No doubt it was real dumb. It was an honest take, but he will grow wiser and learn not to say what he thinks, but rather what people want to hear.
Not sure if this was posted elsewhere or where to post it, but this article had some decent points about all the drama. The USMNT is a mess. That's the price of the U.S. becoming a 'soccer country'
Here's the problem with that piece. The article was excellent and laid out all the reasons why playing for a national team has a lot of issues facing it. BUT the title was pure clickbait. For those who just wanted to read the headline it just gave them more ammo that the USMNT is a disaster. But totally not true and if you actually read even the first couple of paragraphs the author spells out concisely just a bad set of circumstances lead of to the roster we have for GC. Want to point fingers? Then stop pointing so much at the USSF and start pointing at FIFA and UEFA.
I liked the article as well, but it is starting to bother me a little that everybody who makes the case (like the author did at the end of the article) that almost nothing that happens with a national team in the year or two preceding the World Cup actually matters for the tournament itself seems to be relying on the same single counter-example for support: Morocco in 2022. I'm sure if you strain real hard, you can come up with a few more examples, but my own sense is that the World Cup is a small sample size theater where teams that have been a mess for a while can go on a surprise run every now and then while teams that have prepared well can be knocked out with a fluke bad performance or result. The small number of games means that those types of outcomes will happen more often than they would over a full season, but they're still not the most common outcomes and they don't justify writing off everything that happened earlier in the cycle IMO.
I wouldn't mind real pressure from real media and real coverage leading to a significant spotlight to perform and get results. But that isn't what we have here. Has ESPN even mentioned the USNT once this month? Our sports media complex doesn't even acknowledge the Gold Cup. Instead we have a few butthurt ex-NTers who for whatever the reason have taken every opportunity to cry about the current generation. And there is plenty to criticize. But it's not even soccer or performance focused. It's not organic. It exists in this little weird soccer bubble.
The US' performance pre-WC isn't exactly predictive, either. One only needs to go back to the panic of our last friendly window. You are 100% right that it is sample size theater, though, and I am sure you are right that you'd rather be looking good than looking bad; it's just that it is hardly definitive.
Yes, actually. Pretty easy to check: June 19th June 17th June 16th June 16th June 13th June 12th June 11th June 10th June 10th June 8th June 7th
Right, not definitive. But I do think it's decently predictive. Although, it depends on what you mean by pre-WC. The last window before the 2022 WC certainly gave us all a fright, and if that's all we had to go off, I would agree the WC results would have been largely unexpected. But I still think the two years leading up to that tournament put us in a pretty good position to manage our usual Round of 16 exit, particularly in a group with only 1 team with serious QF expectations. We were ranked as high as 16th and never any lower than 26th by Elo for the entire period between June 2021 and December 2022. But more importantly, the things that got us results in the tournament were things that we had clearly been developing over the cycle. E.g., Pulisic's game-winner vs Iran came off a play we'd been working on for a while; the tactics and formation were relatively consistent over the prior two years as well, and had generally looked effective against the types of teams we played in that tournament; the stinginess in defense, the MMA midfield, the fullback aggression, etc. were all things you could see us developing over a period of time, with encouraging results. The one thing we didn't have, similar to this cycle, is a full complement of players available all that often. The January 2022 qualifier against El Salvador is probably the only lineup that cycle that looks remotely like the lineups we fielded during the World Cup. (The same 10 players started in both that El Salvador game and the Netherlands Rof16 game, but more often than not each individual lineup that cycle only featured maybe 5 or 6 of the players who would start in Qatar.) So that's one area where I find myself a bit more hopeful that the current messiness that article refers to won't necessarily doom us.