Argentina have 10 center backs who have at least 180 minutes of starts in the Top-5. We currently have 2. Our overall pool looks like-- Ream EPB Trusty McKenzie Richards CCV Robinson Campbell Atencio--hopefully, Seattle move him there. Not a huge group, though there are also a few USL wonders who may break through. Ream obviously won't be there in 2026. 3 in the Top-5 by then would not be a bad number.
Less talented (than the starters) veterans are what most of the teams in our peer group and 100% of the lesser teams were playing. It’s not reasonable to think you can’t sub if the sub isn’t as good as the starter in ideal conditions. The real question is does the sub improve or maintain the performance of an exhausted starter? I don’t think a fresh Scally is worse than Jedi, when he’s so tired he can’t trap a ball or that A barely running Musah is better than a fresh De La Torre.
And unlike at forward/amid we don't even have a large pool of accomplished, prime-age CBs at the next rung down--players we would expect to push for caps.
When you say solid, I take that to mean in line with other BuLi wide attackers who play for top table clubs and play very little defense? Example Sane, Musiala, Coman, Gnabry. Players like Brandt, Rues, and Hazard on BVB are known for giving better defensive efforts. There is also a disconnect between where Gio actually plays for Dortmund (wide attacker), and where many are thinking he plays for Dortmund as a CAM. https://www.transfermarkt.us/giovanni-reyna/leistungsdaten/spieler/504215
If you're a proponent of MMA you must ask, what is the pinnacle of using them? It's obviously the WC as we just saw, a tournament setting with games every few days. So next you must ask, can you play them every match or do they need rotation. We just saw the answer to that too. Rotate or they have dead legs eventually. So then one must ask, do we have anything approaching a like for like replacement in the current 4-3-3 for any of them. No. Not close. In which case the formation should be altered so MMA can rotate. At least Musah/McKennie. That's before accounting for other issues such as lack of creativity. I think ideally we use a setup which rotates MMA in the XI and uses a creative mid. And GC, NL, Copa, friendlies, home, away, whatever, employ a creative mid as a constant this entire cycle as it's all prep for the WC to an extent. We need a creative mid to be a mainstay in our setup going forward. That would be part of our evolution. And if the next coach insists on MMA there's still ways to do it with a creative mid in front. But a defensive 4-3-3 lacking any central threat or creativity isn't really positive evolution. Not when it largely just ends up in inaccurate crosses against set defenses.
We need to have a high hit rate at CB. It will be interesting to see if Robinson and Zimmerman stay in MLS. I think both could be successful in a Top 5 league.
I am a proponent of MMA from the very early days of the best XI thread. In the current pool Aaronson and Acosta are the clear backups with players like Williamson and Dotson having the potential to step up in the next 2 years. Many international pundits after WC2022 agreed that MMA were one of the best midfields at the tournament. If we are playing MMA it has to be a Liverpool-style setup with a clear, flexible, interchangeable, attacking spear {Pulisic, Weah, Reyna}. Berhalter did not ever implement any such scheme and repeated wild crosses into the box is not the answer. McKennie and Musah will have to improve on making chip passes over the top and short diagonals to improve the offensive efficiency against packed in defenses. We also need to work in training camp on sets that deploy both fullbacks high with repositioning of the forward line to to stretch and confuse the opponent like the sequence below:
FANTASTIC post. this is everything that is needed. and i want to reiterate 1 and 5, and how important it is to have players that can/are, scoring regularly. consistently, and just more than they currently are. if you cant score goals, u cant win the important games. we could go alternate route, and defend and posses. but, i never hear anyone talk this way. cause, its boring. and u still need to score at least 1 to win
Looking at this on a position-by-position basis, forward and CB is where we fall most short of elite teams. IndividualEleven's posts on Argentina help to clarify this. We can be a bit unlucky at other positions in terms of young players developing. We need luck at forward and CB in terms of player development over the next few years. Interestingly forward and CB are two positions where the development curve is a bit different and late bloomers more prevalent. Maybe we find a Tim Ream or two in the next cycle. I'll settle for one. It occurs to me in particular that Walker Zimmerman will be 33 in 2026. Not too old for a CB.
