I’m glad we can have this conversation out from under the shadow of Berhalter Derangement Syndrome. My position has been consistent because I’m familiar with those studies and their findings and have been consistently operating from a working synthesis. Not just swinging from one claim to another based on an agenda. Player quality is the overriding factor in team success over a larger sample. Until you get to a multiseason sized sample luck/variance is the next most important factor in determining a team’s results. Then comes coaching. So let’s say over a season it’s 70% player quality, 25% variance/luck, and 5% coaching. Coaching will have the greatest positive effect when a manager who has a strong ability to implement a particular style is coaching a team built to play that way. The opposite when the opposite is the case. To implement a style takes training time. I think Kompany came out and said that he felt, as a player and now a manger, that it takes 50 training sessions (I might be low on that) to start to execute on the ideas a manager is trying to implement. Poch has had under 20 training sessions with our first team. Those 20 training sessions were also far more spaced out than the 50 a player would get at the club level, which surely means lower retention rates. Our player quality is middle of the pack for a WC team (now in the expanded field). For our team to succeed beyond that 16th to 28th best talent tier we need luck/variance and/or coaching to come through. There’s no real way to systematically address the first one so we should focus on what we can control, coaching. We need to find out if Poch can do a superior job at implementing a style of play that fits our team’s talent. He needs ample training sessions and some matches to do it. The best opportunity Poch will have to coach a significant number of training sessions along with a handful of matches, most of which will be competitive, is this summer. Waiting for the pre-WC camp is a risk because there will be fewer games, none competitive, and it will give Poch zero time to significantly change course. Starting to iron things out in this GC is going to set us up far better for success than kicking the can down the road.
Use the UEFA friendlies for the posh players who are too big-time to get up for lowly CONCACAF sides. Have that be the start of their WC tests, get reps in the system, chemistry, etc. Then for the GC cull many of them regardless of play for grinding vets & hungry prospects looking to make their last case for the WC. Have largely bifurcated groups, to be combined subsequently.
Why? What’s the goal? That’s a correct strategy for the first Gold Cup of a cycle (now with Confed Cup off the table). Now we are playing catch up with a completely new manager just before crunch time. We’re going to be missing guys because of the CWC, fitness, and possibly some impending transfers (less of an issue because of the earlier final allowing rest and a full preseason for most). Bringing in guys 26-40 on the depth chart is going to be the more useful move to address that concern this close to the WC. Getting the players we are going to need on the same page of Poch’s playbook is a higher priority. Poch just figured out who his pool is. Now he has to coach them up and most of the training sessions left before he has to pick a squad will come this summer.
We historically have done the opposite, and used the 1st GC to try and win, while the 2nd redundant one is for trials. Recently both GC's have been for trials cuz it was replaced by UNL. The goal is to plug holes still existing in the XI & then find viable alternatives for when we have inevitable attrition, under-performance, & tired legs. Many want to put the cart before the horses here. We likely don't have the horses. And that's not because they aren't in the stable, at least by our standards. Depth chart spots 26-40 is just where they are now. That's fluid. After 1 or 2 can be in the XI, and a few the next XI. Some think this work of rounding up our horses can be done solely off club play. We've seen so often this is a myth, cuz it doesn't translate, or they aren't good EPL/UCL KO starters. There's a lot of variation of translation outside of that group. Also, it can't be achieved thru existing failures w/ the nat'l team. And if they continue to fail in this tourney, as past is the best predictor of future, what was that info worth. We're building a machine w/ a group of flawed/broken parts. It also doesn't take a year of continuous work to build a machine once you have the parts. If it were true you wouldn't see new manager bumps at clubs, after maybe a few game transitional period. It doesn't take over a yr to learn a system & teammate's tendencies. It matters, but to that extreme, it's highly overrated. Find a couple viable players at every position, put them in a basic system that fits their skill-set, make sure they complement one another, drill for a few camps, and you should be ready for primetime.
