CONMEBOL national federations were mad after the 2016 Copa and felt tricked, since they made close to nothing. It's evident they negotiated carefully this time.
Hang on... We got new data from the CA that will probably lead to a coaching upgrade. That's not wasted. Without this tournament, Gregg would be going merrily about his business, with whatever impact on 2026. Full credit to those who did. Giving him a contract all the way to 2026 was a bigger problem than bringing him back at all, even though I didn't really want him back.
This evaluates player quality based on team quality, minutes played, and performance quality: With all World Cup squads now announced - which nations have the highest quality players? pic.twitter.com/d88Gc7ZKoz— Aurel Nazmiu (@AurelNz) November 15, 2022 Netherlands 3-1 USAStatsBomb Live xG:#NED 1.61 - 1.51 #USA #NEDUSA | #FIFAWorldCup pic.twitter.com/0Hu2UpZnV3— Statsbomb (@Statsbomb) December 3, 2022
The Moroccan players hated their old manager and some were refusing callups. They replaced him with a guy with a less impressive resume than Dolo.
Belgium are under-achievers, but Croatia, Serbia, Poland? Come on, Morocco. You know why the bias. They rank only using the UEFA competitions and leagues. So Euro countries are grossly overrated there.
No, he's been selling this generation since 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and now 2024. He's always selling, he just sounds louder about it when the market place agrees with him. He doesn't believe for a second they are overrated. He never rated them in the first place. It's the easiest bet in the world to simply bet the under on prospects, and he's always laying that bet, 6 days a week and twice on Sunday as they say.
I blame the fan base in great part. You push these guys into going for the big name teams where they flop, instead of going to some place where they are going to play and learn. You've created a culture where appearance is more important than substance, bling matters more than how well you do on the field, and having the Big Name on your shirt is the focus instead of being a crucial player in a more modest team. It's on you.
Not trying to speak for anyone else -- just want to note that it's a bit different for a NT coach than for a club coach. "Bare minimum" makes sense if there's a level of performance between success and failure. Maybe getting 17th in the Premier League is bare minimum -- bad, but you get to stay in the PL. Most PL clubs would have already changed coaches in a 17th-place season. (But if your payroll was in the bottom rung, say bottom 5, 17th probably should be viewed as a success!) In evaluating a NT coach I think it'd be smart to look at process and xG and actual goal difference and whether you got eliminated with 6 points or made it through with 3. But I'm not naive. In the real world, eliminated with 6 points is a failure, knockouts with 3 is.... success, unless you're in the echelon where merely making the knockouts is underperforming. People are trying to treat getting mauled in the round of 16 in Qatar 2022 like 17th place in the PL, without any context. If we'd been a 90% favorite to qualify for knockouts, then actually doing it would be no big accomplishment. But give or take, 53% is about a coin flip, and turning 53 into 100 is an accomplishment.
Pulisic is ranked low because he does not do a high volume of things that tend to lead towards helping a team’s goal difference. If he and his teammates finished his chances at just a bit above average rate then he’d have 8 goals and 5 assists. Then beyond that he isn’t doing a ton of valuable stuff. Pepi is so high because almost all his 484 minutes came as a sub. Extra time minutes don’t get counted and subs tend to do better playing against tired legs than starters. Dest’s numbers are very good in a vacuum he just played on an all conquering team and he plays a position where it’s harder to have a lot of impact on the stat sheet.
C'mon. I suspect you actually know better than this. Guys, not just American guys, go to big clubs where they play less because of salary. Chelsea will pay someone more to play 45 min a month than Mallorca can pay for a starter. I would love for Gio, Matt, Yunus, everyone to find a place where they can thrive getting regular starter's minutes. It really strains credibility to think that's not happening because of fan pressure.
Draws against Slovenia, Denmark, and Switzerland, plus being fortunate in beating Slovakia in overtime in the Euros with a vastly superior squad. That may look great to you. I don’t think that translates well to the USMNT.
This is an incredibly naive and asinine opinion. I can't tell if you're being serious or just generally don't understand the global market. The players simply climb the pyramid and chase their dreams of playing for big clubs. Same dreams every young kid has no matter the sport. They grow up watching these clubs/UCL and dream of playing there. No different than a young Euro basketball player dreaming of playing in the NBA or a Japanese baseball player dreaming of MLB. And they make the decisions with their families and agents based on money and opportunity. You're generally a good poster but ever since getting grouped you're throwing a bit of an incoherent tantrum with your posting.
Doesn't "No national team hires a top coach anymore" suggest a market inefficiency that we can exploit? ie if we have one and the other teams don't, wouldn't we have an advantage in an important role? Like, I keep seeing people say that international managers aren't top line managers and therefore we don't need a top line manager. But you can see it another way.
That’s been a large part of the problem for a generation or more. Assuming because a guy is at big club X it’s better than playing everyday at mid table club Y. Like, McKinnie is at Juve but 2024 Juve /= 2014 Juve. Ditto Pulisic and Milan.
I never heard the phrase “got grouped” to refer to a group exit until recently and now it’s constant.
It's the _culture_. A proper soccer culture is aware that you get rewards through _effort_. You climb your way to the top. And it's not true that Chelsea or Milan are going to pay you a ton more for being a Loan Army clown than what a team like Norwich or Kaiserslautern will pay you for playing there. But here, since most people only watch top clubs, and Champions league, the entire push is to be in those top teams no matter what. And that's bad. Because we have several guys whose fate would have been different in a different culture, where they'd have been ok going to some club where they can finish growing, learning, and becoming important for their teams. I'm angry, yeah. And that is not something that is going to change. So what the hell.
No, they rank every league and about 145,000 pro players across the world. The problem is that cross continental ratings are incredibly hard to create. Their assumptions do allow them to properly rate European leagues relative to each other. However, when it comes to the USMNT, most of our squad is in Europe! Even with that bias in place that should help us they rate our squad 30th in the world. I do think their methodology (of rating a player based on the quality of their team) is flawed. However that is the prevailing ideology of most people on this board and in our fandom. This is what they believe and their beliefs say our squad quality is 30th best in the world. Even with that Euro bias helping us it still says our squad is the 5th best at Copa America and on the bubble for getting out of the group.
I feel like large chunks of our culture are surprisingly oblivious to the concept of your local or a smaller club being the highest priority of your fandom. I imagine that rubs off on our player culture even if in a small way.
For our team it's accurate. We're about the #5 or #6 in strength in the Americas (we should be above Mexico in that table btw). We'd have beat Panama 11 v. 11 --it was not going to be easy though, there's no big gap. So, if we're #30 in the world in player strength, does it mean Berhalter did extraordinarily well by getting us among the Top 16 in Qatar?
Oh that is HUGE. You have no idea. Soccer is only as big in a country as the local leagues (notice the plural) are.