Of all the things on the gomichigan list, I am most optimistic about the ones involving the pool of under 20s, if only because of the numbers. When talking about youngsters I am very dubious of experts who say “I have seen all the [INSERT BIRTH YEAR]s and none are elite.” I expect we will have superior depth in 2026 if only for that reason. The thing that worries me most is our dependence on Adams — both the lack of depth and the lone 6 tactics. We have been lucky not to have been handicapped by something worse than his exhaustion (Netherlands). He will be 28 next WC and he is not actually superhuman. I hope we find ways to lighten his defensive load. Leaving him out there vs counters with only two mediocre CBs against world class competition isn’t a winning strategy. I agree with the general notion that moving toward top 5 leagues is the way for individual players to improve, generally speaking. Wish MRob could do that. To my eye Jedi looks to be still on an upward trajectory. Lots of people like Tolkien, who hasn’t impressed me when I see him, so I assume I am not seeing a representative sample. Vines so far seems suspect defensively. He was pushed way up field in order to be relieved of his defensive responsibilities in Sept vs Japan. The only left footed youngster that regularly impresses me is Gomez, but he may not be ours at all. On the right I hope the new coach will lose Yedlin and Cannon and Moore and bring Reynolds and Scally in. Reynolds still has a very high upside despite his club travails. If the Fed commits to Gregg through 2026 Scally might as well try to switch to the 6 or CB. His club coaches like his disruptive ball hawking and ability to stick in without fouling. But he will never be Gregg’s very narrow conception of what a FB is — which is all about raw speed and crossing, and places very little weight on on the ball defense. I think we could develop depth better with more logical roster decisions. Calling in new or substitute player X and barely (or not) playing him, and the doing the same with player Y in the next window, is no way to build depth. Gregg’s roster decisions throughout qualifying hurt the team. They were illogical and unexplainable (least of all by the nonsensical explanations he offered). As this large number of U20 players move forward in their careers, I hope they get legit opportunities to show what they can do, mixed into some part of the first team, rather than token “See, he struggled for 45 min vs Uruguay” opportunities. Lastly, I am optimistic about the strikers because I think their failures to date are about how they are used. If the only way we can attack through the middle is by dropping one of the front three (Pulisic) back to receive the ball and carry it forward, then that is easier to defend than if we had a creative passer at attacking mid. If both Weah and Pulisic are making credible runs and drawing defenders, the CF would get many more good opportunities. As for crosses from wide, Sarge got his head on one or two before getting hurt. We left our best heading CF at home. I think all will do much better in a system that knows how to use them. And I would like to see Vasquez move to Europe and get seriously into the mix. He looks like he has size, speed and skills. [/ramble]
I agree, I just dont see our current crop of McKenzie, EPB, Richards repeating the elite performance of Zim and Ream and Turner(edit: I should add CCV in there, who played some) which was up there with teams like Brazil, Croatia et al in terms of GA. I hope I'm wrong and I'm praying Trusty comes good because we don't have another left footer serviceable (I'm excluding the jobless Brooks).
I don't think that's actually fair. He played Ream at left back as a hybrid LB/LCB who would slide over the right back hybrid would slide into a dmid spot. Everyone clamored for Robinson and to move Adams to dmid only. He did. Now he only plays attacking backs I guess. I feel like he would play Scally as longs he keeps progressing and doesn't regress or get injured but he was already playing the second youngest lineup and a barely 20 year old and perhaps though going even younger and playin his other 19/20 year olds (that virtually no on else brought) wasn't a good idea. "If" he's back I could see Scally as a choice when it's a more defensive set up or even as a RCB in a three back set battling with Cannon. I am hoping they find someone with more skins on the wall so GB doesn't get a second cycle but if he did I don't think he'd stand pat.
This the old disagreement over whether the fact that he eventually I sees what everyone else saw long before is a plus or a minus. To me it’s a minus. But he gave a lot of minutes to players he decided to leave home at the last minute. And if you found his other squad explanations persuasive, we just disagree on that too.
I don't take defensive numbers very seriously, to be honest -- they're all about counting activity. That's pretty reasonable for offensive plays -- if you're getting good shots, or passing the ball successfully forward, generally you're doing good -- but has many more conceptual problems defensively. Never confuse activity with achievement, etc. Virgil van Dijk has some of the fewest defensive stats of any player I've seen.
I was certainly puzzled by some of his choices and coaches often get locked in and make the wrong ones. It is easier to say they're the wrong one if they didn't work but that doesn't necessarily mean other choices would have worked any better. it would be cool if there was a way to run everything through a simulator / time machine to see what works the best but then if that was possible every coach would have that ability. I'd like to see a coach chosen that can get that final missing piece of better chances and goals without sacrificing defense chosen. Is that coach out there and do they want to coach the US?
One area of opportunity that is developing is some depth in our pool of wide attacking players. I've been more bullish than most on Paredes, Tillman and Cowell and all three have to one extent or another been giving signs of taking a step or two forward. It is an area of opportunity but also a challenge. The challenge being how to leverage the depth at the wide attacking position to shore up a couple other positions we are less deep: center forward and midfield. Of our wide attacking players, I think Reyna and Tillman have the most potential at other positions or in other roles. I'm not saying other positions are their best position. But their flexibility helps our roster play longer and gives us a chance to alter tactics on a situational basis.
Alternatively, going into the WC would anyone have predicted the quality of Zim and Ream and Turner and the GA they put up? Of course not. That's why I think it's limiting to hold up a WC performance as something that can or can't be repeated. Each WC is its own, self contained tournament and across 3-4 games, good players can play poorly or poor players can play greatly. I'll look at it another way - we have a lot of youngish CBs playing in good leagues and the way it's looking, in 2026 there is a good chance 1 or 2 of them are pretty good players in the top leagues. Going into a WC, that's more than we could have said about Zim (not Ream, but let's be real a 35 year old CB have a career year in the EPL is not going to be repeated, so we might as well forget about it moving forward)
This is true, and I feel like I've frequently made some version of the same point. The World Cup is the be-all, end-all of national team soccer aspirations, and that tends to give it outsized importance in how we evaluate the team. But any individual World Cup is not a reliable benchmark of the team's overall quality. The same is true if we substitute "player" or "coach" for "team." Imagine if Acosta hadn't been close enough to Bale to foul him before he tried to lob the keeper from midfield. The most likely outcome in that case is that the 2022 World Cup goes down in MNT history as an embarrassing failure, and Turner is the goat. There can be huge variation in results from one very tiny change in circumstances (a reality somewhat captured by the old Nike commercial where Wayne Rooney ends up living in a trailer park). Will our defense be at a higher level in 2026 than in 2022? I think that's very likely, barring severe injury problems. Will they be as successful, or more so, in keeping the ball out of our net during the group stage games? I think it's more likely than not, but that's much harder to predict.