like. Believing that the U.S. wouldn't lose a match like Croatia lost to Spain is just splitting hairs. What's the difference between that 6-0 loss to Spain and the U.S. losing 4-0 to Costa Rica or 2-1 to T&T? Most consider that 2-1 loss much worse than a lopsided loss to Spain. Anyway, lopsided losses happen to all. I've seen Portugal beat Spain 4-0 (and it should've been five), so it really can happen to anyone.
Sure. It has always been like this since the beginings. A good coach, good players and great strategy, will only make things easier on your team, as after all, you also need a lot of luck, that things happen your way, when it gets to some specific competition. All there is really to it, is that if you manage to get all the right pieces in place and a certain portion of good luck behind you, you may finally win. As no one has the recipee, to be lucky when the time of the great event comes, all teams can only work on the things they can improve. The rest (that portion of good luck), is beyond any teams reach, to fix it or do anything about it. Sure helps though, to minimize the need of luck, by being great at the other things.
well, in my opinion the gap is narrowing. for instance, in the 90's when i first started watching world cups....it seemed that there was just a huge difference between the italys and brazils and everyone else. i think with internet and globalization....the gap between top teams and everyone else isnt so great as before...and it is getting smaller. i think there is a shift that is happening and that people havent noticed so much yet maybe. i think the margins for the very top teams and the rest is as small as it has ever been. i think this is a big reason for league of nations and these programs...the EU teams are fighting hard to maintain their grip on the top of the sport.
Yes, we agree on this If so, you would expect that both Italy and Brazil, would be winning everything at continental level as well, but at the European championship those years, Italy never even reached one semi in any of those 3 tournaments played, and in South America those years, Argentina won as many Copa America's as those won by Brazil (2 titles each), with Uruguay winning one as well. And let me remind you that the 1990 WC was won by Germany, and the 1998 WC was won by France. Their dominance (Brazil and Italy), was restricted basicly to what they did in the1994 WC. (which is pretty much the same as for Croatia and France for the 2018 WC)
yea there has always been that element of luck in soccer...which is part of why it is so captivating. any team can beat any team on a given day. my point wasnt so much about brazil and italy specifically...but as a fan of an outsider country in the world of soccer, the usa....i have always been aware of the perceptions about the "good teams" - the argentinas the brazils the germanys the italys etc - that group of teams and ...everyone else. i think that perception that there is a huge huge gulf in class among the top teams and everyone else was just more justified a few decades ago. but maybe it is the same as it always was..... greece won the euro in 2004. bulgaria made a run. czech republic was a top 5 team in 2006. iceland, croatia, etc are making runs....there are always surprise teams and there always will be....but i think it is becoming even more common now than before...even if only slightly - b/c the top teams are not as far away from the others as before.
just to add on from another angle: jesse owens 100m gold medal time in 1936 was 10.38 seconds. usain bolts in 2016 was 9.81. sports science, nutrition, training techniques etc are making the athletes of today better and better with each generation. in soccer, the field is staying the same size basically and the players are getting faster, better trained and more athletic every year. the 2018 WC set a record for PKs. it almost surprises me now when a knockout round match doesnt go to extra time and PKs. it is getting harder to break down defenses than ever before. and it is getting easier for organized teams to have success. we are seeing a disappearance of "special" #10s who create magic and their influence on games is decreasing - messi, neymar, ronaldo in the 2018 WC didnt do much (ronaldo had that great opening game but beyond that not much).... i think it is b/c the average player and average team is too athletic now..too fast too good defensively...even if they arent as good technically they can compete and nullify "better" opponents like never before. i think if messi had played in the 90s he would have had a better chance of winning a world cup. look at france. they have an extremely athletic team with pogba mbappe kante etc and they used very defensive tactics. in fact they almost took a page out of the usmnt playbook...to me they were just a better version of what the usa has always been....it was striking to me to see them play similar to the usmnt teams....the us doesnt have a pgoba or an mbappe but they could play and often do a very similar style to france's in 2018. i dont think it was a coincidence that in france's sendoff match to the world cup...france was unable to beat the usa and it was a very defensive match that ended in a tie. these trends bode well for future success of the usmnt. i hate to say it - b/c i have always wanted the usa to evolve into a barcelona style possession team with flair and excitement - but the current trend seems here to stay and seems to offer the best chance for us success: very athletic, defensive teams full of wingers and forwards who constantly defend and dont create much and have high workrates. the us' best chance to compete in this current climate and acheive results is to continue to put out teams with as much athleticism and defensive workrate as possible....despite my wish they would become more asthetically pleasing...i think the game itself is shifting away from rewarding that style.
With Maradona and Roman Riquelme around, where both of which had very strong personalities that could barely stand each other, only with luck Messi would have even played. And if so, not even the slightiest chance of wearing the number 10.
I am optimistic for us making a run in 2026 based this group of young players coming through will be in their prime, the players behind them look to be a solid bunch too, Euro clubs showing more interest in our players, assuming many of the youngsters reach their potential, home field advantage, and a lot of luck. I dont see what Croatia has to do with any of that. Croatia just became the second non-winner since 1966 to make it to world cup final, with the Netherlands being the other (3 times). From 1962 and earlier, there is Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Sweden. That isnt a huge number of teams and the ones that do make the finals are generally one of top 10 in talent at the time, There isnt much in USA history to suggest they are ready for a final. A final requires getting out of the group and then winning 3 games in a row. We have never put together 3 solid games in a row at the World Cup. The closest we have come to doing that is the 2016 Copa and the competition is much below what one would expect to see in a knock out phase.
Yup, you did pretty well at the semi's vs. the team that finished second (a much below type of competition ), when they scorched your team there, despite having home advantage, by 4-0....... (from this precise moment of time, start wishing you don't get that same team at the knock-outs for 2026, as up to now, they are very hungry for titles......)
I was obviously talking about the previous 3 games. That Argentina team is the quality we should expect to face in QF and SF of the world cup. Our lack of depth killed us with all the suspensions, but i am under no delusion that the game ends any differently than the two Colombia games if everyone was available.
Yeah, but Owens ran on dirt in spikes, and without starting blocks. He might have been faster than Bolt on the same track. Many people think that "Bullet" Bob Hayes (1964 100m Olympic Gold Medalist) was the fastest human in history, even though his best time was "only" 9.9, because he did it running on loose rocks (cinder track). Apple, meet orange...