Are you expecting Jesus Ferreira to score goals at the World Cup?

And just because he shouldn't have made the roster as a CF, doesn't mean he didn't have a case as a CAM/SS/utility guy when he's a 5'8" guy with good technique, motor, & high fb i.q.. Two uncharacteristically bad touches 6 weeks into his offseason and thrown into a start in the toughest match of the WC, ala when Gregg did it to Miles at Canada, doesn't change that. He still managed to have a lot of solid link-up in possession. A lot of scouts would watch that and see usefulness in another role and at another time.

And this is all not mention he was coming in off an MLS playoff performance where he choked. It's not like he was riding high and then just fell flat either.

So there are a lot of variables here. To throw the baby out with the bathwater would be short-sighted. He's not on my 2026 roster at the moment, but he's solidly in the mix, and could move up if he steps up, and others falter.

 

Forty five minutes at 21 against a very experienced, big backline in a knockout game at the World Cup. He wasn't good; he wasn't as bad as some say. It's certainly a reasonably tough ask, and certainly not worth writing anyone off.

 

Ferreira is young enough to improve and be part of future cycles.

However, this can be said of a lot of forwards. Pepi, Sargent, Pefok, Vazquez, Wright, Dike. They could all be around for two more cycles. If Balogun decides to play for us that makes the picture more crowded.

I think Sargent and Pepi start with the inside track to get most of the playing time over the next cycle. But none of the others, including Ferreira, should be discounted.

As some others have noted, Ferreira has some positional versatility. But I think it will probably be harder to get PT at those other positions.

 

I wrote him off for 2022 because I don’t think he was good enough to contribute anything.
But I don’t write him off for 2026, because there is 3 years ahead, he can develop.

 

Scuffed Greg had been very critical of Jesus and did a whole tear down of his game as a striker long before the cup. There's enough stuff to criticize in the world without making strawmen.

The way people talk about that Dutch game is like they've never seen a soccer match before. Wow, a guy who hadn't played a game in months had a couple of rough touches. Reyna came into the game and was arguably worse before moving to the wing but nobody talks about that.

 

No offense but this is 100% bollocks. Belz is the guy you're thinking of, not Greg. Greg spent the bulk of '21 and especially '22 boosting the hell out of Ferreira's game, and soft peddling the terrible finishing, like epic horrible finishing by brandishing the xG facts against Belz and his eye test intuitions that Ferreira stunk as a finisher for the USMNT team (which he did). Velasquez boosted him nonstop in '22, and was basically the "in contradistinction to Belz's take, here's Velasquez bringing the xG mathematical reality" etc.

In no way shape or form did he shred him pre cup. None, like might he have owned some frailties in his game (size, aerial game), I don't know? Maybe? Though i can't recall it, but anyone anywhere who listened to Scuffed last year knows two things:

#1: Greg thought Ferreira had the highest upside of the strikers we were using, and brought the most to the team.

#2 Soft pedaled his issues consistently with math, but not eye test analysis of what he saw (in comparison to say, the way he'd criticize Steffen's keeping against Jamaica on the road with an eye test review of Steffen's poor technique on Antonio's wonder goal).

Heck I even thought he was overly kind to him in his review of his performance agaisnt the Netherlands which was a catastrophe, with far more than 1-1.5 bad giveaways (the guy could barely hold onto the ball, period). Saying "he wasn't particularly "good" is a weird euphemism for "worst attacking player on the field the entire WC, and one of the worst performances by an attacking player on the field since Wright was savaged for his performance in a monsoon (where Wright was invisible but wasn't actively gifting the opponents' chances like Ferreira was all night)" and kind of gives away the fact that Greg couldn't call it honestly, even after that horror show of a performance.

Now in fairness:
#1: It aint fair to Ferreira to judge him entirely on that game, which was the worst performance I've ever seen from him, even worse than the catastrophe's I watched in Olympic Qualifying in March '21. Ferreira is not that bad in any universe, he was on the day, but one figures the most reasonable explanation is that he was out of form due to not having played a club game in 2 months, and then having not touched a ball for a second at the World Cup, he was then asked to touch it in the Round of 16 against the Dutch. Pretty intense, not a great situation at all, I wish wed given him some late minutes against Wales or Iran w/their slow defenses to sharpen him up.

#2: Ferreira isn't an effective striker or really false 9. He's simply too small, too physically weak, and provides nothing of quality in the aerial game to speak of. Better as a false 9, sure but best as a 10 or a wing forward, he makes no sense as a striker unless we're playing at home against some garbage Caribbean side, or against some Central American second tier side that can't get away w/the same physicality they can get away with at home. Other than that, he's got no business playing striker, full stop.

#3 I actually like Ferreira long term and think he's good. He's young, productive, very fast, bagged an absolute ton of goals and assists the last few years when healthy, he's got a future as a depth option for us, especially in off year Gold Cup's and in home matches against regional crap we face, but until he grows a great deal as a player he's not in the same universe of striker options like Pepi, Sargent, like Wright, like Dike like Pefok, like Tillman, like Reyna, like Weah etc. He's depth, and should not be played in a position where he simply isn't good enough as an international. Move him into the #10 and WF depth charts and go from there, at best, you can put him behind some guys for false 9, but I think that's a waste.

