Scally has good top end speed, but his acceleration is below average for a soccer player. He lacks explosiveness.
Interestingly it appears he wasn’t even on the broader provisional roster https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6603999/2025/09/06/cristian-roldan-usmnt-pochettino-messi/
Owen Wolff may or may not get called up for the Japan friendly depending on whether Poch happened to be tuning in for some Argentine and just happened to catch his goal and assist Owen Wolff equalizes for @AustinFC from just outside the box! pic.twitter.com/lY4nCjHTwo— Major League Soccer (@MLS) September 7, 2025 Rising to the moment. pic.twitter.com/fcr8RcBZNT— Austin FC (@AustinFC) September 8, 2025 Sounds like Poch is really on top of the player pool huh It had been two years since Roldan’s last USMNT appearance. He was not even on a broader provisional roster for September games against South Korea and Japan. “So,” he tells The Athletic, “I didn’t know if I was even on the radar.” ... But the national team calls had stopped coming. Roldan hadn’t been to an A-team camp since the 2022 World Cup. He wasn’t even invited to an MLS-only January camp in 2024. Twelve months later, Pochettino called in a free agent who’d been banned from an amateur indoor league for allegedly punching another player, but didn’t call in Roldan. The phone call from Poch must have meant a lot to Roldan... if only Poch ever talked directly to any USMNT player outside of camp! But on Wednesday, his phone rang. It was Seattle Sounders general manager Craig Waibel. “He didn’t know where I was,” Roldan recalls, so the first question was simple: Are you available?
Caden Clark opened his DC United account versus what I assume was Club America’s ‘D’ team in a 3-1 win last night. Sigh. I got nothin’.
Another reason why the Berhalter call up makes no sense is that this guys does literally everything better than Berhalter, including deliver set piece balls. Neither of them nor Luna is better than Tillman-Reyna-Wes-Musah, but Berhalter especially. Owen Wolff (‘04) scores his 5th goal of the season for Austin FC, he also has 8 assists. Younger than all of the MLS based midfielders that were called up to the USMNT and arguably better than all of them as well. pic.twitter.com/oaDlFBCvQE— American Ultras Talk (@usmntaut) September 8, 2025
Anyone been paying any attention to how the old yank misfits at colorado are doing? Vines? Cole Bassett? Anything there? Any hope of a potential James Sands type return?
The exclusion of Wolff has been a pretty bad oversight considering they are giving various MLS MFs a chance to make a statement. He is becoming the man in the MF for his team now and physically his traits pop so much more evidently than guys like Berhalter, McGlynn, LDLT and Roldan. Just seems like every MLS player trial of late has been meh to awful. I maintain that Luna is the real deal but other than that I have been disappointed.
Eh, Wolff is just about to turn 21 and is on a hot streak that started on July 16th. I think he has a lot of potential and perhaps he is really breaking out to be a star, but a guy who has been on fire for six weeks -- and had been a month when the rosters were picked for this camp, let alone the Gold Cup -- is not a pretty bad oversight. It's okay to make him do it for a few months. I remember when Taylor Booth was Eredivisie Player of the Month before the World Cup and it was a disaster. If Wolff is the real deal, it'll be apparent. I hope he is.
People are taking the thread title too literally. We’re not actually looking for a guy based on this week’s performance.
His old man made an awesome career of almost scoring. He woulda been s guy if he could have found the back of the net
I'm all for watching Owen Wolff, and maybe even getting excited. I just don't really get why literally any news needs to be turned into a dire criticism of a terrible failure by the staff / USSF. Owen Wolff is on a great six week run and him not getting called up is a "pretty bad oversight" according to a poster (who is not amongst the most negative usually). It's like the culture around the USMNT is make every an idiotic mistake no matter what. You can see it in all the other criticism -- the desperate need to pretend all the people not called up are depth chart choices, the definitive judgements on fairly 50/50 decisions, the doomcasting despite any available evidence to the contrar ... ... I really like to dive into fandom and literally none of my real life friends have any interest in spending this much time on the USMNT (or really any of my teams) but it's not even dialogue here most of the time. Anyway, would not mind a Wolff call up at some point, but (a) January camp seems an easy way to fit every priority in and (b) if he keeps tearing it up we have camps in all of one month and two months. No, there's not a lot of camps before the World Cup, but if he's the real deal, it'll be okay.
