News: Bruce Arena says the United States will be in a position to win the World Cup by 2026

Don't worry. All of those prospects in their primes will be horribly mismanaged by USSF, while both USSF and MLS will be telling Americans to support Mexico instead of their own NT, instead.

 

UEFA's qualifier format does make qualifying a bit straightforward. They have 14 slots for 55 members, meaning 1 in 4 teams will make it. Their qualifying format is thus relatively short: a single round of group play, and then one round of second-place playoffs.

Doesn't make it easy, of course. But it means qualifiers are mostly decided by ten matches in a six-team group stage. And since there were no earlier elimination rounds, these groups will include teams at the very bottom of the confederation, like Gibraltar or San Marino. Think of it like the Hex, if the Hex included matches against Aruba and the British Virgin Islands. Essentially, out of your ten qualifying matches, only 6 (or even just 4) will pose any challenge.

So this might limit the amount of seasoning you can really get during qualification - especially if you luck into a group like England's, with Scotland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, and Malta.

I'm not backing Arena's idiotic comment that CONCACAF qualifying is more difficult than UEFA's. But it is longer, and the weakest teams are eliminated early. You have more matches that are meaningful and competitive. That might present an opportunity to develop a team that UEFA doesn't.

(Of course, CONCACAF's problem is that it's so top-heavy that only about 6-8 teams in the entire confederation are serious contenders, so the challenge drops out of the matches)


The ideal is probably CONMEBOL, which, due to its small size, can play a straight round-robin of the whole confederation - meaning each team faces 18 matches in a very deep confederation with grueling travel playing in very hostile territory in a wide variety of climates. That kind of gauntlet really does test a team.

 

In 8 years we might be a position to make it to the semifinals. After that, it's a question of luck and being mentally ready for the moment.

 

That's almost a 3rd of all of them. It's significant. Another significant factor? No NT has won with a foreign coach.

To contend for the WC we would need top players (core of the team consists of players on championship winning squads from top leagues / UCL). The last three WC winners not only had the top leagues at the time, but most of their players played together on the best squads from those leagues.

 

I love how cocky we are.

Can't draw T&T to qualify.

Only reason we finished top 5 in CONCACAF is because an 18 yr old carried us.

Haven't sold an American attacker who successfully transitioned to a top 5 league in over a decade.

Most of our A team mids can't even escape dribble.

Our top domestics can barely manage a SOG vs Bosnia's D team.

But we're talking WC Semi's.

 

Not cockiness at all, just the ability to understand that different things are in fact different.

The main reason we failed to qualify last year was that the US youth situation eight years ago looked nothing like it does now. We got knocked out in the quarterfinals of the 2011 CONCACAF under-20 championship by Guatemala! Here's the lineup for that game (from the US Soccer site):

USA: 1-Zac MacMath; 4-Moises Hernandez, 5-Perry Kitchen (capt.), 2-Gale Agbossoumonde (16-Moises Orozco, 82), 3-Zarek Valentin; 8-Sebastian Lletget, 14-Amobi Okugo, 10-Kelyn Rowe; 13-Greg Garza (17-Omar Salgado, 77), 9-Conor Doyle, 7-Joe Gyau

Needless to say, those guys didn't contribute much to 2018 qualification (aside from Moises Hernandez for Guatemala)

I'm pretty sure that our current crop of young players is a lot better than that one. Even if Pulisic and McKennie both suffer career-ending injuries in their next game, we'll still be better off than we were then.

 

Lletget scored v Honduras in the Hex.

 

Like I said, they didn't end up contributing much in qualification.

For the sake of contrast with 2011, the 1999 Under-20 WC squad included Tim Howard, Steve Cherundolo, Cory Gibbs, Carlos Bocanegra, Nick Rimando, and Taylor Twellman. The 2001 Under-20 WC squad included Landon Donovan, DaMarcus Beasley, Oguchi Onyewu, Bobby Convey, Edson Buddle, and Conor Casey.

 

Projecting the youth scene now to the WC semi's in 8 years isn't an exercise you'll see me participating in.

And I like a lot of our youth but they're just that, youth. Let's call them unprovens. I'll wait until they're actual top league ballers week in, week out.

And as much as I like a Pulisic or the idea of what Sargent might become, I have a major concern in that even if we have a few top level attackers, they'll continue to suffer from our dinosaur tactics and lack of creative CM's.

 

Eh, coaches being optimistic isn't that shocking. Klinsi said his U.S. team was aiming for the semis in Russia despite suffering some notable losses just within CONCACAF. Plus, easier to be optimistic nine years out. Arena can always change his tune to hopeless negativity in 2025 when Pulisic is in MLS and McKennie is playing for the Cosmos.

