ESPN Carlisle Article: "Has the U.S. men's national team lost its fight?"

Funny thing was we tried to transition to skill-over-athletics just when the rest of the world was moving the other way.

After 2010, if you look around, you'll see top players everywhere tend to be athletic types: strong, often tall, fast, very in-shape.

The time of Maradonas and Eusebios is gone. At least for a while.

 

He was not. More than that, my understanding was he was not on board with US Players after Jones and Dempsey. He felt the next generation was soft, and that guys who should have stepped up to lead never did. He wanted Jurgen to turn the roster over more and look at more of the pool to see if they could identify players with a tougher mentality, and most importantly, whether they could find some leaders.

 

The ghost in this article. The architects of most of the malfeasance when you pull the veil back far enough (much like WW2 if you want to get down to it) are corporate and ownership interests. When the goal of USSf became the enrichment of MLS owners the USSF suffered. By coopting the USMNT as a low cost marketing and ticket selling money maker all thought of soccer, coaching development went into a fish tank called : maximize gross margin.

US player development is now tied to MLS development which is not constrained at all or obligated at all to reciprocate and help grow US player development.

JK for all his smiles was German at heart and he was beyond giving a damn about Dan Garbers Marketing Enterprise called MLS

It should further surprise no one that the USSF went from a guy teaching economics in an academic setting to an investment banker skilled at low cost profiteering and market manipulation.

 

Was it the 2013 U 20 World Cup where the US team was bullied physically by the Spain team?

 

Yep, and that Spain had guys like 5'11" Saul and 6' Llorente, facing the likes of 5'8" Luis Gil and 5'8" Wil Trapp.

 

Our landscapes's response to not making the WC has been:

1) Cut out Tom Byer's youth development pilot program before it even started. And they've already been caught lying about this according to Byer.

2) Direct more $$$ and a new fund at young foreign players to come in and block even more Americans in MLS.

3) Charge FC Cincy 150M to join SUM.


Seems like we're doing a good job of studying the best countries and making real change.

 

As soon as certain factions within USSF got rid of Sunil, you can see them getting rid of the progressive initiatives Sunil sponsored.

 

Depart for Europe on Sunday to speak at the Youth Development Conference in Lugano Switzerland where the Lugano Champions Trophy Tourney is happening with Youth Teams from Barcelona, Chelsea, Roma, Dortmund and many more. “Football Starts at Home” is on the Road again.

— Tom Byerトム•バイヤー (@tomsan106) May 31, 2018

Which of our other technical coaches have been invited to speak there?

And that's just his latest tweet from like 2 hours ago.

 

Sometimes we get what we deserve.

But, as Byer explains on the new Planet Fútbol Podcast, the departure of former U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati—who had championed Byer’s program—took away his support inside U.S. Soccer, which chose not to extend its funding for the program after the initial six-month contract ran out at the end of December.

https://www.si.com/soccer/2018/05/24/tom-byer-us-soccer-pilot-program-canceled

 

Reading between the lines: Geoff Cameron was the problem from Gold Cup to T&T squads. And probably the odd German. He says specifically that the players he brought into the qualifiers were the problem.
*Kelyn Rowe, Bruce said something to the effect: he'll benefit more from getting MLS match time. Which to me reads: my aging players don't like him showing so much personality and so little ass licking.

 

If we give credibility to Howards quote, well Sacha was the other player from Klinsmann's callups that was eliminated by Bruce.

 

Its mostly skill.

The "fight" part is why we didn't qualify for the WC.

The "skill" part is why we would've been knocked out in the first round if we ended up getting there.

I tend to think "skill" is the bigger overall long-term issue, not one WC cycle. And I think we have more skill when you look at the players we are starting to produce, but these are mostly players in the youth age groups right now.

 

Interesting analysis, I would add to it by saying that what makes you jump from, "just there to even up the numbers," to "relevant," is skill, but what takes you from "skill," to World Cup trophies is "mentality,", and Germany perfectly captures that. Germany wins the games it should win, and wins the games it shouldn't win. It wins when it plays poorly, it wins when it plays great, it wins when it's behind, it wins when it's ahead, it wins when it's tied and it has no business winning, it even wins when its behind, knocks out Argentinas goalie, scores an equalizer on his replacement, a replacement that forced Argentina to keep superb Lionel Messi on the bench for Argentina's penultimate quarterfinal in 2006, a tournament they had looked likely to win just hours earlier. Germany has that "fight," but it also has that "skill," and when you combine the "fight," with the "mentality," well, you get Germany, and you get those inevitable trophies.