In the past the first Gold Cup was the one that determined who qualified for the Confederations Cup that would take place the summer of the second Gold Cup. So it made sense to prioritize it. Still we brought strong teams to the 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2017 second of the cycle Gold Cups. Like the pure B-team GCs were the ones where we were in the CC, 2013, 2021* and 2023*. *The recent GCs have been deprioritized because COVID fixture congestion pushed the NL into the summer of those GCs. FIFA has a rule that clubs only have to release players for one major summer tournament. This also shifted the GC to be later in the summer and created more problems for European players. Those conditions are no longer present. The GC is the only major summer tournament (at the international level for our players) and it doesn’t really interfere with having an offseason and then a Euro preseason. National team managers aren’t with their players much at all. Like a year of national team training is the equivalent of 6-8 weeks of the club season. Midseason form is a real thing and it isn’t primarily about physical fitness (teams knock that out in preseason). The new coach bounce is primarily due to a team going on a bad run of luck results wise, relative to their underlying performances, then the old manager getting fired, then the new manager coming in and results tending to hang around the average of their underlying performances. Like the studies show that “no manager”, which is what they designate the interims as, tend to do better. That interim is typically just an assistant doing largely what the guy who got fired did. If you are trying to figure out which player in a third tier league (the tier below Ligue 1) will translate that’s pretty hard to do off of just club play. Soccer is not a mechanistic system. It’s organic. It’s made up of people. It requires one group of people to try to beat another. That kind of analogy falls completely flat when faced with reality. It works in a simplistic video game/simulation but not in the real world. It takes more than one work week’s worth of training to get guys coordinated enough to deal with the best the world has to offer.
Whether a coach can implement a style that fits the players is something that needs to be figured out at the director of football level. This is a large part of why some organizations, like Liverpool, are successful from manager to manager to manager. No amount of great coaching can fix poor recruitment and poor matching of preferred manager tactics to a player pool. That's why Manchester United have been so mid for over ten years, despite having hired celebrated coaches and having spent gargantuan amounts. No amount of irrelevant 'studies' can alter this basic aspect of the game.
I am a Liverpool fan. They are incredibly analytically and study driven. What they do is surely highly informed by these findings on how manager fit matters just like their recruitment has been. Lots of clubs spend money and hire people well informed on this kind of thing but they don’t listen to those people and their findings, they don’t put it into practice, Liverpool did. A DoF is still taking a gamble because they are not in charge of the actual implementation of the desired style of play. They do not know that the manager they are hiring was responsible for it in the past. They can select a manager with a philosophy that matches what works for their players and they can hope that their due diligence about that manager’s ability to turn philosophy into action was correct. The manager and their staff are the ones ultimately responsible for translating those ideas into action. Maybe at the last stop the manager had a key assistant who made that process work and now they aren’t bringing that guy with them because he got promoted into the managers old job of running the German national team. Then the new team is SOL even with a manager with a past history of “success”. Actually implementing this stuff is what matters, not a desire to implement it. That implementation is done in and around training when a team is together. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The path to a first round exit is plastered over with assumptions that our players will just magically do what Poch wants with no training time.
Does this Edgar dude have the Gold Cup preliminary roster? Thread - #USMNT Pre Roster Selection for the 2025 Gold Cup.Full Roster is set to be released next Thursday. pic.twitter.com/ugg6dybS1F— Edgar (@ConcacafEdgar) May 18, 2025 "Brady, Ledezma, Freeman, Blackmon, Berhalter, and Sullivan" Yes please: Sullivan, Freeman, Berhalter Don't need to see: Blackmon, Ledezma, Brady Wonder why no Noahkai Banks... Here’s the preliminary roster. Notable players here are Brady, Ledezma, Freeman, Blackmon, Berhalter, and Sullivan. Notable omissions are Horvath, Banks, Reyna/McKennie/Weah (CWC), and Pepi (injury). Zendejas and T. Tillman are both there even though 1 of them will play in CWC. https://t.co/rEYzvYAaQV— American Ultras Talk (@usmntaut) May 18, 2025 Edit: just looked at the full list from the first tweet, Caden Clark really?? Multiple players from 0.5 PPG Montreal who just won their first game mid-week and then got blown out 6-1 at home by an almost equally terrible Toronto FC is hilarious... I assume these are the 50-60 range guys on the fringe with no real shot: Chris Brady, George Campbell, Tristian Blackmon, Max Dietz, Shaq Moore, Richy Ledezma, Kris Lund, Caden Clark, Sean Zawadski That's 9 so perhaps Marlon Fossey or Dejuan Jones, or I hate to say it but this season maybe Patrick Agyemang is the other one
Granted this is "vs MF" vs "vs AM" but here's 21yo Beau Leroux vs 21yo Caden Clark... Poch must be really impressed by Clark's 0 goals 0 assists so far this season if he put him on the roster. The "all that matters is winning games" crew are going to be apoplectic and tear Poch a new one when they see this!! (sarcasm because no they won't, I mean it's not like Poch is winning games lol)
Canada Here’s Canada’s 🇨🇦 Gold Cup Pre Roster.#CanMNT pic.twitter.com/xXY8mEkm6r— Edgar (@ConcacafEdgar) May 18, 2025
If true only real take away from that is Gio staying with Dortmund for The CWC. CONCACAF Edgar is someone I've always been iffy about, but dude did just lay down 120 names between two teams. That's about to be a decent litmus test for his credibility
Oh and then there's Tim Ream, whose inclusion in the 60 will surprise no one but who absolutely should NOT be on the final 23 man roster... Every week people watch Tim Ream play in MLS and make some statement along these lines Tim Ream’s recent form has not exactly warranted a call-up to the #USMNT.— Alex Calabrese (@amcalabrese12) May 18, 2025
It's just a preliminary roster. So hopefully Ream doesn't make the final one. But it means Paredes is auto-excluded. Reminds me of leaving Wright off the CNL provisional. Was on the verge of returning. Same goes for Paredes. Poch also hasn't worked w/ him.
