One thing is for sure, our Olympic eligible team, minus the goalkeeper situation, would annihilate the over 23 team. Olympic GK ??? RB Dest CB Palmer-Brown CB Richards LB Robinson M6 Adams M8 McKennie 10 Reyna RW Weah FW Sargent LW Pulisic Bench: GK?, Carter-Vickers, Cannon, Johnny/Yuiell, Aaronson, Ledezma, Konrad Over 23: GK Steffen RB Yedlin CB Long CB Brooks LB Ream/Gasper M6 Morales M8 Nagbe 10 Lletget RW Boyd FW Zardes LW Morris Bench: Turner, Miazga, Chandler, Green (or Acosta/Roldan), Mueller, Holmes, Altidore/Novakovich Analysis: GK u23 lose this battle by a landslide. There is NO one of worth on the horizon in this group. RB Dest is an upgrade and projects to be a major one. CB I’ll give an advantage to the over-age players, but the u-23 defenders have equal or more potential. LB Antonee wins this one for the u-23’s M6/M8 the u-23’s win this one by a landslide. Nagbe and Morales aren’t bad but there is NO ONE after them. 10 Reyna has a major advantage. R/LW The u-23’s have a major advantage. The difference between international/world class and CONCACAF level. FW the u-23 has a major advantage.
The U-23 squad has such an advantage that most of those guys are actually the full team and the U-23s will have to be cobbled together from leftovers. I mean, the starting lineup for the full team in any big game looks almost exactly like that U23 lineup once you get out of the back line, which to me means most of those on the over list are done for. If you're already being passed up by players younger than you, it's not like you're suddenly likely to improve or they will start to decline before you do. Once you're passed up by a younger, better option, you're over outside of being a backup or in case of injuries. We may actually end up with a terrible U-23 team because all the good U-23s are needed for the full team.
Positions? Or roles? It's not the same thing. Lately, the way to go has been to recognize what each player brings and what support each needs and being able to play around with the positioning. Many on this board seem to be position determinalists of the 4-3-3 variety.
Seems like this is one aspect (the other being tactics) of what people have been debating--or, rather, not so much that proposition, but whether GB subscribes to it. We shall see.
Again, outside of the goalkeeper situation, even our B team u23 squad is stacked... GK ??? RB Araujo, Duncan (Lennon) CB McKenzie, Glad, Pineda, Pines (Maloney, Edwards) LB Bello, Gloster (Kobe) MF Johnny, Sands, Cappis, Amaya (Durkin, Otasowie, Tessman, Dotson, Servania, Cerrillo, Berhalter, Kayo, Booth, Bassett, Leyva, Busio) 10 Ferreira, Mendez (Fontana, Mihailovic, De la Torre) R/LW Sabbi, Harper, Gioacchini, Taitague (Wolff, Amon, Lewis, Cowell, Saucedo) FW Pepi, Akinola (Toye, Robinson, Sanogo, Kelman, Wright, Dike, Butler, Hoppe, Michel, Soto) Would that squad win the Olympics? No. But I wager they would be competitive. And the depth is significantly better than the over23’s.
Yeah, I think the funny thing is, we probably have a team good enough to do some real damage at the Olympics now, but they will mostly be too busy to participate since they've all kind of skipped that grade.
I would hate to see mediocre coaching waste this rush of talent, And....most of these kids are on teams with good to excellent coaches and it is going to be very evident to them the severe downgrade they are facing with USSF's Nepotism Central approach.
No, he isn't. And if you wish to place a wager on how Berhalter fares, compared to Dalic's Croatia, it's on.
At this point, I believe there is only one American manager who we could expect to have the intelligence, energy, feel for the current game, and ease with working with younger players, that would integrate our players into a strong national team. But Jesse Marsch is not a Chicago Boy.
Lots of places to bemoan Gregg. I like the idea of a thread just to bask in the greatness of our player pool currently... In Couva, the team started 6 MLS players; 3 more came in as subs. A good chunk, but there were Bundesliga, EPL players on the field. Also, two from Liga MX. A group of MLS, Bundesliga, EPL, and LigaMX players sounds like a mostly historical USMNT lineup. Maybe a few more MLS guys than historical, but the 2014 WC team had 5 MLS starters, a guy from Liga MX, and some from the EPL, Turkey, France and Bundesliga. But we all sensed a difference didn't we? We sensed that the player pool was at an ebb in 2017. We now sense a completely different level than history don't we? Even a different level than the peak in 2010? https://chasingacup.com/change-is-afoot-usmnt-tier-improvements/
Comparing to the standard of 2010 is something I used to do regularly. I should probably re-look. I don't really agree with @David Kerr 's tiers -- there's too much emphasis on the club and not enough emphasis on the player within that context. Having Tyler Boyd count as Tier 2 and Jordan Morris be Tier 3 is a pretty clear sign there needs to be a better system. We definitely have a wave of talent, but I think models like these overstate it. Weston McKennie is exactly the same player today (Tier 1) as he was in June (Tier 3). Has Steffen gotten better? He's gone from Tier 3 to Tier 1. Chris Richards looks to have great potential, but Bayern gave him a start out of position as a backup to an exhausted Pavard ... and then promptly purchased a backup. I love his potential, but his Tier 1 is not accurate, and nowhere near Christian Pulisic's Tier 1. I see far too much listing the numbers of peoples at clubs, and some failure of acknowledgement of the actual role of these players -- McKennie now a rotational starter and role player. Reyna is likely a rotational starter. Richards is clearly a potential play on the bench. KLDF is on the Barca roster for wage reasons. (And not to dog anyone's potential... let's just be realistic about current performance). There are real improvements to 2017, no doubt. But I think it's less than a model like this wants to call out.
