Exactly. Plus, whatever we think around here doesn't matter. Listen to Adams or Cannon or Pulisic or any of these players talk. They want to be the best, and they know the best are in the Champions League. They all want to play there. Guys in Europe already, talk the same way. They, mostly, don't think, "Denmark baby, I'm in Europe, at the top!" They see it as a step towards the top. The idea that better competition either breaks you or develops you is fundamental to every single thing humans try to accomplish. If Morris was still at Stanford, would he be this good? What is the problem along these lines for some people. Makes no sense. Improvement isn't instant either, duh. Can take years. Morris improved in MLS from when he was in Stanford, great. Would he have done so in the Bundesliga? Yes, or he would have moved back to MLS. Nobody said you can't improve at every step. But you can certainly plateau if you stay at a step. Weight training, piano playing, sports, business career, it is the same thing. What is the disconnect?
Bringing it back to the topic. Scuffed had an excellent podcast on the tactical shape of the February game and how that so much better fits our pool over what Gregg tried to do in most of 2019. But like all exercises, it leads the fundamental question: Do you play Yueill and drop Reyna or Morris or do you play Adams at the 6 and include them both? LIstening to Gregg, he is leaning towards having Yueill or Bradley on the field as a DLP. That puts Morris or Reyna on the bench. You can wiggle out of it and play one of those two at striker, which is not where they are excelling for their clubs, but then you are sitting Sargent or Jozy. Is it all worth it for Yueill? I don't see it. One thing the Scuffed guys don't consider is that Adams was probably going to play the 6 in March. Or maybe we were going to see Cardoso...
I think it'll play out slightly differently, but basically agree: The core of the team will hopefully all be in top leagues, which are all in Europe. The overall rising talent with mean more than just a few top league guys -- we will not longer have to pretend that Fabian Johnson is going to play to pump up the numbers. MLS will slowly become a much better developmental league and league as a whole, meaning that the American pool in it is significantly better. As a result, a few starters and most of the backups will likely continue to come from there, especially because of international travel -- there will be a bias for younger and closer domestic players for the back quarter of the roster for many windows. B teams will be heavily North America-based. I think people overestimate how often a Europe-based vet wants to travel to Columbus and Guatemala for a 7 day camp with no real shot at actual PT. Totally agree that players will either go to Europe right away or likely around 21-22 when they establish themselves, but we will also see more movement in the mid-20s for a short while until... In the longer run, MLS becomes closer to a Top 10 league than a Top 20 league, and more players stay home as salaries rise. The split then becomes more about how good our players really are as the closing gap makes staying in your home country more and more attractive. But I see that still being 10+ years off.
There's a substantial mythos around competition and the statement you are making in the context you are making it isn't really true. Competition can drive effort level and improvement. I'm not disagreeing. But there's a ton of real study, case studies and examples that cooperative activity can drive more innovation, more progress, more personal improvement than competitive activity. So much of WHY humans improve is often internal. The obsession with pitting people against each other and "sink of swim" being the preferred model of development/improvement is widely accepted but it's not particularly true. Not that it doesn't do some element of it, but it's not actually the best model in many or most cases. It's one of my general bigger issues here, but throw someone into the hardest competitive level and sink or swim is a terrible development plan.
In the long term? Of course not. Even a middle term projection of youth development doesn't have Yeuill starting in a healthy situation much past the next six months (which is another story altogether). In the short term? I can see the argument for continuity and some experience in some decisions going right into WCQ, especially in road games, etc. But I wouldn't make a blanket call. The only thing that interests me about Berhalter's current plan is that I could really see Adams and McKennie really being defensive dynamos together, at that place in the field. Against lesser opponents especially, it seems like that will be where more of the action is, and where they will be able to best amplify and take advantage of their defensive skills. And I would not be shocked to see a different set up against Mexico.
Can you give me an example? Can you give me an example? Duane Holmes is an example. He moved from a League One team to a mid-table Championship side and people were immediately calling for him to be on the NT ahead of MLS players, not based on performances but simply because he played in the Championship. While I accept that players should be pushing themselves at the highest level possible, just because Berhalter picks a MLS player ahead of a EFL player doesn't mean there's a conspiracy. And the constant calls to get young players with minimal experience into the NT are annoying. These players need time to develop. Pushing them too hard could backfire as I'm sure their club coaches are very aware. Hopefully Richards, Reyna et al will get regular starts in the near future and will feature prominently in the 2022 WC cycle. I'm sure GB hopes that too but it's his judgment call.
The method is to give each person something.E.g., he says he is 1)trying to get Nagbe back and that 2) he is designing a "dynamic" midfield 3) he will teach Nagbe to do new things........ It's a Tower of Babel trying to be all things to all people but interest in the USMNT was waning badly, per ticket sales pre Covid, and no doubt there is pressure on him to "do something!!!" His discourse changed when his brother was out at USSF, albeit that was a gradual process.
So how do you get better if you have no benchmark? Competition within a team does nothing but make those on the team push each other to be better.
Honduras go wide on the attack with wingers and go at cb's, avoiding the center. CR line up with 451 so you'll have Adams and McKennie covering 5 mids. Etc., etc. There's no magic pill Adams-McKennie combo that does anything to win games. It is a chimera.
.......originally developed as "liberalism" after Darwin, and expiring more or less with WallStreet bankers jumping out of 19th story windows in 1929.
