Not just more, but better. They didn't just create half chances, they created clear chances where they moved the defense around which increases the chances of a guy going unmarked and they took advantage of our mistakes to get clear shots on goal. That is a massive difference to what we did with the ball.
Love my bullets... * Question.... how much progress has the US made - relative to other nations - since 1990? A lot, I'd reckon. However, I think that on a relative basis, other nations have also made progress. For example, I'd suggest that Spain produce much more potent and consistent teams than they did 30+ years ago. Why is that happening? My guess is that the growth / improvement of the player pools in Spain, France, England, etc. have mostly to do with the financial incentives of clubs to work with youth players. I don't think MLS has quite fully taken on that mantle. * Where we need to be... I saw some posts elsewhere pointing out how young many of our 2022 players will be in 2026. But I'd argue that if we're still thinking Tyler Adams is a guaranteed starter in summer 2026, something went wrong. More good players - it really is that simple. * The truth is that players make career decisions that often aren't aligned with what is best for the USMNT. Big paychecks can be had in Europe, but I'm not sure if the experiences of Pulisic, Dest, or McKennie with their respective clubs have been good for our national team. As an Atlanta United fan, I thought it was hilarious that Bello went to Germany. And Luca de la Torre seems to have made a very bad career move - at least in terms of getting on the field - in going to Celta. But what the hell can Berhalter (or someone else) do about that? * I think MLS is fine and may be the best league in the Americas, or soon will be. It's very understandable, for example, that a quality South American player would want to get paid in dollars while perhaps waiting for a move to Europe. But again the interests of MLS aren't fully aligned with the interests of the USMNT. * I really don't know where the position of USMNT manager fits into some of this grassroots stuff. That manager's job is to work the top 50 players into a coherent team and to make decisions on formation, lineup, etc. on game day, not to get into the details of what's going on with the St. Louis academy. As such, maybe offer the position to an older foreigner who might want a more relaxed pace? I could very well see Berhalter wanting to move on to a new challenge - the club game in Europe might be attractive. To pick a name, is West Brom too good for Gregg? Don't know.
If people think US Soccer in 2018 was a mess, 2022 USA Rugby is its own category of incompetence: They had three chances to qualify for Rugby's World Cup and choked in all 3 of them, culminating in the above match.
Go out and volunteer for some local soccer organization. Work hard, do stuff and you might be sent as a delegate.
I don't think you need full on super stars to compete, but you do need 1 to win. Don't think you'll find a single team that has won anything that didn't have a super star that put the team on their back. Last soccer team I can think that won something without a superstar was Greece and the Euros like 25 years ago. We have good players, and some who are very good, but not enough to make a deep run. What could we have done if we had double MMA or a 2nd left back at the level of Jedi? That won't get us winning the WC but there's only a handful who ever have and only 1 team will win this year and 4 years from now.
Japan took Croatia to penalties and South Korea is getting blown out by Brazil. It's sports, both results happen all the time.
Eh. Let's not go overboard. The goal on Dest was nice movement, and the build up to the first was very nice. But Tyler didn't get lost because of good movement, and the cross that Jedi failed to cover was not exactly a brilliant set of quick tactics to create space -- you can literally see Turner screaming at Jedi for like 5 seconds. It's not bang, bang here. Those were TERRIBLE defensive plays. If you defend properly, on each of those, it looks like when our offense plays -- hey, good idea, oh, the defense is there. They did do a good job of beating our pressure in midfield -- I was concerned about that. Honestly, when we would send the ball down the line and do the Man City cutback and Lletget would hit it in, no one was praising our tactics or movement. Very similar movement and play to the Dest goal -- it requires someone not properly marking the late runner. Incidentally, we stopped doing that runner in the World Cup and in some of the games leading up. I'm sure Berhalter did it to maintain defensive cover, but that's a tactical choice that I think should be questioned -- the McKennie run into the box was one of our better plans for a long time, and it was extremely rare. I wonder how much his fitness played a role?
That wasn't an insult to anybody. We ARE improving and by a lot. To some degree this is a generational thing. There are fans who've been around a long time, like myself. The pace of improvement we've had over the past 25 years is astonishing. In the first USMNT match I went to, we lost to Bermuda. Bermuda! So our attitude is IT'S HAPPENING! STAY ON TARGET! We are improving at a rapid pace already. Then there's a younger group of fans that hasn't seen the past 30 years. For them there's no pace that will be fast enough. They expect us to compete with France and Spain NOW. Here's my thing: Don't define the success of soccer in this country based on the results at the World Cup alone. Our soccer culture is night and day from where it was only 25 years ago. We ARE making drastic improvements.
