Biggest Underachievers/Disappointments in USMNT history

I believe Conor Casey tore his ACL early in his career just after leading Bundesliga 2 in scoring and never got back to those heights.

 

What about personality conflicts? Feilhaber would, IMHO, have been an excellent international player, and did play quite a few games with good results. I think he did not play well with MB, as he was tried a few times and experiment not repeated. Then there was the coach problem. Such a shame as I think he could have been, and is, a great distributor of the ball.

As far as Maurice Edu, I think he had one bad international game and was never given much chance after that.

Agree about JOB and Brek Shea. JOB was injury prone. Brek Shea just could not put all of his physical assets together with a soccer brain. I had hopes for him last year and first part of this year to make a comeback...probably not going to happen.

 

Juan Agudelo is a guy i thought would make it for sure. All the pieces were there...size, speed, skill, soccer IQ. He tore it up at the youth levels, and looked fantastic when he was breaking into the league for the Red Bulls. Scored vs Argentina in 2011 and seemed destined for big things. Then it was a couple years of bouncing around Europe, and he's turned into a fairly underwhelming role player at New England. It seems like the desire and competitiveness faded away at some point. He's still only 25, so theoretically he could play himself back into the national team picture. But I think he's out of contract right now...if he decided to retire early like Brandon Vincent it wouldn't totally shock me (not that I'm suggesting that will happen).

 

He did share the MF with MB in World Cup 2010 in three matches coming off the bench at halftime to replace Findley. as such, I wouldn't say it was an experiment that never happened, just that club struggles got in his way at times. The one year Feilhaber got steady games at a level about Regionaliga was 2009-2010. The rest of the time he only recent spot play here and there in Europe. Afterward, I agree it seems that he and JK just could not get along. For better or worse, Feilhaber's times in Europe didn't really help his career, it works for some, not as much for others.

 

1. I don't really think of this as much as underachievements, but the dangers of fans buying into hype too early. Jovan Kirovski was that for me. He was a decent player that had a solid professional career and had a decent number of caps without appearing in a world Cup for the US. That said, I still remember the SI articles and other things. American wunderkind part of the incredible Manchester United bunker crop at age 16. He led the ManU reserves in scoring at a time they were producing tons of talent. He was a solid pro and I like Jovan, but those of us who followed the port then thought he was going to be a big star. I think it just goes to show the danger of putting too much stock in performances at youth levels.

 

This is a weird one. Sir Alex Furguson, a decent judge of talent, twice tried and failed to get a work permit for Jovan. He mentions this in one of his books. You forgot to mention that he then went to Dortmund where he didn’t play much.BUT he did score in a CL league game, possibly in the year when BVB won it all! He had a lot of talent.

 

All true, but I never saw him as a force for the national team: nor as go to player for his clubs in Europe or really even in early MLS... no.

He was at Dortmund for almost 4 years and played in a total fo 20 matches in teh Bundesliga (1 year on loan in Bundesliga 2).
He moved to Sporting in Portugal and played in 5 matches.
Wne to Crystal palace and then indeed did make it to the EPL playing a little under 600 minutes.

As I said, a solid professional, but not nearly what was expected by folks. if we would have had Big Soccer back then, there would have been a meltdown about clubs not playing him.

of course the soccer culture being what it was, it may have just been me and you chatting on an old Prodigy forum on this thing called the interweb .

 

Mathis has to be on the underachiever list.

Also, I always felt like injuries cut short Bobby Convey's career prematurely.

 

Every keeper since Howard.

 

I wouldn't call Guzan an underachiever. He went from basically being unknown in youth circles and from two years at South Carolina to being a starter in the EPL for several years.

 

Underachiever is too polite a word for Brek Shea, he is a f*ck-up.

For underachievers, I'd say Juan Agudelo, who looked incredible at age 17-18.

Holden and Davies, like JOB, were due to injuries, that's different from underachieving.

Nguyen, Feilhaber, and Kljestan were due to a coach in Klinsmann who talking about proactive attacking football and then tried to squeeze as many defensive midfielders into his rosters as possible. None of them were world beaters, but all were MLS MVP finalists, they would have been useful to have on USMNT rosters at times when they were performing well.

 

This is an NT thread,so I will say he disappointed as never being real competition for Howard.

 

And again not by his fault. All his career is one strange story. I might be wrong but I recall he was a star on Irvine Strikers team that won National Youth Championship, and after that he didn't get scholarship.

 

Mathis torn ACL twice. Healthy Mathis was our most talented player ever. US not anywhere close to Korea without him.