If that preliminary roster is real, then these are the changes from the NL preliminary roster from 3 months ago. GK Horvath -- out [Callender ruled out due to CWC?] Brady -- in FB (4-5 more FBs than previous prelim roster): None -- out Freeman, Lund - in (plus Ledezma if you consider him a FB) [Dest & Wiley - previously injured, now in] CB: Banks -- out [Ragen ruled out due to injury or CWC?] Blackmon -- in MF: Berhalter, Ledezma, Sullivan, Zawadski - in [Cremaschi, McKennie, Reyna ruled out due to CWC?] Winger (4-5 fewer wingers than previous prelim roster): Cowell, Vassilev - out [C. Campbell, Morris, Weah - ruled out due to CWC?] [Wright - previously injured, now in] CF None - in [Ferreira - ruled out due to CWC?]
He at one point did have a decent connection through the FC Dallas pipeline but I think he's gotten a bit more hit and miss
Paredes and Banks should both be on the 60 roster as guys just coming back from injury, as Wright and others should have been for Nations League... Callendar isn't even the #1 GK for a Miami team that is a complete mess right now. Ferreira has 0 goals this season and 5 over the last two seasons.
Yeah, I'm giving both the benefit of the doubt, since every other player from the last preliminary roster who's on a team that's secured a spot in the Club World Cup has apparently been left off this roster. (Caleb Wiley might be the one exception, but I'm not totally sure what his club status is right now. TM says he's still still with Watford until June 30, and the CWC starts June 14.)
On MLS Wrap Up Kljestan and McCarty said Alex Freeman was one of the best fullbacks in the league and should be on the actual Gold Cup roster... we'll see if Poch is actually paying attention.
Correlative/causative fallacy. No proof that the reason Mexico failed at the WC was the team they brought to the GC. You're also extrapolating from a single data point without explaining why Mexico's situation last time round is relevant or analogous to ours now. What really matters is not so much Mexico in the past so much as the US now. What is the thing we are going to learn from experimenting with marginal players at this GC that we have to know before the WC? I'm not against this idea at some positions but I'd need to hear the argument specifically for why it matters. Like we're weak at LB, maybe there's an argument to look at guys there for example. But the counter to all this is that this is our continental tournament and winning has intrinsic value as an accomplishment in itself as well as giving the team a much needed boost of confidence after a brutal exit at the CNL. My take--likely a minority one--is that the whole "all in on the WC, screw other tournaments" approach overweights the WC and underweights the other tourneys. WC is the big stage, obviously, but I value the GC and CNL where we can win the whole thing even if it's not against the same level of competition.
Man what a great--and sobering--post. I have certainly fallen victim to the tendency to overstate the importance of coaches, and now that Poch is here I'm trying to resist it. He will be a positive presence for sure but he's going into the WC with largely the same group of players we had last time round and throughout the Berhalter era. Expecting something radically different due to his presence alone is likely going to lead to disappointment. Even Mario Andretti is not going to win a race with a good-not-great vehicle. This has been on my mind a lot in the run up to the WC. When I think of the USMNT teams of the past that succeeded in the WC (and those that failed too) they had one thing in common: reps and reps and reps. Concacaf WCQ is rough and forces teams to unify against adversity. Not having the chance to come together as a team nearly as much as in the past strikes me as a major concern, which is leavened somewhat by the fact that this is the same basic team that did have lots of reps before the last WC. The 94 team had years under Bora where they'd play any game they could scrounge up--made possible bc fewer of them had European obligations--to offset the lack of WCQ. But yeah, even if Poch could work miracles he still has a really short runway to do it.
Straw man fallacy. It's not a cherry-picked data pt from our chief rival this very last cycle, in conjunction w/ our own from the same period, as well as past ones. There's a pattern. And sure, there's no hard proof you win because you have better, more trusted players. There's no proof Argentina hoisted the WC cuz their players are better than ours. But it's logical.