This is the thing. Its damn near impossible for these second tier nations like the US, Japan, South Korea, Australia, etc. to break into the top 8. All of them invest tons of money. Many of them are doing all the things that people are saying "the USMNT must do." So don't define our progress as a soccer nation on simply the result at a World Cup. You'll always come away disappointed. We had a terrible 2018 cycle with the USMNT. HOWEVER, a lot of the youth development foundation that the USMNT is benefiting from now was set into place in that cycle. People watching youth teams didn't think we had a terrible 2018 cycle. They saw the talent on the way. The same is true now. The youth watchers just saw our U16s crush it at a tournament in Spain. Talent development isn't a 1 or 2 year project. It takes a long time to see the fruits of investment.
Sports are just bigger business now as you note. I'd also say that if we are going back to 1990, those countries had the resources in place to make a quick pivot. We had to build ours. As for MLS and USLC, we're at the point where there's about 5 academies operating at a decent level of experience of proven development. There's about 20-25 more that are in the early stages of caring and trying and we'll see a differing and lower level of success from them ... but those outputs, if they are any good, will just be arriving in 2026. And five or so that just still aren't trying. Which is about as good as we are going to get until USLC gets more financially viable or the market explodes. We should be starting from zero. Players regress or get hurt. Other players emerge. Roles and team needs change. It's hard to envision some of these guys NOT on the roster, but much of our talent is not super versatile, so it's actually likely that at least ONE of the envisioned core isn't a starter in 2026, note even counting positional redundancy. Nothing. The answer is volume. I actually hope that now that a core is starting to settle -- though not exactly in sync -- we can start to use the U20s, Olympics and other camps to build out a more robust set of options. No, but I don't think they are mis-aligned. You can argue that MLS should give more time to Americans ... but you do need some level of foreign play to keep the level of competition high. A lot of people seem to think MLS should be a kind of glorified academy league that then sells to Europe for the real development, but I think that ignores a lot of things. The ideal situation is that MLS establishes itself up there with the Eredivisies while maintaining rules that incentivize development without discouraging smart selling. It's all a very tough balance. Restrict too many foreign players and encourage selling of the best Americans, and the league never improves. Incentivize playing Americans too much and the teams will never sell. Make it too easy to get foreign talent or don't give enough incentive to player development and teams will stop. The coach is going to be the #1 PR rep for US Soccer. Even if Earnie wanted to do it, or McBride did, and they clearly don't... the coach is going to be the clear representative. To that end, they are always going to be the one sending the signals in terms of what a player needs to do to make a national team. Kids are going to listen. They are also going to be the most impactful closer in recruiting. It just is. I think Earnie and McBride -- the latter has never been a coach, right -- would prefer if the Coach took the lead on the general philosophy links across all the teams. And we know Berhalter had input to player selection and high level tactics. We could disassociate that, but I doubt Earnie will. He wants a program. The vision is that our U20 and U23 players slot relatively seamlessly into the national team.
I agree that we are improving. Night and day. We agree on that 110%. There are things to celebrate and there are things we need to work on. It’s not a dig to say, hey we can work on this and that to get to that next level. Moreover, we need to maintain a critical eye. Not to be negative for the sake of being negative. But to be better competitors. Therefore, it’s okay to look ahead and explore what’s going to give us that edge over our opponents. What nation isn’t doing that? What nation doesn’t want to improve? Those who seem to grow complacent seem to become the German and Italian federations. Two consecutive missed World Cups and two consecutive group stage exists. Even the best can fall behind if they’re not improving.
Their World Cup results are disappointing, but those nations don't judge their entire football culture on the result of the World Cup cycle. German club teams are doing great, headlined by Bayern. Which nations have the most clubs in the first knockout round of the Champions league? A quarter of the round of 16 clubs in the Champions league are Bundesliga clubs. Who won the 2021 UEFA U21 Championships? Hint: The answer is Germany What I'm trying to say is that there shouldn't be an over-reaction to a nation's World Cup finish. That doesn't tell the whole story. So when evaluating the USMNT: We're the Gold Cup Champions. Nations league Champions. Back-to-Back-to-Back U20 CONCACAF Champions. We've made Back-to-Back-to-Back U20 World Cup Quarterfinals. Qualified for the Olympics. An MLS team just won the CONCACAF Champions League. We have a steady stream of young players moving to top European leagues. We're on the right track. There are a lot of positives. There's a lot to indicate we are improving at a nice pace. And some aspects of required improvement just take time. If an alien came down to Earth and read Big Soccer they'd assume that the US program is a disaster ranked #108 in the World.
