I think it had a lot to do with how good he was. Subotic arguably was up there but not where it counted, goal scoring.
With many of the dual-nationals folks seem to blame the federation or the coaching staff or whomever. Not the player. So the villain in the Subotic tale on these boards was Thomas Rongen. ......................and I think that's not quite fair. Rossi is really the only one in which that hasn't been the case. There was enormous vitriol directed at him. Basically demonized as a traitor. And that was solidified when he scored a brace against us in the Confederations Cup.
I'd push back on the Paul Gardner hate a little bit. I fell in love with the Brazilian team at the '86 WC when I was 7. And then at least where I grew up (Pittsburgh), soccer looked absolutely nothing like that even as I got older and better. The best of the youth coaches were 3rd-rate British coaches (or wannabe British coaches) who preached long balls to big center forwards and fast wingers, lots of crosses, and lots of "getting stuck in." So, I looked forward to Gardner's columns to dream of a day where I could play with players and coaches who valued technical ability, clever passing, and a little flair. Of course, that happened for me when I got a Dutch coach at age 13, who had been on the fringes of the Dutch national team in the '70s and came to the US for the NASL. He showed us tons of videos from that Clockwork Orange era, and our team started started passing circles around the British-styled teams after a couple years. That's when I realized Gardner's simplistic Latin = good, Euro = bad worldview didn't hold up, but I still have a bit of fondness for his rants.
Yeah, he wasn't wrong that early MLS was often brutal, or that American soccer was full of athletic try-hards and very short on skill and guile. I think of him whenever I watch our chunky king Diego Luna.
Paul Gardner wasn't wrong about the soccer landscape in the US at the time. It just came across as EXTREME snobbery. Everything that's done in the rest of the world is better than we do it. Those people still exist. They exist on twitter. Paul Gardner was their grandfather. As if MLS was just going to start and be La Liga. He, in particular, was relentless when suggesting the US soccer structure was neglecting the latino and hispanic community. Something that was a legitimate talking point 25 years ago.
Switching was pretty rare back then too, once you got a single senior cap even in a friendly you were cap tied for life.
Gardner obviously wasn't a soccer hater and he did want the US to win and the sport to grow, he was just a lunatic
He also took a beating on air from Jim Everett, the football player. Maybe it beat some sense into him.
I mean, I think the difference is that Rossi was born here and did at least his early growing-up here. Somehow people didn't view his ties to Italy as being as "authentic" as other dual nations. As opposed to somebody like Subotic.who clearly had lived elsewhere and whose stay here was more transitory, or some of the dual nationals who grew up overseas and had eligibility for US as well as other nations. Somehow I think US fans thought Rossi was "ours." I'd just note for those who might have thought that way that he had deep family ties and went to live in Italy at 12, long before any international decision was on the radar. Never bothered me as much as some other people, and I'd like to think that we as a fanbase have gotten better about respecting player's agency to make their own choices. I can be disappointed, but the players don't owe me anything regardless of background, they can choose their own path.
This was a pretty prevalent viewpoint back then and led to MLS academy 1.0 and the missing generation. It was flawed because the world had moved on from just skillful players and moved to skillful, athletic players which FC Dallas figured out in their 2.0 but I'm not sure LAG has figured that out yet. Philly read the room and their players were athletic two way players right off.
I was having a drink with Mike Renshaw and Dominic Kinnear after a match between Houston and Dallas when Kinnear started complaining about Ruiz. Renshaw said, "Yeah, you hate to play against him, but you'd love to have him on your team." Kinnear took a swig and said, "No @#$&ing way."
Renshaw was a legend. Somehow played for England and the US because we were so unorganized back then.
I don't think there was ever a time when a single senior friendly alone cap-tied a player for life. However, my understanding is that, for quite a while after FIFA introduced provisional cap-tying through competitive youth caps, a provisionally cap-tied player became fully cap-tied after a senior friendly.
I'd like to hear how MLS is the biggest villain given so many of our best players have a connection to it.
Around 20 years ago the best Americans in the league were guys like Donovan, Dempsey, and Beasley. Now it's guys like Ferreira, Zimmerman, and Robinson. A league that expands by nearly 20 teams and has franchise values that are astronomically higher should probably be able to nurture American talent better than the MLS of 20 or so years ago. It hasn't and I'm not sure it ever really cares to. For MLS, the American player is little more than a source of cheap labor to fill out club rosters. There is no mission or purpose related to developing top American talent or signing top American talents and providing them with a place to flourish. I'd argue most of the teams that we would like to emulate have domestic league that attempt to accomplish or both of those goals. Simply put, MLS has done more for the development of our regional rivals than it has the USMNT during the past 20 years.