I'm very glad we have him in the pool, he's much better than probably 80% of the available tools we had in the attack in the '18 cycle (beyond Donovan, Dempsey, Pulisic, Altidore and maybe Wood) but he's not a striker, and he plays positions (other than 10) where we have far far better, more talented players available, especially at WF, so it's gonna be hard for him to break through for more minutes when we have a sane coach (and in fairness for Berhalter, the fact that Ferreira didn't earn a minute in the group stage suggests that Berhalter understood this going into the cup, and felt he had no other choice once the Netherland's game came around and he'd stupidly left Pepi at home, and Sargent had gone down due to injury).

 

I had forgotten that --- damn it lol. So mindlessly stupid. I wonder if other countries coverage includes such moronic drivel? Would Major Mexican papers have all those guys up there alongside Henry Martin, or Polish Papers rolling out Karol Swiderski? I don't know, but man, at the time that was as bad as it gets w/local homerism. Funny that even Berhalter didn't believe it for our own roster, let alone the whole tournament's various rosters.

 

I liked the second paragraph of the post I repped. Don’t care about podcasts. Genius.

 

And a zero rep for this one if you’re so intent on keeping score.

 

Because I'm not working that hard for internet points. I remember it happening after the Uruguay friendly. You look it up.

 

Someone needs to start a puppet account named Strawman for fun.

 

I personally think Ferreira will be fine. He's gonna come out on a tear in MLS this year. I expect Vazquez will too.

..................we didn't fail to advance in the World Cup solely because of Ferreira. I mean, with the way people talk about Jesus here........you'd think that he played 200 minutes at the World Cup.

He's been around forever, so people forget he's only 22.

Folks are adamant about Vazquez or somebody else. And I like Brandon too. Vazquez scored the same number of goals as Ferreira in the same league (18). Pepi scored FEWER goals than that the year before (13). Just saying.

I'm as big of a Pepi fan as anybody, but he had a tough calendar year. Then right before the event, he got on a little hot streak in Holland. But that doesn't negate the tough year.

Also, are we criticizing Berhalter for trying to give Ferreira confidence and boosting him publicly. This when Sargent was doing nothing, Dike was injured, Pepi wasn't playing, Zardes hadn't fallen out, etc.? I mean......................Berhalter did bring Haji Wright in from the wilderness. And Haji played more minutes at the World Cup than Ferreira did.

We talked for all of 2022 about how thin our forward options were. We had to be using somebody. NO forward in our pool consistently scored against good teams. None of them. So we went with some guys. No matter who we went with, it was going to be a problem. So now people are just pumping up the guys who Berhalter didn't use at all. We also have no idea how Vazquez will perform against good teams when the games matter.

 

BIG “I think this is funny, and only got 1 like so I’m mad” vibes

You mistake your “posts” that are never actually your own posts as facts and truth, but 95% of it is opinion and based solely on a skewed view. No you don’t get any reps, because nobody puts stock into what you post because it’s so nauseating at this point.

 

It was always going be a hidden banana peel for the coach. No matter who he chose they weren't going to much and then everyone could say he should have picked someone else. I mean I just watched Vasquez in the recent games and he looked ... a lot like the other forwards. Could be the system or it could be they all need seasoning or a combo of both. Am really hoping it was the system and a new coach comes in and unlocks the scoring but I just have this nagging feeling that if it happens we will start giving up a lot of stupid goals because we can't have nice things.

 

Josh Sargent hasn't scored for the USMNT in more than three frickin' years, and he played in all three of our group games (starting against Wales and Iran). And by the way, those goals were against Cuba in the Nations League. One can argue that Sargent has only scored one goal in his national team career against a good team. That was Peru 4.5 years ago.

All I'm saying is the forward problem goes way behind Ferreira. I totally get the criticism with Ferreira, but it can be extended to just about anybody in the forward pool. Pepi went 10 games in a row without scoring for the national team, so Berhalter started looking at other people there too. [The only teams Pepi scored against were CONCACAF teams that didn't qualify for the World Cup. Did nothing against the good CONCACAF teams. 0 goals and 0 assists.] The list goes on to other forwards.

Obviously, figuring out who can reliably be counted on to score against good teams is a primary task for the next USMNT coach. And of course the players that people don't see with the national team are always better than those that we do. So now the flavour of the month is Vazquez. Who I like. No reason not to like Vazquez or Ebobisse or anybody else. We should cast a wide net. I just find it comical that people are CERTAIN those two will be better than existing options. Cuz there's zero actual evidence for that.

 

I actually think he saw it and the easiest way to see this is that we spent basically July to October panicking that Ferreira had moved ahead of the goal-less Pepi, after the squad announcement and we realized that he had inexplicably not even included Pepi, the panic was more about, how many starts is he going to waste on Ferreira until he moves to Sargent? And then the cup started and Ferreira didn't play a single minute in the group stage.

Seems clear to me that either Berhalter feared 2 months out of action made him a lesser version of himself, or that Berhalter saw reality and viewed Sargent as more up to the task, especially considering the opponents.

Ferreira only played in the cup because Sargent got injured and Wright was at best, mediocre.

I think if you'd polled the board about how the group stage minutes would be allocated on November 19th, Ferreira would've had the bulk of the expected minutes. Instead, either Berhlater got sense, or Berhalter feared his sharpness wouldn't be up to task.

In terms of the rest of it, I agree w/you.

I'm just flummoxed that he left Pepi at home, that will literally NEVER make sense to me ever.

In terms of Ferreira, I do think he'll be fine, I just think his problem is really he isn't a striker, and is way down the depth chart at any other position he might play, so unless he blossoms abroad, theres not gonna be any evidence that he should be anything other than injury replacement depth for CM, and like the 8th wing forward and that's a wrap.