 

following the footsteps of UCLA walk-ons Jimmy Conrad and Cobi Jones .

here is a good article about Feilhaber's nomadic soccer youth. Basically his father constantly moved as an oil trader. Made it to California for high school. NCAA does not have the resources to do a lot of scouting. UCLA coach saw him in the aforementioned matches, but didn't have enough time to watch more so asked him to walk on. I am surprised he wasn't scouted mor given Irvine was a powerhouse and his coach was a former player who would have understood the college and professional scene.

https://www.teamusa.org/US-Soccer/Features/2009/November/18/Feilhaber-plays-Denmark-today?p=1

 

Was it that Feilhaber didn't play well with MB (I don't remember that being a major problem), or that Feilhaber and Beckerman didn't get along (anyone know the story behind this, aside from their tussle in a national team camp, the pre-season fight between RSL and SKC, and 2013 MLS Cup?), and Klinsmann picked the latter, which made Benny persona non grata with the national team even when he was doing really well?

 

JK and Benny did not get along.

Also Benny's overrated by many folks because he rarely played in the last 6 years and thus was not integral part to any the major failures. His game has some real flaws which is why he crashed out of Europe so hard.

 

He problems with prior coaches too...Not just JK.

I don't see Benny as an underachiever. He is a good/great MLS player who is inconsistent at the international level. Frankly, you could write that for a lot f USMNT players.

 

Depends on what the baseline expectations were. Like most of our young players in Europe, hopes and hype for him were sky-high back in 2007 or so.

He asserted himself with a booming gold cup goal against Mexico. And so then there were high hopes he'd succeed in Germany. He flunked there. Then he failed to get any playing time at Derby County, which was arguably the worst EPL team of all time.

He experienced success at the lower levels of Scandinavian and MLS, but I think there were definitely hopes he would have been higher level player for the national team, at least a consistent starter throughout his prime. He did not live up to those expectations.

 

I would add the following two disappointments to the list:

1. John Thorrington. Was on the books of Manchester United and Bayer Leverkusen and was gifted with world-class speed, but never panned out.

2. Santino Quaranta. I remember the coach of the U17 national team he was on saying that he and Eddie Johnson showed more talent than Donovan and Beasley did at the same age. Sadly, Quaranta can't hold a candle to the careers of Donovan and Beasley.

 

Didn't Quaranta have really bad drug abuse problems?

 

Pre-1994: Steve Snow
I don't speak from first hand knowledge, I simply write based upon an article I read several years ago and the statistics.
111 goals scored in high school in Illinois
49 consecutive high school games with a goal (remains a state record)
1988 High School Player of the year
1989: Leading Scorer in NCAA Tournament as a freshman
1989 U-20 World Cup Qualifying: Scored 5 goals in 7 appearances
1989 U-20 World Cup: Scored 3 goals in 6 games (team finished 4th in tourney)
1991: Leading scorer in the Pan-American Games
1992: Scored 10 goals in 10 qualifiers for the 1992 Olympics in Spain (including a hat trick on 3 shots vs Honduras, and a brace against Mexico)
1992: Scored twice in two appearances at the 1992 Olympics

Reading the story, you get the sense that Steve Snow was like a cross between Hope Solo and Clint Mathis, and those qualities lead to an incident almost identical to Hope Solo's understandable melt down with the media during the '07 World Cup when the coach inexplicably started a past it Scurry over her, in this case, Snow lost his ---- after Osiander decided to start Washington as a counterattacking element while parking the bus against Italy in the Olympic opener.

Basically that blow up, combined with a torn ACL conspired to destroy his career (along with his basic temperament).

The sense I get reading the story is that Snow probably would have been our top goal scorer of the pre-McBride era and might have been a crucial asset in 1998 in particular. It's funny to read the reports about the response to his melt down and see how much it has in common with Solo's melt down, and for me, the idiotic insular quality of the USMNT and to some extent the USWNT. While it's not acceptable, those kind of melt downs are understandable and they happen all the time in professional sports, but oddly, its our national teams that seem incapable of dealing with it in any way other than a "mean girls" "ostracize and penalize" approach. Strikes me as ridiculous. I just assume as adults, he can eat a punishment and the team can move on, but clearly the USWNT couldn't do that, and in Snow's case, it seemed a bit similar.

https://www.mlssoccer.com/post/2014...-snow-usmnt-world-cup-hero-who-never-was-word

Need to think about post 1994 examples for a bit before posting on that though immediately coming to mind are Ramos (head injury vs Brazil), Mathis and Wolff (knee injuries) they played after them, but we're never totally the same circa early 2000's, Freddy Adu which remains one of the more stunning fails to my mind (the talent was incredible but it just never came together reemphasizing how important work ethic, and mentality are), Michael Renken, Joseph Gyau etc.