 

There's going to be plenty of hopeless negativity for Qatar, let alone 2026.

 

With USSF in charge, this is certain.

 

I think it's so cool that someone dug up an old article from Bruce Arena right after the 2002 World Cup.

 

2010 already passed.

 

I don't expect the USA to be a top 5 team or reach the level of the perennial world powers. But if the current crop of young players comes close to their potential and the goalkeeping gets sorted out, I could see us getting to the top 8 to 12 or so - somewhere around Belgium, Uruguay, or Colombia's current level. And if you're the home team for all your games, anything can happen.

McKennie and Pulisic are pretty much proven. How many other teenagers were starting for Bundesliga CL qualified teams last year? And as for the others - some will fail to meet expectations, but I think there's enough of them to be pretty confident that some will pan out. Both in terms of the level of proven talent at the very top and the depth of potential talent at the next level, the current youth class is pretty much unprecedented by US standards, and I think it's important to keep that in mind before assuming that the future will look like the past.

 

Semifinals should be a target.

 

Didn’t have good enough players? Is that you Bruce?

We had top two talent in CONCACAF in 2018 and still sh!t the bed. The talent will still be top two in the region in 8 years. Semifinal is a ludicrous expectation if we don’t improve dramatically in other departments.

Every other team in the world is getting better, look at this World Cup, most every team has a few great players and some domestic league filler, us in 8 years IF our top end talent all pans out, we won’t be more talented than average at best.

 

Correction, Bruce is talking about WC semi's.

Particularly funny coming from someone who threw his players under the bus for failing against Trinidad...

 

LOL no.

There's no mystery. Are the current U15s and U17s close to on par with Germany, Italy, Brazil, Spain, etc?

I don't believe we will win the WC in my lifetime. If I'm wrong, the players who will win it probably haven't yet been born.

 

If we win a World Cup within the next 30 years, expect Jurgi to jump in and take full responsibility for the success.

 

. Of course we had sufficient talent to qualify. But we did NOT have sufficient talent to overcome bad form/injuries, questionable roster decisions, goalkeeping errors, and bad luck. The lack of talent took away our margin for error, and then there was error.

I think you're underrating the current US youth prospects. Go check how many current teenagers played more than 1000 minutes for top Bundesliga teams last season.

 

The problem is that the federation and its coaches are useless, so these players will not reach their potential with the US. USSF is an albatross around the neck of American Soccer.

 

Lack of talent is on the looooooooong list of reasons we didn't quality, but far down from things at the top... like shit coaches. Again, we are in CONCACACAF, talent is never the problem.

The problem here is not that I don't follow and am not aware of our teenagers, the problem is I have followed our kids for years. In this instance I was addressing the absurd assertion that we will magically be a semi final team in the World Cup because we have a few good prospects. Even if they all panned out we would not have top 10 talent in the world. Semis is 4 teams, this is simple math.

 

Semis? Maybe in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s). It almost happened in '02, but that was by far the best U.S. team we've ever had and it barely deserved to advance out of the group. It benefited from a couple flukes (S. Korea playing to win against Portugal in a match in only needed to draw, and our QF opponent being our well-known nemesis Mexico).

The U.S. is so far off from having the kind of talent needed to be in the top echelon of the sport, even with guys like Pulisic, Weah, Adams, McKennie, Sargent... I'd be overjoyed if we had a team as good as Croatia. Heck, I'd love for our team to play with the determination of Iceland. Let's face it, U.S. soccer is still mediocre, and yet incredibly arrogant. A little humility would be a welcome change.

It's going to take a few more decades of development and maturing (of players, coaches, administrators, AND fans) before we can talk with any honesty about having a team with the talent and depth necessary to be a WC semifinalist.

 

If we had switched keepers with Costa Rica, I think we'd have qualified with ease.

So have I. I followed the under-17 WC games in 1999 on BigSoccer threads (along with Landon Donovan's father). That was the last time we had a crop of young players that was at all notable by international standards. The current one looks quite a bit stronger than 1999.

I actually said earlier in the thread that I wouldn't predict the USA to become a top 4 team. But you don't have to be a top 4 team to make the WC semifinals- especially if you're the home team.

We also have more than "a few" good prospects, which is part of the point - some won't work out, but some almost certainly will.

Just for comparison purposes, at age 19 (when Uruguay was sitting out the World Cup after having lost the playoff to Australia) Luis Suarez was moving from Nacional to Groningen, and Edinson Cavani was at Danubio. McKennie and Pulisic are already playing at a considerably higher level at the same age - and even without those two, I think we'd still possibly have our most talented youth class of all time.