The Coming ‘Golden Generation’ Will Not Accomplish What the 2002 Team Accomplished

Then there is Maradona punching the ball into the net, Lampard having a ball 2 yards over the line and the goal not being given, Sol Campbell having a perfectly good goal chalked off that to this day is a mystery, Koeman blatantly pulling down Platt in the area and only suffering a free kick OUTSIDE the area and bloody yellow card!

You think England are 'lucky'! And to think ze Germans feel hard done by with that questionable hand ball!

 

This is a pretty delusional take.

Portugal didn't respect us.

Korea might have had some favorable refereeing that tournament.

Shit the bed against Poland and needing another result to get out of the group couldn't be considered luck, especially when it meant a tournament favorite failing. Whoops, hanging on to beat Portugal doesn't look as impressive.

Mexico didn't respect us they had been dominating us for years.

Not even going to try on the Germany game. This one has reached mythical levels. Great game, but the interpretations are crazy.

 

Remember the time @bsky22 put salt in his coffee instead of sugar and blamed MLS?

That was the same day MLS forced him to stub his toe on the bottom of the bed.

 

Your on a roll exaggerating just about everything. Keep it up!!!!

 

Luck is such a big part of sports results. Any time anyone takes issue with the notion that luck matters about almost any sports performance, I know we're on different planes and should just ignore each other for our mutual sanity.

That's true even about a league setup. (Liverpool's 97 points in 2019 is still third-best in Premier League history, right?) In a tournament with three group games and four knockout games, with spot kicks to settle ties... if you think luck doesn't play a big role we should just stick to enjoying different conversations.

 

Is this like when you claimed Berhlater had done a great job building a program going forward?

Even your facts aren't completely correct. We didn't destroy Portugal and were lucky they didn't wake up until the second half. A young player award really doesn't have much to do with the team performance, and as we would see with LD throughout his career, he could be just as unimpressive as impressive. Once Germany adjusted to him he was quiet for the rest of the game.

Portugal didn't show up for the tournament, but we know you are going to go on about that.

I can't think of a bigger controversy than SK making the semis since we started participated in the WC.

So it is also facts, that teams play from game to game was uneven, and the Portugal, SK, and Mexico games not be as impressive in light of the circumstances.

 

Not trolling, but not going to listen blowhards act like it went down differently than it did. Best WC we have ever had, but barely got out of the group and played a team we were familiar with in the round of 16s that didn't respect us.

The selective nature in which people provide context around here is nuts.

Are you even familiar with how SK made the semis? You didn't really think the SK team we struggled with was really going deep in this tournament, did you?

 

Just stashing a comment I wrote on another site where I can find it later on....

Golden Generation is just a stupid term for a country of 300M+ where the sport has been making incremental inroads for half a century. Our baseline assumption should be that each generation will be better than its predecessor, until we reach some sort of structural limit where soccer just can't get any more popular for talented young sportsmen to take up as a calling. I don't think we're there.

The GG term made a tiny sliver of sense for Belgium, Portugal, Uruguay, or Croatia, all small countries where the sport is quite entrenched and the notion is they have to depend on dumb luck enough to have a bunch of their best players come along and compete with much larger countries. Even so I recall Portugal spoke of a "golden generation" in 2002 with Figo & Co.... until we beat them, then an 18-year old from Madeira broke into the team the following year, and suddenly it looks silly to call the 2002 generation golden.

GG should be a historical designation. There's too much uncertainty to use it ahead of time, especially on a trajectory like the US where you should expect to be improving regardless.

 

In the past, our players would usually peak later than most since most of our national team players were not turning pro until they were in their 20s. Christian Pulisic started a trend of players who can compete at clubs in top leagues as teenagers. We now have MLS academies and more players than ever at top European academies. With the Golden Generation stuff, I think people are assuming our players are going to make the same massive jumps that players in the past did. But, a lot of our young players might already be near their peak, especially with the extensive injury histories some of the players already have.

 

This "golden generation" got unlucky in the copa america... weah's red card, ref letting panama take free shots at turner, missed offside goal against uruguay. The 2002 team got lucky in the world cup... donovan's fluke goal against portugal, missed o'brien handball against mexico, losing to poland.

The red card thing is getting to be a bit of a disturbing trend... these euro players like dest and weah maybe think their names are too big to deal with concacaf sh*thousery and they get angry and lash out at players from "smaller" nations using gamesmanship and the dark arts.

 

Weah's slap had the ring of a Karen going "do you know WHO I am?" Makes one wonder what Miller told him to get him that mad. Maybe "after 1250 minutes in Serie A even I would have scored one"?

 

I don’t buy that the team got unlucky. They just were not up for it. Some players actually gave it their all, but as a group they were not ready.

That was on Gregg.

 

Luck vs. skill is a false dichotomy.

First, statistical "luck" is a mix of actual dumb luck and aspects of play that we can't measure (yet). I don't know which team wants it more or has developed more "clutch" ability, if that even exists. I can tell you even if they both want it the same amount, it's the nature of randomness that your best performance doesn't always show up when it does you the most good.

Second, of course the team could have played better after Weah's red. This is the false dichotomy. Because samples of data from competitive intl matches are small, we have to place great emphasis on imperfect measures like "How did we play for 70 minutes a man down against an inferior but non-joke opponent?"

Third, it's sometimes right to replace a coach who's gotten unlucky. Leeds was 14th in goal difference when they fired Jesse Marsch. Had they kept him, there's a good chance the players would keep losing confidence. The fans would have revolted. It's likely their performance would have degraded from 14th.

