"The Greatest Team You've Never Heard Of"

After today's loss and the men's overall performance at the Word Cup last year, I think for future cycles Nike should skip the ad campaigns all together.

 

Even if they had won the WWC, the hubris of Nike's ad campaign would not have been justified IMHO.

But hey, maybe now Nike can sponsor the USWNT's "victory" tour with a new them: You got served!

(joking, don't hate)

 

Just to be clear, Nike is at fault for the horrible advertising campaign. USSF went along with it. I don't blame the USWNT or the players for that even though I posted on these boards that I didn't like Mitts comments. The loss was a team loss that was created from poor coaching. We are getting a lot of overlapping threads with the new attention to the WNT.

 

No, the hype was justified back then. Remember who was ranked #1 and undefeated in over 40 games coming into the Cup? Not Germany of Brazil. The #1 ranked team in the world can go by that moniker "the best team." But not until they earn it back, if ever. We need another Overbeck or two, plus a couple more Wambach's.

 

In the second half Ryan brought on an African-American player (name escapes me) who looked and moved like an Offensive Lineman.

If the future of the USWMNT are players like her and the similarly-framed (and moving) Abby Wambach -- who appeared to be lifting hot dogs as preperation for this World Cup -- then the inevitably is that we are no longer the dominant power in the sport.

Think about this.

Marta is only 21, and has already broken Mia Hamm's WC goal scoring mark.

Do we see female athletes like Marta on this squad, coming up through the ranks? Moreover, do we even see players on the men's side with such fluidity?

The glaring fact is that the best athletes, men and women, play this sport in other countries all around the world. Until the finest athletes in America choose soccer as their professional pursuit, as opposed to the other major sports, we'll always be middle-of-the-road.

As for the NIKE campaign, well....look.

I love NIKE's tremendous support for soccer in this country since they jumped in with a blank check in 1994. I always thought that NIKE being the official supplier of the USNT was one of the few cool things to be proud of as an American company on board - a perfect fit just like Umbro for England, or Adidas for Germany.

But their ad campaigns Stateside are shambolic.

Last summer in Manhattan's Herald Square, they put up a massive poster featuring Beasley, Donovan, and E.Johnson. They appeared to have the fragile bodies of 13-year-olds yet were striking the typical arms-wrapped, stare-down pose.

The rest that summer was, as they say, history.

As is this one.

 

There needs to be a shift in player evaluation away from the "Biggest" (literally) to the most-skilled.

 

Back then? Back then was a few months ago when Nike started the campaign. There were even a few people on these boards complaining about it then. We even made fun of Nike's horrible justification that made the entire thing worse.

You can't be serious...

You're comparing Ellertson to Wambach? Ellertson was probably the quickest and fastest player on the field. There isn't one type of player. Top athletes come in different sizes and have different strengths. They all won't be fast and they all aren't sticks with muscles.

Are there many athletes like Marta coming from anywhere? I wish there were more like her, but she is one of a kind. An athlete with her talent is rare. Also, just because a person is athletic doesn't mean they will fit the sport. Not every track star will be a good football player. Ask TCU.

The best athletes around the world play the sport that fits them. What if our best offensive-linesmen played soccer? Believe it or not, they are some of our country's finest athletes.

Beasley is relatively small. I'm not going to defend Donovan. Eddie Johnson is 6'. I honestly think that was a case of you seeing what you wanted to see. I'm not going to try and make a correlation between Nike and the success and failure of US soccer. I'm not defending Nike. I didn't like the ad campaign for the women this year, but their ad campaign for the men especially wasn't even on my top ten complaints. How about the actual design and feel of the uniform?

 

Here's a great quote from an AP columnist today:

"Still, just like the men, the women suffer from the lack of a real soccer culture here. The women don't lose nearly as many topflight athletes to other sports, but like the men, nearly all of them begin playing soccer in organized leagues, taught by volunteers just learning the game themselves.

"The coaching gets better as players advance through the national team ranks, but there's no substitute for the imagination players develop playing countless pickup games in narrow alleyways or on tiny, dirt-encrusted fields, where the ability to improvise or anticipate a quirky bounce is everything.

"For more than a decade, the U.S. women's superior athleticism was enough of an advantage to win nearly every time out. But a number of the other top national teams closed that gap in recent years, and their women developed an understanding of how to play together that the U.S. team displays only occasionally.

"Most of the time, the Americans' offensive strategy consisted of kicking the ball long and down the middle of the field, relying on striker Abby Wambach to retrieve it, then beat several defenders, usually single-handedly."

 

Of course a soccer culture would help and I have a lot of problems with the strategy utilized by the team, but I don't think imagination and creativity are exclusive to or dependent on poor conditions. Go back in time and replace the baseball fields with soccer fields or the basketball courts with places for soccer and that doesn't fix things now. While there are expensive teams and methods for people to play soccer in the US, not everybody is coming from the same background and environment. Not all of the top players are going to come from the bottom or the top.

You might like this quote from Coach Ryan:

 

You might like this quote from Coach Ryan:

So why can't we get the whole package? If we know what it is, such as speed, skill, savvy, able to play in both directions and do well with set pieces, why aren't we out looking for players that do this instead of bringing in players that do one or two of the things and attempt to skate by on the others? I know players like that must exist in the US, we've seen them before. Why can't we get them now?

 

Those are the real questions everybody wants to know the answers to. The players are out there and many of us have seen them. Some of them are even on the NT.

 

Shut up! They are not! That's a myth coaches tell their middle school teams to give them hope! If you say their names five times while looking in a mirror I've heard they show up!

 

We have more professionally coached women than the next 4 countries put together. We spend more money per player than any country in the world. Here's the facts: Economic exclusivity drives our player selection process. We as a country like it that way. The club soccer mafia ensures that it will stay that way. Enjoy it. Life is not fair but at least in Brazil the system casts a wide net that ensures more of a meritocracy that the upper middle class segregation of our player pool.

 

Brazil is the anti-USA. The people who are less likely to accept women's soccer are the upper-middle and upper class in Brazil. That's too bad... or maybe it's too good. What if the money and investment in women's soccer in Brazil happens like a lot of posters say is necessary for them? Will they fall of like the US team has? For the most part, this has worked for basketball(FIBA did us in, but now we're back) and baseball. For the US to succeed in the future, we need to invest in women's soccer abroad. It may actually be cheaper than bombing them too.

 

I think that idea was suggested in the PBP thread at halftime.

 

This is also why we need a pro league back - that will eliminate some of the inherent biases you describe above for players to get 'discovered'.

 

Nike also brought us that "Dan and Dave" fiasco.

Whoops!


More like "The Worst Coached Team You Never Heard Of Until 48 Hours Ago."

 

I disagree...we already built the bombs.

 

Thanks to Title IX?

Flannigan sockpuppet?

 

Not to threadjack, but that was actually Reebok.

 

I agree Brazil WNT is one team I didn't expect to go this far.
Congrats!