We've had fight and mentality, but not much skill, and in recent years we've had more skill, and not so much fight, and not so much mentality beyond the odd blip here and there (playing hard fought games in the cup in '14 despite being overmatched in all four matches, especially after Altidore went down and we had no forwards worth a damn other than withdrawn forward Dempsey, and I would also add performances in 2009, and 2010). Not sure what to think of the latest generation. On the one hand, they've made runs to the quarterfinals of back to back U-20 World Cups and the most recent U-17 World Cup. On the bad side, we've managed to lose repeatedly in the quarterfinals in recent years:

2003: Equalizer at the whistle forces extra time against Agentina where of course we lose.

2007: After dominant performances against significantly better teams, the US went out and choked in the rain against Austria.

2015: Injuries, no Novakovich left us w/o the weapons we needed to win, though we forced penalties in that QF heartbreaker.

2017: Unlike '15, we were played off the field but still managed to force extra time.

2017 U-17's: lost to a much better team in England.

Interestingly enough, the teams that beat us in '15, and '17 in all 3 quarterfinals went on to win in their semifinals and advance to the final (winning one or two of the three finals, can't remember which).

Not sure what to say about what it might mean, but I do like that the kids have managed to win multiple tournaments over the past several years, and have consistently performed well in qualifying, and in the tournament in terms of results, if not always quality of play and along the way they did show plenty of fight and grit.

Fingers crossed that they can put it together over the next five years.

 

Funny thing is that our 2014-18 pool was our most valuable ever, with guys like Brooks, Pulisic, Fabian, Chandler, Williams, Johannsson, Wood, etc. moving us well past the £60m mark.

Even right now, with our youth-filled squad, our market value is still over £60m; but two-thirds of that is Pulisic.

That puts us as the #2 team in the region and above half of the NTs going to the World Cup, so at least from a market value POV, we're seriously punching below out weight (Panama's squad is valued at £8.5 by comparison, Costa Rica's at about £40m).

 

One small consolation from reading about the terrible attitude and leadership in that squad is knowing that bunch would have fallen flat on their faces in Russia.

It's bad for the sport in America not to be there of course, but beyond just showing up, we're not missing anything.

 

I disagree. I would argue that nothing is set in stone for the following reasons:

1. Injury, form, and age would have eliminated many of the leaders and Old Guard. Howard and Jones are done. Dempsey is a 15 minute player at best. IMO, Cameron was terrible this season. Omar G had a terrible season. Of the veteran German-Americans, Brooks may have been the only one ready to go. Altidore picked up an injury. So the World Cup team would have walked into Russia with a clean slate.

2. Bad results in qualifying never guarantee bad tournament results.

I think a tactical approach like the one used in Azteca would have been promising in Russia, and the team had enough center backs and midfielders to use it if they qualified. The major worries would have been (1) a tired Pulisic, (2) the inept state of the striker pool, and (3) whether Arena would have been bold enough to phase in younger players for the group listed above.

 

When Schweinsteiger and Podolski were called up for the German national team for the first time, they had shown next to nothing at club level before (if I remember correctly Schweinsteiger had a few sustitute appearences for Bayern while Podolski played half a season for Cologne)- and they weren`t considered world-class talents. At that time German football was in a mess as far as the quality of homegrown players was concerned. Hence, Klinsmann and his predecessor Völler decided to call up inexperienced young players instead of mediocre established players. They also called up players like Robert Huth and Moritz Voltz from Chelsea and Arsenal academy with zero first team experience at that time. Most of these inexperienced players were found not good enough for the national team, but some like Schweinsteiger and Podolski stayed.

Schweinsteiger had his breakthrough season at club level in 2010 (7 years after his first call up for the German national team), Podolski will always be remembered for his time at the German national team rather than his exploits at club level.

I think Klinsmann tried the same approach with the USMNT. So far, Pulisic has shown far more quality than Schweinsteiger and Podolski at the same age.