Not my tiers in that one my guy. I didn’t write that article. I only focus on the youth players. I also am not entirely sold on the tiers
If anything, people want more tiers. They want to micro manage where Besiktas fits in with Pachuca and Inter Miami. I wrote the article, and I'm a bit iffy on the Europa league teams from countries like Turkey myself. But it isn't suppose to be some hard and fast rule making model. It is just a general way to look at it. The only important tier is the Champions League tier really. Guys like Johnson, Brooks, Bradley, Dempsey, who played at Tier 2 type clubs have been very good for the USMNT. So, probably in CONCACAF, that tier is relevant. But under that? Worrying about the club is not that important. The biggest blow back I get is that I put MLS in a tier with the bottom of the EPL. That teams that will be in the Championship next season, or just survive, are full of players superior to Championship players, several whole teams of which will be in the EPL next season. Meanwhile, constantly MLS people tell me that it is better than that league or this league or that any MLS team will survive the drop in the EPL Then other people will tell me that MLS is below Poland and nobody can play well enough there to be seriously considered. It gets so into the weeds that we lose sight of the guys who are taking steps. EPB is making Team of the Week every week but that is drowned out by tweets and posts arguing whether Austria is better or worse than that league. But Austria is not a really different level than Holland which most will argue endliessly is above or below MLS. Tyler Adams was an exceptional player before he started for a Tier 1 team. It is the flip of your McKennie argument. Guys are improving and declining. But, for a snapshot, to really compare the general talent level, I think the model is easy to understand and gives the right general answer. In the end, it is just a soccer article. But it does work to show a real difference between now and Couva in a way parsing out the different club careers of each player would.
It's not a bad article and it wasn't meant to be critical in that sense. It's well written and I appreciate that. I just think that it's overly dependent on club. Stature on the club can matter as much as the club; we're getting a decent chunk of Tier 1s who are backups or at best rotational guys, who would be everyday starters on Tier 3s right now if not for luck or whatever. To that end, it's less about differentiating between clubs, and more about not kidding ourselves as if our team is better because Tyler Boyd is at Besiktas and Clint Dempsey was at Seattle. I mean, that's not an upgrade. Overall, I get what you are saying. And en masse, it definitely means something. But the fanbase is overly reliant this kind of methodology, and it doesn't always mean a player is better. Any system where Clint Dempsey and Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna and so on were Tier 3 players is a pretty blunt tool. And that's okay, but we just need acknowledge that it's blunt. If we're expecting Weston McKennie to be the best midfielder in US history today simply for being on Juventus ... I think we're setting ourselves up for a fall.
Just on the last part, I'm not sure that world football was so stratified when Reyna played. I think that was a time where scouts drove to games and wrote paper reports. Now, anyone can be scouted with a few clicks on a phone in your pocket. It has made everything more fast and efficient and, along with things like FFP, really concentrated talent at the tops. Tottenham and Fulham, then, were more Tier 2, Europa league contenders and Donovan is a strange case. But we had few players in the Champions League and few consistently. Pulisic already has more UCL appearances at 22 than Bradley, Donovan, Dempsey combined (Dest might have more already and McKennie and Adams not far behind). I see your point but it is still a good way to broadly discuss NT talent. When Mexico fans are tweeting recently in fear, it is not because they have scouted all our players in depth. It is because they see the clubs our players are starting for and are key players for. To me, the methodology of comparing clubs gets bogged down by trying to be too fine. By trying to tease the Sounders versus Gruether Furth or Pachuca versus Luton Town. But, people like to argue, about sports especially. For anyone that hasn't had a chance: https://chasingacup.com/change-is-afoot-usmnt-tier-improvements/#respond
I'm not sold with GB as a coach but GB as a recruiter has been a pleasant surprise. He is contacting all up-and-coming USA eligible players, no matter where they play. These players may not beat out our current starters but they could make our bench stronger.
Yep. I know there's a lot of angst about getting Adams to the 6, but even if he's there ... there's no real depth. If Jens Cajuste can be a quality player, then suddenly I feel a ton better about the overall midfield.