USA goalkeeper discussion thread - Episode IV: A New Hope

My old brain failed to translate "Brentord" to "Brentford" somehow the missing "f" just made it impossible for me to understand. I am usually pretty good at translating past the internet typos (I make enough of them myself) but, in this case, I simply failed. Thank you for putting me straight.

 

Never knew where Brentford was but looking at a map I see it's close to Fulham and Chelsea. So many London teams and neighborhoods. I sometimes think about if that happened here and what neighborhood team names would sound cool. Red Hook FC, Hollywood FC, Southside, Oak Cliff, Fishtown, Fifth Ward etc.

 

I think one of the biggest things lots of Europe has over us is the concentration of clubs in cities like London.

There are 17 clubs in London (I believe of those 7 in the EPL, 3 in the Championship, and 2 in League One). For a city that’s a bit larger than New York City. There are just way more development opportunities available and it’s much harder for a player to slip through the cracks.

Whereas we have such a big country that’s way less dense than Europe and where we don’t have any cities (and never will) with that concentration of professional teams.

 

We do have cities with lots of pro teams (see LA) but we do not have a concentration of just one major sport like London does. I do not really think our lack of soccer (real football but used here to solidly separate what the USA calls football and what the rest of the world calls it) cities with multiple soccer teams. ( again we do have at least 1 and I think 2 cities, maybe more, with 2 or more professional teams.
The problem we have is not the low number of soccer teams or the size of our country it is simple competition for fan dollars.

I even think the dilution of talent because of there being multiple choices for kids to choose is not much of a problem.
The problem is dilution of the fan base and that simply means it is harder to make a team successful.
I would like to see more professional soccer teams in the USA but the road blocks put in place by MLS and the USSF makes that very unlikely. But you never know.
It is very unlikely we will ever have cities with more than 3 (much less 7) pro soccer teams but there are already a number of cities with 3-4-5 pro sports teams but, mostly, only 1 of those is soccer.
We are competing with too many distractions to ever have even 4 pro soccer teams in one city.

I actually like what we have. I think there are too many pro soccer teams in many cities in Europe and we will, eventually, prove to be better off with the pro density we have, We will, eventually, catch up with Europe in the quality of soccer but it is not fast. There is no magic bullet to jump us past Europe but it will, baring major outside influences,

I do not like the fact we cannot move faster to catch up but Europe has a major advantage in that they have been at soccer a lot longer than we have.

One question I have for those of more knowledge than I: Has there ever been any sport that really competed with soccer in Europe? I know there are a few places where rugby is very popular but, in my rather extensive travels in Europe I never saw any location where Rugby was exalted above soccer.
Even in Scotland and Ireland I saw few locations where rugby appeared to outshine soccer. But I did not visit everywhere so I may have missed some locations.

 

I know what you mean but technically if you go down several levels even Dallas - Fort Worth has a lot of pro soccer teams. It's just that only FC Dallas is in division 1 and no really cares about levels below that. I don't even know all of them and I liver here. I'm sure other big metro areas ae similar with only NY and LA having two teams that we've all heard of.

 

Everyone is different. His path will be unique to him. I remember his film being excellent. He's one to watch for.

 

He's the kind of guy you watch tape of against kids of his age group at Dallas...................and he just totally dominated. He was so much bigger than them. I mean, he was like 6'5" as a 15 year old.

His size was absurd. Now, how that translates when he's playing against adult professionals will be interesting. He can stop anything in the air. [Imagine if he actually extended his arms in the picture below. How far above the other players he'd be in the air.] But does he have the agility at 6'6"+ to get down for the low stuff. And how does he play with the ball at his feet, which seems like a requirement these days. There seems to be a lot of debate about him out there. Asmir Begovic is 6'6", so there are guys out there of his size. We'll see how he develops. Definitely one to keep an eye on. But the likelihood is kinda disappears in the English reserve system for a couple of years. That's what happens to kids of this age that go to England.