I don't think our 2026 chances were doomed under Gregg, in a vacuum, but the surrounding context matters. Dropping off a cliff of negativity before a major tournament would be really bad. So a change was in order.

 

We played a Portugal team that was given both the 7th highest odds to win the thing before the draw and the eve of the tournament. They were not the favorite. They were considered 7th favorite. Facts. A talented team that did not gel at all during the tournament. We played well in the first half. Not total domination but it was clear Portugal was not in the proper gear, they were taking us lightly and we got at least one very lucky goal. They woke up in the second half and we were chasing the game and hanging on for dear life.

South Korea was a difficult opponent in that they were the only team every bit as fit as us…if not more. The Poland match was a shit sandwich. Mexico was a familiar opponent who was better than us from a technical standpoint but whose style suited us perfectly to play counter. And Germany was a gritty performance that we very easily could have won. One of my favorite US matches ever. But that German team was also the 7th favorite (as co w Portugal going into the tournament).

We accomplished a great deal in that tourney, but we were very fortunate to make it out of the group stage. It was overall an odd tourney: no Dutch, a German team that made it all the way to the final that actually a very subpar German side (see: qualifier v ENG), France (w Zidanes injury in particular) being very flat, a group of death that featured pre-draw odds makers 1 (ARG), 4 (ENG), 9 (Nigeria) and 10 (Sweden) which knocked out ARG, some questionable officiating that went Korea’s way v Italy and ESP and BRA and ENG facing one another in quarters. It was a tourney that unfolded strangely due to draw, qualification, and bigger team health and form in such a way that outsiders could go deeper than normal.

We can compare the current team to 2002 all day long, but when we do so, we should never ignore two critical changes:

1) overall fitness advancements in the game. Our calling card was our work rate. We can no longer substantially out work teams because fitness has improved across and there is a practical ceiling that nearly all teams a very close to today. That was the big on field advantage we had 20 years ago. Fitness really took off when Germany rebuilt for 2006 not happy with how they played in 2002 and general fitness/speed enhancements in bigger leagues as quality of talent consolidated in those leagues.

2) The second is technology’s enhancement of film study. The international game is far more simple than the club game tactically, but planning is still important. A lack of information on the opponent for both teams introduces uncertainty, which favors the underdog on average. I can get more information on any Portuguese opponent in that group today from my sofa than Portugal could then. It would be much, much easier to develop pre match wrinkles to neutralize 2002 Donovan and Beasley (for example)today.

The 2002 team had a great run. They were a bit lucky wrt meeting who they did in the form they were in. But we played very well overall with what we had. But neutralize the work rate advantage due to modern training a match requirements everyone has adopted and make film more accessible to analyze player tendencies at the national team and club level and the US 2002 team would have had a lot going against them.

I’m not happy with where we are. From a talent perspective, there aren’t 20 teams with better talent than us today. Maybe not even 15. We probably can’t say that about any pre-2022 WC cycle, but a couple of facets playing a one if the most talented 10 or so teams in the world can no longer be exploited the way they could be back in the day.

 

This may well be true, but I think an important caveat is that, in addition to the 15ish teams that have better talent than us, there are probably 15ish teams that have comparable talent. And in that band, how well a team performs is meaningfully dependent on the distribution of talent, including injury status. All things being equal, a team with one very good player at each 11 roles will beat a team with 11 very good midfielders and a team with with 9 very good and fully healthy players will beat a team with 11very good players if 6 of those 11 are injured on match day.

 

Absolutely. Teams need form, fit and cohesion. And you need sound tactics that allow you players to do what they do best without asking them to do as much of what they’re not good at. Thats the majority of cohesion.

And somewhat to your point, this list is pretty instructive: https://www.transfermarkt.us/statistik/weltrangliste

Norway is sitting 11th on the team value rankings table because two players have a combined estimated value of EUR290 million. Transfer value doesn’t perfectly equate to match value due to things like age affecting transfer value and all of the things you mentioned. But it’s a decent indicator of where we are.

We are much better than we were at any point in terms of talent. The tactics and cohesion leave something to be desired obviously. But the idea that 2002 was something these players could not duplicate is wrong headed. Based on odds, the 2002 group would be to a group containing the 2022 editions of Portugal, S Korea (neutral setting rather than at home) and Serbia. Getting 4 points with a poor loss v Serbia. Then beating the 21st best team by pre-draw odds to win the 2002 tournament (which strangely is about where MEX was in 2022), then losing a well played match to a team roughly equivalent to a BEL, POR, NED in the quarters. And probably having a pretty significant fitness work rate advantage and having greater familiarity with our opponent tendencies than they had of ours outside of MEX.

It was a WC quarterfinal and we’re not where we should be at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, but it was a WC quarterfinal in a completely different competitive era. We can’t compare the teams without contextualizing the eras. We can’t hope to outwork teams in this era, nor do we have as many surprises to offer.

 

The international game requires intelligence. Smart players adapt fast, and do better, considering they only spend three or four weeks per year, total, with the NT.

Smart players also tend to have leadership positions within their clubs. It's natural for the others to defer to them. And smart is of course relative, since they are competing.

The main issue is that I don't see any particularly smart players with this bunch. Maybe Adams, but that's about it. Keep in mind it's relative and to succeed in sports you need some smarts.

PS: Ream also comes across as a notch above but he belongs to the previous generation.

 

I think the leaders in this group are Pulisic, Adams, Jedi and McKennie, possibly Weah and Dest on their day. We lack a 25 year-old Ream type who can command the defense and a reliable striker. But Pepe is 41 so maybe Ream will still be around in 2026.

 

I do not like our chances if we still need to start Ream in 2026.