There's a ton of evidence that cooperation within a team is much more effective than competition within a team. Competition can be motivation, but it's not the only one. And there's a LOT of drawbacks to intra-team competition. I'm not saying competition can't be effective, but people (and far more importantly outside of soccer) need to stop worshipping at the altar. People are motivated by a lot of different things, and combative motivation comes with issues. That's more a discussion of how you run your team -- I find it interesting that soccer is the only sport where people are OBSESSED with intra-team competition as opposed to inter-team competition. Other sports focus far more on winning games than winning starting spots as motivation (which is also competition). Inter-team competition is still very helpful; after all, it's the freaking point. But there's no real backup to say Jordan Morris would be a better player now if he had gone to harder competition; there are other things at play. Outside of sports, profit-driven competition tends to actually stunt meaningful innovation in a lot of ways as it focuses on short-term profit driven things. It's why we have the iphone, but not why we have computers. That technology was largely driven by cooperative efforts by non-profit motivated people in teams working at places like Bell Labs. Anyway, that's away from soccer.
So the 4-2-3-1 that everyone propounds here as the clear is also a chimera? Would you have significantly different formations based on opponent, then?
I theorize that the genesis is European influence and Europeans no doubt developed the idea of competition because they were dealing with very young (soccer) players coming to athletic clubs and getting on a professional path early on when athletes in USA, say, were going to school where there was a pecking order already in place through interaction at the scholastic level. The difference is that there was no social pressure to perform at the 'sports academies', relatively. Because it is European, ofc there's a good number of American soccer fanaticos who take it as gospel
The combination of Adams and McKennie in a 4231 is the chimera. McKennie was playing mainly as one of two dmids for Schalke to close out their 0 wins in 13 games streak. Adams needs a strong partner in a 2 man midfield as we saw at Rbulls NYwith Sean Davis and with Marsch in Leipzig they always had 3 cb's with Adams on the right and Konate just behind. Nagelsman has also had somebody watching over Adams as he was integrating him - Sabitzer had the task sometimes. This can all change over time but based on their play CURRENTLY the Adams-McKennie "dynamic" 4231 is a chimera, yes.
A benchmark is just a measurement, right. You don't need a benchmark to get better, you need a benchmark to prove that you've got better. Is Christian Pulisic a better player now he's at Chelsea? Is he a better player because he's at Chelsea? How do you quantify that? Did Gary Lineker get better after moving from Spurs to Barcelona at a time when La Liga was way better than the EPL? After scoring 36 goals in 77 appearances Johann Cruyff moved him to the right wing then dropped him to the bench. Attendances dropped below 10k in 2016 when Klinsmann was in charge. The only way to win them back is to perform well in competitive games. No it didn't.
Talking of Yeuill. I've never been excited about him, but the kid keeps on growing. For me he looks better than Moralez or Holmes already. He, probably, not gonna get to the Adams/Wes level, but who knows where his ceiling is. What if SJ cells him to BL next year? He becomes much better player the second he signs the contract? The same questions about Pomykal. Both should be automatic call ups.
Pretty obvious that we have some people on this thread that have never played competitive sports. They keep score for a reason.
I think the lack of competition for roster spots in the last cycle was instrumental in our failures. I think competition within sports is inherently and self evidently vital to the entire enterprise, the development of players, managers, etc and is ultimately the entire point of the endeavor. Regardless, here is Berhalter on tactics, that was tucked away on the round of interviews he did during the MLS; MLS is Back Tournament, tournament: https://ussoccerplayers.com/2020/07/the-near-future-of-the-usmnt-according-to-gregg-berhalter.html Berhalter on MLS tactics We know by now that the USMNT boss is very much a tactics guy. He's been meticulous and detailed about this aspect of the game both with the national team, something clear from his previous club jobs. That makes his answer to how he scouts these games interesting, if not surprising. "What I have been able to see, in all honesty, which is interesting, is how you can really build pressure on yourself by playing to the side of the field," Berhalter said. "You can easily get trapped on the side. It's so clear from my vantage point, because I see the ball going from the center to wide and then having no numbers there, and the opponent just squeezing to the side and the ball staying there. So that's been interesting to see, like, really, the awareness of what a pass to the sides can do to your group, and how to get out of it, how to make sure you have enough numbers there to support the ball, or if not, that you're ready to get the ball out of the side really quickly, you play it there to draw the opponent over and then you have to get it out of the side." This is one of those little glimpses of a coach's thinking that pundits might overlook without specific context to use it in. File it away for consideration in future USMNT matches, not to mention when watching MLS. I have no idea how this integrates with things like long diagonals, patterns of play, Pulisic playing more inside, etc. But its another data point we can over analyze.
Here is a nice piece on Klopp's philosophy. Klopp from my perspective is the anti-Berhalter “There was a very good piece in Die Zeit that said modern coaches like Thomas Tuchel are from the Guardiola and Van Gaal School of Coaching. What these modern coaches value above all else is control, ‘we have to be in control at all times and we have to have the ball’. “What Klopp likes is when things get out of control, because at that point it is all about emotion, about passion, and at that point it comes down to how much you want it. This is when Klopp’s teams are at their best. “Klopp creates the situation in the game where it is no longer about tactics, but about getting stuck in and making tackles, and Dortmund lost their heads among this Klopp whirlwind.” https://www.planetfootball.com/quic...rgen-klopps-philosophy-i-always-want-it-loud/
I just find the way he frames the entire enterprise (running the national team) frustrating. This not chess. You don’t have to have a particular set of pieces, each with some generic prescribed level of power. You may not have aany decent bishops, and instead may have three excellent rooks. Get out of your “how can I be brilliant” math head, Greg, and field the best team you can given what you have, then use the gigantic brain you think you have (and maybe you do) to do the best you can with that. FFS.