 

I don't know. I'm not speaking from authority at all, but I'm curious if this is actually good. How helpful is it to be playing for a team that's ridiculous bad, and not performing remotely like below average to average or better sides typically do. Are you likely to develop bad habits based on getting shelled? Anxiety, stress, a sort of sporting ptsd, like the yips with Chuck Knoblach and golfers on putting?

On the one hand, he saw a gazillion shots, and had a gazillion high stress moments to play through to try and better himself in. On the other hand, how translatable is it to play for a 5th-12th percentile club in a mediocre league? Do you actually develop more bad habits than anything? More nervous tics? More stress based patterns that aren't helpful.

In some ways I can see the argument that you grow from this, but I can also see the argument that just being dumped into a ---- pile of an experience can help develop really bad habits, and stress related behaviors.

I'm not sure this was good for him, we'll have a much better idea 1 year, 2 years from now than right now.

 

Unfortunately I think there's a lot of evidence that he just hasn't been good for a long time and that was hidden by his Man City affiliation until he started screwing up for them too. During the Turner/Steffen debates of '21-'22 somebody, I forget who, made good points regarding how consistently worse, much worse, Steffen was in the key categories for keepers in MLS compared to Turner. I think there was a vividness bias piece at work because he had some spectacular saves, and an outsized success rate on penalties .

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I really think this reality was fundamentally a byproduct of how clubs came to be and formed over time. In England and it seems like Europe, it historically appears to be a goofy kind of bottom up things, where guys had clubs, loved the sport, and made a team (I was curious about Atalanta's cool badge, and their history is particularly interesting as is the fantastic origins of that badge), and then eventually a league evolved around local sporting interests. It feels very bottom up, everywhere, which would allow for more teams locally, and promotion and relegation and all that. That's not what happened with our bigest sports like Baseball, Pro Football (which was behind college football and slowly developed behind the popularity of college football with a top down approach with local outfits and ownership from the jump), hockey etc. Our sports often seemed to develop as much top down as bottom down, some interest in a sport blossoms, so leagues get organized in cities with owners taking up and financing the local team and from there you have a league....

It feels like Europe was more, a group of people playing together, and then they themselves organize it into a club, and then they pick up viewers and fans, as they play against other local and regional clubs. At least that's the sense I get. Very much community style bottom up, whereas ours was more businessman seeing an interest in the sport, and trying to make money off it from immediately organizing it.

I could be wrong, but that's the sense I get, our cultures just don't match enough to have made any of this possible, if we were going to have stuff like them, it had to have been built 115+ years ago in a fashion it simply wasn't and with soccer its like quadruply so because soccer was such a miserable, isolated, closed down sport here which was actively suppressed as being too European, too foreign etc.

 

When I coached I noticed that GKs coming from teams with poor defense were generally better than those coming from teams with good defense. In game repetition is one of the best ways for goalkeepers to learn how to read shots but, once they get on a good team, it can take a good amount of time before they are able to keep that good defense organized and make the correct coverage calls to help the defense.
That is the progression from poor teams to better teams involves turning a good shot stopper into a goalkeeper and that is not always possible. However goalkeepers from teams with poor defense can have bad habits that can be very hard to correct. If you expect your defenders to make mistakes it can be very hard to adjust to teams where mistakes are rare.

Goalkeepers are unique in a lot of ways particularly in the mental area.
The players they have the closest relationship to are strikers, particularly the players that are primarily the poacher type.
I used to tell players that i tended to play my "flakes" either all the way back and all the way forward. In fact I have had several 'keepers that were also strikers and very effective at that. Although I am sure they exist I have never had a really good keeper that was also a good defender or midfielder.

One other thing that 'keepers on poorer teams learn is recovery. That is they do not let giving up a goal cause further errors. That is good. I have seen to many 'keepers make a series of mistakes after giving up a goal even when the goal was not at all their fault.

That is the ability to not be impacted by the past but to still learn from it is a highly prized goalkeeper attribute.

 

There's also the fact that when Steffen broke out with the national team......................it was really in a dead zone.
2019 Gold Cup, which was our "A" team at the time had Steffen, Sean Johnson, and Tyler Miller. Tyler Miller!!!