 

I do wonder if Bruce was full of it about going youth on his backline and other areas heading into the cup if the roof hadn't caved in. Random quotes do seem to suggest that multiple coaches seemed to get there was a problem with some of the vet core and it wasn't sustainable, but that makes me wonder all the more why they didn't just jettison it then going into the final 4 qualifiers.

If we went young at the cup, I think we get a result, possibly 4 points if we're lucky w/the group we land in If we went with the same old dogs in the Cup, I think we maybe get a result if we get one of the really awful teams (Japan just lost 2-0 in a tune up at home, Russia just lost to Austria at home, a lot of the teams at this cup are going to be god awful, excluding the Euro squads).

So I think we may be overreacting when we say we would have fallen flat. It really depends on where we would have landed.

To my mind:

Europe left two of its top 10 or 12 sides at home.

Africa left three of its top 6 sides at home.

South America left 1 or 2 of its top 6 sides at home.

We got Tunisia and Morocco in part because CAF grouped three of it's four 2014 qualifiers in the same group (along with a recent Cup of Nations champion) insuring that a max of only 3 of 5 qualifiers would be the same as in '14, additionally Ghana fell to Egypt in a match of two of the continents best six sides, and Burkina Faso failed to qualify almost entirely because of a bad 15 minutes at home against Tunisia (leading 2-0, they gave up two goals late, and that proved the difference).


To my mind we didn't get close to best out of Africa, Concacaf, South America or Europe, which created a situation in which there's one group featuring teams that almost certainly would have lost a home and home playoff with say, Italy, the Netherlands, Chile, and maybe even some of the CAF teams at home and a pile of groups with at least one, and sometimes multiple whipping dogs that are going to get curb stomped making the move to 48 look all the more idiotic in a months time.

So if we switch out with Panama, we get England, Belgium, Tunisia, in such a group I think we get crushed by Belgium again, I think England's on the rise, but they always seem to play poorly in cups, and then you have a weak side in Tunisia we likely could have at least drawn and possibly beaten.

Switch us out with Mexico or Costa Rica and the sledding might be a bit more tough. I don't think we were making the Round of 16 unless we landed in a group with Russia, with C, D, and H being the only other groups where we also had a chance, plus although I would have preferred we made it, the shock to the system of the fed was needed. The problem as everyone knows is that they have failed to respond to it properly. The attempts at serious fixes has not been seriously taken to this point. But perhaps they will over time. One can only hope.

 

Though we won the Gold Cup, it's not as if we played particularly well.

 

I have no reason to disbelieve him. It was not just Tim who said this, Bruce also says 'something changed.'

However, it keeps the logic of this team: we rid ourselves of the problems. they were the problem. not us. we didnt qualify for the world cup.Nothing needs to change. they were the problem.

 

I have had access at a youth player level in Germany and Japan over the last decade. In Germany the players, even at 10 or 11, were sophisticated, quick thinking and incredibly physical. The game was fast and athletic.

In Japan, at the same ages, the kids are so well drilled in footwork, passing and constant movement off the ball that the matches were genuinely entertaining. However, they were not nearly as physical.

In both these systems one thing stood out: they were never at a loss of knowing what to do next. They never wavered from their purpose. The ball always moves in rhythm and almost always goes vertical. In other words, the direction never wavers on the pitch. That is a characteristic that needs to start from the very top of our organization and flow down to the pitch.

 

I don't think you can include cobi in the list of players not ready for international play. Maybe when he first started, yes, but he improved and played quite well, as well as being a very fast winger...something which we are sorely in need of now.

 

The sourcing in this article is disappointingly vague in key places. E.g.:

I get that guys will sometimes only give the real story if you leave their name out of it, but this doesn't even tell us whether the sources of those quotes were players.

 

Boss: Yo Jeff! you have your sources for the story?
Jeff: Yes sir!
Boss: You have the captain? starting forward? defenders?
Jeff: No sir!
Boss: good, how about the coach sourced just for this article?
Jeff: No sir!
Boss: good, you have quotes from previous players? Quotes from previous coaches?
Jeff: Not exactly sir! I have anonymous sources.
Boss: great! You are making those anonymous sources the focal point of your story?
Jeff: of course sir!
Boss: Good work. At no point do you say anything on how MLS ruined the cycle?
Jeff: Never sir!
Boss: Lights out Jeff. You're our go to soccer man.