The Coming ‘Golden Generation’ Will Not Accomplish What the 2002 Team Accomplished

IIRC, JJ made several WC group stage best XI in 2014 and along with Dempsey and Howard made the 2014 FIFA WC best 50 players list.

 

Reyna played in both Germany and England and I could have seen him in Italy. There were definitely guys of that ability who didn’t play in those leagues due to either choice or health: O’Brien, Mathis, Donovan. Those were the others who may have been able to do this health and desire permitting.

The one thing that people tend to overlook when we’re comparing who was playing in big leagues over time is that the quality of those leagues today is much higher. A late 90s mid table Big 4 team was not nearly the destination in the 90s or even 00s that it is today. Teams of that caliber are much, much less reliant on their domestic pools and poach globally much, much more efficiently and with greater frequency today. Ignoring fitness, technical and tactical enhancements and merely looking at where players rate globally within their respective eras: a solid majority of the Big 4 clubs today have assembled the level of talent required to play in one of the three European competitions 25 years ago.

 

And kids, get off of my lawn!

 

A lot to unpack here:

1) part of the team spirit associated with the USMNT from 90-2002 especially was derived from underdog status coupled with fewer paths available for players to get to the next level. Winning as a cohesive collective was really the best only (or at least best) way for those outside the US to take notice of the players. Thus “buy in” was probably easier. More talent/global acceptance is probably the cause of some of what you are seeing/perceiving rather than something that is merely coincidental.

2) our sides in that era were associated with an incredibly high work rate and fitness standard. Organization/cohesion was strong too. The game has changed. Fitness standards, ground covered, work rate have gone up everywhere. Tactics and organization have also improved. So it becomes impossible to appreciably “out work” or “out organize” an opponent. At least to the extent that it is casually perceptible. 7-8 guys doing the dirty work via conceding miles of possession but staying organized would get picked apart by attackers today. If everyone is doing it, it is no longer a hallmark of the USMNT. It is easier for sides to rise to the fitness/organization challenge than it is for sides to rise to the player development/technical ability challenge. So our area of advantage has evaporated while we continue to make up ground on the player development/technical side.

3) culture/team identity. Has American culture changed in the last 20 years? Yeah. Do we have a clear understanding of how changes in American culture have influenced the team? Not really. We get little media drips here and there. But we don’t really know. We aren’t in the dressing room or the team bus and we aren’t attending practice. And we probably won’t have a better idea until many years down the road (ex: Regis entering the squad and the impact, why Harkes was excluded, etc in earlier years).

4) the idea that culture has degraded is very much open to debate. The idea that different groups have a far different take today on what that culture should be or how to best represent it compared to 20 years ago is objectively true. Polarization. More of an evolving global culture vs more of a nostalgic traditional culture with clear definitions of what it means to be X. This rift was widening well before the last 20 years. 9/11 put a brief moratorium on it in the US. But this is not unique to the US at all. Italy. Hungary. The UK/England. France. Poland. Brazil. Spain. All notable global examples of this among fairly well off democracies. Japan reckoning with population loss and what it means to be Japanese. Some people believe culture is changing too quickly or it has abandoned its principles. Some people feel it is not changing quickly enough to adapt to reality or that going back would abandon the true principles. How much does any of this influence things like national soccer teams? Nobody really knows. Have things like social media and the globalization of marketing influenced athletes? Definitely. Is it good or bad? It’s probably mixed but the extent to which it is a net positive or negative is debatable. And culture is always evolving. Honus Wagner’s MLB is not Babe Ruth’s is not Ted Williams’ is not Willie Mays’ is not Mike Schmidt’s is not Ken Griffey’s is not Albert Pujols’ is not Mike Trout’s.

Things don’t occur in a vacuum. Someone can abhor real or perceived changes in “national/entertainment/athletic culture” but many of the improvements (better access to global leagues, dual national players, MLS quality improvements, more domestic fans of the global game, different marketing channels) can be attributed to those cultural changes. You don’t get player improvement to the degree we have seen without those cultural changes. If we want to see what cultural stagnation looks like in sport, look no further than China and North Korea in women’s soccer.