Guzan was out, Horvath was in club purgatory, Turner hadn't broken out, and none of these guys like Callendar, Slonina, etc. existed yet.

For a couple of years there Steffen was the guy pegged to fill the void. Berhalter started the 2022 cycle with Steffen, but midway thru completely switched over to Turner.

I'll just say that as a youth watcher, Zack Steffen was the best young keeper I'd seen since Tim Howard. The raw tools were incredible. That earned him a move to the Bundesliga. People forget that when he came back to MLS, he was still in his early 20s. When he was MLS Goalkeeper of the year and Best in XI in 2018.........he was still only 23. Very young for a keeper. We didn't think of him as a finished product. He was younger than Callendar is now by 3 years. But then the injury problems started. He's never, ever been the same since the injury he had at Dusseldorf during the 2019/2020 season. Never. That also seemed to complete stunt his further growth.

Sometimes young keepers that have these amazing raw tools just don't develop. Bill Hamid is another. Folks of a certain age will remember that we all pegged Bill Hamid as a USMNT regular. Didn't happen.

 

I certainly bought the hype. I was blown away by him at the U20 in '15, and w/him having those vivid big moments in MLS, and those beautiful save clips on twitter I just bought the hype back then. Maybe it was the back stuff, makes as much sense as anything, but I still think the story would then be: he was basically pretty average to above average, and then he wasn't that from '20 forward, and it took Berhalter two years to accept that that guy who was pretty good '15-'19 was gone.

I do remember Hamid, DC United fan, and find it interesting how after we developed Meola, Friedel, Keller, Howard, that other guy whose name escapes me, Hanneman, Guzan from the late eighties through the early aughts we didn't really do anything at all for 15 years until Turner who was basically developed by himself and New England and College, and not at all in the more typical youth identified set up of earlier periods in our history.

I do think we're turning a corner now though, feels like we have 3-5 guys with elite potential, and since Howard, I've never been able to identify more than 1-2 in any small cycle period (like Johnson and Hamid 14 years ago). Right now theres Gaga, Brady, Kochen, that huge dude, and I think at least one other guy. Its much more promising and hard to imagine we won't get at least 2 national team goalies out of that pile that are worthy of the call ups.

 

Maybe.

There's a big step up from where Slonina is now..........................and where guys like Howard, Friedel, and Keller got to.

We're adding more and more and more guys into the hopper, and we'll see what happens. We're throwing some good numbers at it. These guys are prospects. Prospect being a latin word meaning "hasn't done squat yet."

None of what's happened with the keeper pool is really a surprise. We had a couple of U20 cycle in a row in the 2011, 2013, 2015 range that were really thin. We were just hoping one our two guys made it thru. Our hope was Steffen.

Like................2013 U20 World Cup squad was Cody Cropper, Kendall McIntosh, and Steffen. 2015 was Thomas Olsen, Jeff Caldwell, and Steffen. 2017 was Jonathan Klinsmann, JT Marcinkowski, and Brady Scott.

And we knew they were weak at the time. It's not like we were delusional.

We can easily withstand one bad cycle at any position. These are one coach's selection from a small sliver of the player pool in an age group. But when you stack a bunch of mediocre cycles in a row, you know there's a potential for a problem. So we saw it coming. We just were hoping, hoping, hoping that Steffen would turn out. And he turned just OK. I mean, he did win some games for us. 7th all time in USMNT keeper wins. Basically it's the big guns (Howard, Friedel, Keller, Meola, Guzan, Turner)..............and Steffen is next.

And if Turner hadn't appeared out of freakin' nowhere, we'd have been in trouble last cycle. Cuz Horvath wasn't playing. We'd have been starting Sean Johnson or somebody

 

I thing in Europe is you have the history and it’s also the case where soccer is far and away the number one sport (where that’s clearly not the case here and likely never will be). So we can’t replicate that and New York City is never going to have a dozen professional clubs.

But I do think broadly just the fact that we are way less dense as a country compared to Europe makes it harder from a developmental standpoint.

 

To me the big thing for me is that we have lots of young prospects now who are promising. And of course they won’t all hit, but having a larger number makes it much more likely that at least one or two will.