In the opening comment, I stated feeling “optimistic” about the program. Throughout, i have pointed to that I think we’re mostly on the right track. But even if you let me be the dictator in chief and I could influence every decision in US soccer and we just won the World Cup, I’m still going to say at the start of a new cycle, okay, what do we want to improve?
Yeah, you always want to improve but there's a huge difference between that and a lot of what is going on in this thread. How much sense does it make to determine the shape of the program based off 3-5 games played every 4 years and nothing else?
Cricket and rugby have the next two highest global audiences for sporting world cups after football, they are more global than any other sport not called football (or soccer if you prefer). In fact as a child I wondered why the US were so useless at sports, then I grew up and realised that all this 'were better than you because of our nationality' was something that Nazi's and children believed and had no basis in reality. Thinking that you are somehow 'superior' based on nothing but your country of birth is not going to win you World Cups, you're going to need a darn site more than American exceptionalism, that's all I'm saying, leave the 'if only our best athletes picked soccer' nonsense behind.
Everything I've seen has things like Ping Pong and Badmitton being bigger. Sorry, live by the massively populated nation, die by it. As for the rest of that ********ing rant, I wonder if when British National Hero Winston Churchill was forcing mass starvation in India, he was thinking that some British douchebag would reference people on a message board as Nazis and Eugenicists obsessed with a culturally centric view and not actually notice the irony of thinking the world revolved around Cricket and Rugby.
I'm not sure what Winston Churchill has to do with American football I'm sure, but if you think that Americans are 'genetically superior' and therefore are going to rule the world of football by just picking basketballers then you aren't going to get anywhere. Americans are no more or no less 'athletic' than anybody else, the next Maradonna doesn't have to come from Brazil because they don't have any more or any less ability at kicking round objects than anybody else. Perhaps that should be the first thing to bear in mind? https://www.rugbyworldcup.com/news/564996 https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/1346930
Geese, this is going sideways. I don't think Americans are exceptional. We just have the resources and time to put into sports that a lot of other countries and cultures don't have. Think it's a pretty simple rule the more money and time you have to put into anything the better you will be at it. Our women's sports teams (broadly speaking) are head and shoulders above most other's simply because Title IX was passed what, 30 or 40 years ago giving them equal access to college athletics. Women in other countries by and large did not, and still do not have the opportunities women here have. Pretty much since WW2 the US has been able to poor money and leisure time into athletics that other countries have not been able to. One hinderance I think we have that won't ever change is we do not have a national identity or system about how we play. We have cultural influences from all over the world due to our nation of immigrant status and 1) I think that is a good thing but 2) that's not going to change. We have kids and regions who love the Mexican, or Brazilian or English or Spanish way of playing. I think it's going to be incredibly hard to institute 1 way to play that is uniform across this country.
Who the hell said that? And now you've responded to multiple posts who have pointed out that we don't think that but are still parroting it. What does Winston Churchill have to do with this argument? Well, since you've decided to accuse everyone here of Nazism and genetic superiority, I thought I'd point out that Cricket is only so popular because of the violent and at times genocidal history of British colonialism. So great, there's a lot of cricket fans. You got it by subjugating a nation, oftentimes with unnecessary cruelty. Starving dead Indian babies and Cricket World Cup ratings are borne of the same legacy. Go England! And you wonder why people hate English fans around here.
But you don't, thats the point! What makes you think you have more 'time' or 'resources' than Germany, France or Argentina has? Women didn't play football seriously in Europe until the last 10 years or so, already they are now at the top of the tree along with the countries that have been playing womens football for decades! Ask yourself why are the New Zealanders so bloody good at Rugby but can't kick a football to save their lives? If you think its 'Genetics' or because they're genetically superior (or inferior depending on which way you look at it) then I'm telling you, you are wrong! Also there is no such thing as a German or English 'way' of playing football, football formations and tactics have changed and evolved over time within ALL countries, and they'll continue to do so.