 

Excellent analysis. I really wonder if USA athletes are capable of those types of heroic performances anymore. There are many great examples from the Olympics, the 1980 hockey miracle on ice being the most famous, but even more recent examples in other sports. I remember watching the Olympics on Brazilian TV in 2008 and other years when the USA volleyball teams beat heavily favored teams, including Brazil, to win gold medals. And the Brazilian commentators said things like “when the Americans put on that USA uniform they are like supermen, capable of superhuman performances.” They seemed envious. Are those days gone?

 

They might be, but not because US athletes aren't capable of heroic performances. It's more that everyone else's fitness and work rate have improved, so differences in work rate are now marginal rather than decisive. In soccer, the same fitness levels that were considered extraordinary in 1994 are now typical for top-50 national teams.

 

When I go back and watch many of the matches where the US performed admirably against “bigger teams”, the work rate disparity was significant. Not from the perspective of how much the US was working but rather how slow and deliberate the bigger teams were. I’m thinking of the Copa win w Keller in goal, Brazil 94, Portugal and Germany 2002, Italy 2006.


2002 was probably the beginning of the end of significant work rate disparities. No team pressed and worked more than South Korea that year. Two things changed between then and 2014. First, fitness came up a lot across the board. Second, the technical qualities of players—especially non-attackers—improved too. The intensity of the pressure S Korea deployed would be punished severely today. Teams are too good at recognizing and playing out of that sort of throw the kitchen sink at them pressure.

The better teams don’t necessarily need to be as fit as the high work rate teams. Fit enough to keep up, run them into the ground and to use the benefits of HIIT to kill teams with bursts of speed. HIIT + tactics forces less talented high work rate teams to dial down the aggression slightly.

Thats what stood out to me watching things evolve from 2006, 2010, 2014. A lot more guys capable of much quicker runs deep into matches at higher top end speeds, fewer and fewer teams where guys were really struggling for air toward the end. More of a premium on outside back movement, but unlike prior eras those guys don’t have miles of space in front of them when they do come forward. Keepers playing more of an active support role to reduce distances with better distribution. Fewer outright target men up top, so teams must move up the field in unison closing space as they move. A lot more physical strength on the field so guys aren’t getting knocked off the ball in the 70th. Much better counter movements. These things require greater team work rates but they also penalize a team trying to suffer to a result being too much of an outlier.

Data analytics + fitness have reduced a lot of the variation in styles/approaches in most sports. In some ways that makes things more boring, but I can’t blame teams for conforming if different approaches would be punished on the field.

 

In more recent times, I think of the US women's team cross-country skiing gold a few years ago in the Olympics. It still happens quite a bit because we support so many sports.

Soccer-wise, I think one of the reasons why we don't see as much concrete results-driven progress forward is that we overperformed several times over the years because:

• Easy qualification. Tournaments are small sample size theater and just being in one every time means the chance for an outlier run. And not just ones based on hot runs by players -- when you look into things like 2002 (getting Mexico) or the Confed Cup (Look at our group stage performance and tell me we were the second best team) -- for these sort of well timed results, you need to be there.
  
• Higher work rate. People have touched on this but we were in shape when everyone else wasn't. That changed in the 2000s and into the 2010s.
• Elite goalkeepers. A hot keeper changes the game. With mediocre keepers do we make any of these runs? We played well in the group stage in 2014, for example, but do we feel differently if we lose 4-0 to Belgium?
  
• Consolidated player base early on. There was a period where our players got more time together as a senior team and also as a youth team. That has largely ended as well.

Our player base is now becoming like everyone else's. I hope we don't lose the hard-working American DNA, but you can see it slipping a bit with some players.

 

Are we still beating this dead-horse of a thread?

 

I was just thinking about this. It's amazing that the standard for non-attackers has changed so quickly. I remember some Manchester United fans remarking on how good Tim Howard was with the ball at his feet when he first moved there. Howard's foot skills were very ordinary for top-tier goalkeepers by the time he retired.

 

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ArcticGoodnaturedChameleon-max-1mb.gif

Edit - Well that sux. Supposed to show pictures since we can't read.

 

At least it's moved from pure delusion to 'member berry territory.