I was searching for my comment re Hoppe in this thread. Just realized this was pointed out to you back then. He scored 5 goals in a three match stretch. On no planet has Hoppe shown anything close to Dempsey’s 2004 rookie level talent…never mind his 2005 form or any subsequent season.
Playing against scrubs in a weak MLS? Hoppe played in the Bundesliga, then in La Liga. How many goals did the great Dempsey (25) have in his first 2 EPL seasons? Seems like he struggled playing in a different country against better players.
His first season at Fulham (arrived in January 2006), Dempsey played more minutes than Hoppe has at either Mallorca, Hibbs, or San Jose. In Dempsey's first full season in England (07/08), he played more minutes than Hoppe has at Mallorca, Hibbs, Middlesborough, and San Jose combined.
Hoppe is younger than Dempsey was when he joined Fulham. Dempsey joined Fulham in December of 2006. There is something wrong with Hoppe, maturity issues or his work rate but he is still a player of similar quality IMO.
Im not really taking a side here. But to leave “he struggled in the PL” out there seemed a tad misleading. Adding “at first” might have been more accurate.
Yes. After Dempsey's debut season with Fulham (2006/7), when he scored the goal against Liverpool which kept them up in the PL, he appeared more than 40 times each of his next five seasons with the club. Dempsey was pretty much an indispensable player for Fulham his entire career with them, the exception being the brief 2014 loan spell, where nothing went right (still a mystery).
Can Hoppe geet on the field for Middlesbrough? He showed he can still play soccer with San Jose at least.
There's a huge difference between "Europe" and "England", and Dempsey went to England. The English Premier League doesn't have the patience to develop their players, especially when you formulate in the amount of money the team stands to lose if they get relegated. It's completely false to say that Dempsey struggled. Was he a star player in his first couple of seasons? No--but he was where he needed be transition/development wise and functional for Fulham.
Clint put his nose to the grindstone in MLS and showed that he’s a player that any team can trust for 2000+ minutes a season. Hoppe has not shown that capability yet. In that sense, their quality is incomparable. Any ability Hoppe has play-to-play is useless if he’s not even in the squad. Maturity, work rate, personality, whatever you want to call it… all players have to have it. Hoppe is TBD
Matthew Hoppe🇺🇸 returned to Middlesbrough from loan at the San Jose Earthquakes with an INJURY🩼. This put off the #MLS side from exercising their option to buy the strikerMiddlesbrough manger Carrick has chosen to HAULT ⏸️registration of Hoppe in the first team squad for now. pic.twitter.com/K1N0xubj8d— Joshua 🇺🇸🇳🇬 (@joshua_reports) January 9, 2024 not sure about this poster's reliability (I normally ignore spelling problems on tweets, but "hault" is really jumping out at me for some reason), but this report would track with other info about his return to 'Boro.
He basically seems like an aggregator. The best in-the-knows have connections with a select group of people so they can break news in that specific area, whether that be a club or a region. In the last day, he's put out tweets relating to: Wales Mexico Greece Jamaica Indonesia England Belgium Some dude with 1,000 Twitter followers isn't well-connected enough to have inside information on all of that. He's probably just speculating like a poster here - it just looks more official because he has _reports in his handle.
Latte Lath started at striker for Boro. Missed a shot and left the match injured in five minutes. Hopefully he's OK, but if not, relevant to their plans for Hoppe.
True, he has. He's also been crap in 3 of them (Spain, England and Scotland) and distinctly meh in the other 2 (Germany and MLS). In fairness, his German club was a byword for dysfunction but he turns 23 in mid-March, which is when he enters the last year when anyone will consider him to be a prospect. After that, nobody will be talking about about his future potential, only his current production. He has a year to show that he can perform as an adult and at what level. Let's hope it's better than League 2.
Somebody somewhere sometime is going to give us the Matthew Hoppe story, and it is going to be entertaining.