I’m not the one who called omitting Wolff a bad oversight. I do, however, believe that a majority of dispassionate observers who would have watched Wolff and Berhalter side-by-side over the past year would deem Wolff the better player. I have no idea whether he would look good with the national team. He’s only 20 and has never played outside the MLS as far as I am aware. But he is balling out this year mostly in ways that stats miss. Only in the last couple of months have goals and assists ratcheted up, but he has been their MVP for longer than that.
Maybe? Maybe not, though. There's plenty of press who watch MLS who had Berhalter as a first half Best XI type. Vancouver was leading the shield and also made the CCC finals -- they were on a tear despite Berhalter basically stepping into their DP 10s shoes. He played really well this first half, and he was piling up goals and assists. Owen was playing well for Austin even last year, but as many have noted, you probably should be up near Best XI contention to get a USA call up, and especially at such a young age. Because the reality is that international play can be pretty physical. With Berhalter's goal production and Vancouver tailing off and Wolff getting hot (and Austin making a bit of a run), this shift in very measurable items here is very new. It certainly didn't happen before the Gold Cup rosters were made and is wasn't for a very long time before the September rosters. So even if you believe it true, and even if you ignore that it's entirely possible Poch valued the time in system for Berhalter ... i think calling it a "pretty bad oversight" is just the usual overstatement and nitpicking. It's exactly like the Taylor Booth thing -- a short time period for a young player that where that player could be breaking out or it could be a hot streak. But here even, would I have hated a Wolff call-up? No. Is it a "bad oversight"? No. I just really don't see why everything has to be recast as a disastrous or idiotic mistake. I honestly don't know how some of you stay so angry so repeatedly post tirades over and over and over. I know neither you nor OP are really the prime folks there so this isn't really directed at you, but really, I could never generate that much fury over anything in sports. Anwho ... I like Wolff a lot. Long term more than Berhalter. Not sure about Wolff's defense, but he's a more complete player. I think if we called him in, we'd see some flashes and I don't doubt that we'd also have seen some struggles. Big question for me is whether he's got those skills that translate as advantages at higher levels. I'd definitely put him for January if he keeps this up and an outside chance at the World Cup roster. I don't expect him to be at Austin for too long. But that sort of free 8 is pretty stacked on the roster, too. I don't expect either him or Berhalter to make a 23 man roster.
Fair enough. I wouldn’t call either of them in now either given the better MF options. As for January, he may be overseas by then.
🇺🇸 Contract details for Miles Robinson's extension with FC Cincinnati, per sources:- Robinson will be a DP when deal starts in 2026 (and cannot be bought down during contract)- Robinson will be highest-paid CB in MLS, eclipsing Zimmerman's $3.47m dealhttps://t.co/Xz9oeYWhO0— Tom Bogert (@tombogert) September 9, 2025
Its just fantastic that those kinds of deals are going to USMNTers as opposed to mediocre Colombians or aging Euros. Good for him!!! He's been out injured. You do wonder, at this point, what his prospects of making the WC roster are. They're a little murkier than they looked a year ago. I'd still have him in there. Also, I watched part of Argentina versus Ecuador last night. MLS players on both rosters. Argentina, freakin' Argentina, started an MLS player............and it wasn't Messi. [Ecuador's MLS player was Campagna of the Revs. I didn't see him get into the game.]
On the Spanish-language broadcast of the South Korea game, the announcer said that 206 MLS players were called to international duty this window. Which seems insane. TM shows 871 players in the whole league, so very nearly a quarter of the league's players were called up to some national team.