 

Actually Melia and Frei were excellent (if Frei switched already), and for me Steffen never been that great. Tim Howard is totally opposite to Steffen, he is an athletic freak. Zach always had slow reflexes, probably the worst among American keepers I've seen.
But hype was strong, so strong that he got Keeper of the Year somehow, and at that point for becoming the NT keeper Bradenton was a must. So neither Melia nor Frei had a chance. Turner, besides being good at the WC, totally changed the script: now Celentano, Kallender, Schulte, Freeze are considered despite of all Slonina's hype.

 

He became keeper for an obvious reason.
We turned the page at the keeper position, and so Berhalter started the young "goalkeeper of the year" in MLS. He could have started aging Melia or Frei, but that wasn't the point at all.

We could have gone to Stefan Frei at the time, who was already in his mid-30's. That wasn't the point.

This isn't rocket science.

We were hoping Steffen would grow into more. We were giving him opportunities as part of that process. He didn't develop like we wanted.

And when you look at Steffen's actual record for the national team, it aint' bad. Steffen was in the nets last cycle for more important WCQing wins than Turner. It was Steffen in the nets for our wins over Mexico and Costa Rica. It was Steffen in the nets for our road draw in Jamaica. It was Steffen in the nets for our clinching home win over Panama. It was Steffen in the nets for our road draw at the Azteca.

Its like ya know....................a guy like Slonina might not develop further. We all hope he does. But he might just be a guy who starts for bad teams in Belgium. We'll see.

 

Steffen’s record in qualifying was quite poor as a shot stopper. My recollection he was eirher the worst or close to it of all the CONCACAF goalies during the final round of qualifiers. Even though we had a good record when he did play.

 

I don’t quite remember when Frei became eligible, but the 2018 cycle was when Melia should have gotten a chance (when Howard and Guzan were clearly past their prime).

 

Frei was called into the 2017 January camp but had to withdraw due to injury. So I'm assuming he was eligible that year.

Edit: Oh I'm wrong. He was called into that camp, but just to practice. As of the Gold Cup later that summer he still didn't have his citizenship.

 

For ****'s sake people.

He was the Goalkeeper of the Year in MLS in 2018 as a 23 year old.
That earned him a move to Manchester effing City, who then loaned him out to the Bundesliga. Where he did play Dusseldorf's first 17 games until his patellar tendon injury. Then he reaggravated the injury before COVID hit. [He's never been the same. We can all name field players who had their careers altered due to knee injuries. I don't know why people think a goalkeeper would be different. But whatever.]

How many starters in the Bundesliga did we have this year? Zero? Most weeks we had zero keepers in top 5 leagues.

And yes, at the start of last cycle we didn't think he was the finished product. We knew there were holes in his game that he needed to work on. But we called him up to be part of that development process. We were investing time in him. It just didn't work out.

Just like players at other positions don't. Just like Matt Miazga didn't. Or Reggie Cannon didn't. Or Erik Palmer-Brown didn't. The list is endless. There's nothing different about goalkeepers in that regard.

Sometimes players just don't develop in the way we want.

 

pre-Olympics roster is also out. Looks like the odd man out this summer is Chris Brady.

http://www.americansoccernow.com/articles/analysis-mitrovic-names-25-to-final-pre-olympic-camp

GOALKEEPERS (2): Patrick Schulte (Columbus Crew; St. Charles, Mo.), Gaga Slonina (Chelsea/ENG; Addison, Ill.)

 

He could theoretically still go as an alternate which is functionally the same as being the 3rd keeper. If he’s released.

 

Yeah. Why would Chicago release him to be an alternate? Even if there is an injury, he'd still be a backup.

The USSF could take somebody out of season like Borto to be the alternate. Nice trip to Paris to train with the squad behind the scenes.

I'd rather have Brady playing games......................

[Frankly, I don't know why any MLS team would release a player to be an alternate if they have games to play. Even if its Leagues Cup. I expect the other alternates could be the Euro guys at the camp. Pukstas, Tomkinson, Gomez, etc.]