Post-match: Trinidad & Tobago vs. USA - November 20, 2023

Bingo. Of course there is variation game to game and upsets happen. But we have not been the sum of our parts over the long run under GB.

 

Not at all. Spain and Germany had some of the best coaches in the world and did no better with better talent.

Its just the game. It gives underdogs more chance than many sports.

 

1) In soccer tournaments- kinda. More talent means you play better. It doesn’t mean results as a whole will be better. But a team with less talent will never win it all. A team with “enough” talent puts their hat in the ring. This dynamic of underdogs consistently having a chance is how we beat spain and got to play Brazil in a final. Its great to be the US in that scenario. Its great to be brazil. Sucks to be Spain. Where the “generally” starts to show is over mutiple competitions - where your hat gets consistently in the ring. Unfortunately for the US our multiple of tournaments are mostly weak and carry little value. Over these next few- hopefully we get one where we really show how we’ve improved.


2) Raising expectations is fine. But it takes a connoisseur of the sport to see it. Its not necessarily going to be seen in final tournament results.

 

Do you have or have you seen any analytics that supports that statement against non-minnows?

I am not questioning your conclusions I just want to understand the size of said improvements compared to past cycles.

During the 2014 cycle there were lots of analysis done on "proactive", specifically focused on WCQ. IIRC, some were published at MLSSoccr.com as part of a series. What that analysis showed was in the defensive 3rd we were much better than previous cycles, in the middle 3rd somewhat better but the attacking 3rd was around the same as previous tenures.

My eyes says that the current cycle is about the same as proactive but as we all know the eyes lie. We do appear to my eyes more calm on the ball in the middle 3rd and more press resistant especially with Musah in the middle.

 

Regarding a deep run in 2026 we are dependent on either having all our midfield healthy or finding more and better backups for them.

 

I've seen some articles in the past and it matches my impression of games I think about. I'll look for the articles and analytics when I get a chance.

 

https://theathletic.com/3974522/2022/12/06/usa-world-cup-tactics-soccer/

Would love to see that 2014 cycle stuff.

https://www.espn.com/sports/insider...-qualification-stats-defined-their-road-qatar

This has our xGD for the final round of qualifying for the past 3 cycles.

.26 - ‘14
.40 - ‘18
.96 - ‘22

 

A simple model of X number of players will turn into .00005 x X highly athletic pros is way too simple and is where the dreaded culture comes in. First off soccer is not pure athletics. There is a skill component, greatly aided by proper technique, and a very important mental aspect. The Dutch TIPS framework is a useful starting point.

That simple equation is more applicable to places with stronger soccer cultures. In ours we are losing top athletes to other more popular, more culturally important, more well funded sports. That’s an additional multiplier that must be applied. You might need to apply parts of it more strongly to the most outlier athletes.

Because the mental side of the game is so important what players think is important. Thus what they are taught to think about and how they are taught to think about problem solving are very important. The easiest analogy I’ve found is hardware and software. How good a player’s hardware can get is largely due to inherent limits, then getting instruction that harnesses it at the right age. But how that raw computing power is being put to use is quite important. Culture again plays a part here.

 

See above. In the end its just a sampling equation. How large of a sample do you need to get X amount of players who are 3 standard deviations from the mean? The more players you lose to other sports, the less "full" or "dense" your sample is of high quality athletes, then the bigger sample you need.

We do not need 14 million kids playing soccer to get the results of the Netherlands. We know that bc 14 milliion kids in the US play basketball, 15 million kids play baselball in the US, 4.7 million do gymnastics, 4 million run track, 6.5 million are in martial arts, etc etc tch.

And yet with all of those kids playing multiple sports and with all of those draws and overlaps, all of those sports consistently create hall of fame players at a level that dominates the highest professional league of that sport.

So its quite logical that when the US has 14 million kids playing soccer, they will easily offset any retention issue to not only have a VERY strong US but to have US players playing heavily in every top league in the world. We now have between 2 and 4 million (depending on your source). So what volume do we need to just be a top 4 team? To be a team where we are not a dominant producer of soccer talent but good enough to put together an XI of very very good talent? I don' tknow.

Netherlands does it with 500,000
England does it with 3 million
Spain does it with 2 million.

It completely makes sense that we can't offset all of those issues with 500,000. As many pointed out, their sampling pool will be denser of appropriate talent AND they have less of a retention issue. IT should not be 14 million kids. That's NBA and MLB level of talent production number. So somewhere in between 500,000 and 14 million. Big room for debate.

I personally think 4 million should be enough to get us to the Netherlands level but at that point its a gut/ best guess thing.

 

When all of the "talent" is not even close to their prime (meaning that they haven't actually fulfilled their talent), and there is little depth, that has to factor into how good that team actually is. Creating expectations based on how good that talent will eventually be is not a good way to create realistic expectations.

 

We disagree on what's 'realistic'. That's cool.

 

I think our expectations for 2026 should be completely different than they were in 2022 because our team won't be the youngest in the world and more talent will have developed into depth. It seems like you placed basically the same expectations on 2022 as you are for 2026.

 

Nope.

 

The NBA, the NFL, and MLB are the first choices of more of the kids who play multiple sports. A larger percentage of that 4 million (1.5m girls I’m guessing) drop out by the mid teens. 2 of those sports also reward specific physical characteristics, basketball the very tall and football the very big. If you are an elite athlete in America the economically and socially rational thing to do is to play the major American sport you are the best at. There are far more scholarships, more NIL money, athleticism translates more directly to success in two of them, and the pay will be higher.

If you are the 100th highest paid American football player you are making Jozy at TFC base salary money. The 750th highest paid football player is making $1.1m in base salary. What do we think the 750th highest paid male American soccer player makes? If you are the 200th best NBA player you are making $6.8m in base salary. The 9 guys tied for the 117th highest base salary in MLB make more than the highest paid American soccer player in history (who just took a 50% pay cut). If an American is an exceptional athlete the only rational, in the economic sense, reasons to play soccer are that you are so much better at it than other sports OR you are too small.

We have had discussions like this from time to time on the youth boards and people would say that this 4m to 500k comparison is not apples to apples. It is not the same population being measured. That the numbers for registered players reflects a lower propensity for lower level, younger, rec players to be registered in Europe. I saw a survey that said that 40% of England’s 9.9m school aged kids played football within the last week. They are not all registered. The registered players in Europe are a more serious, older, more male skewing group relative to ours. Heck Englands 4m who played in the last week are probably more regular, more serious, and more male skewing than America’s.

The amount of inputs is important but the throughput and the value added are also very important. That’s why there are some consistent variations in the capacity of countries to produce players that aren’t directly tied to population. These countries are turning their best potential soccer athletes into pros at much higher rates than us. They are adding much more value (I think Doc Rivers just came out and said he thinks they are starting to do a better job at this than us in basketball). They have a greater capacity to find and place players into serious environments and those environments are more efficiently structured to process prospects.

If we are converting the same % of potential players to pro players going from 4m to 14m gets us 3.5x what we are currently producing. Do I think the big countries each have 7 Pulisic and Reyna level talents, yes. The 9 best countries at producing soccer talent all produce players who play roughly that many more minutes for big league clubs. The distribution of their big league players’ minutes played skews significantly more towards the higher end of the global table than our pool does. With the same throughput and value added with 3.5x the inputs we become the 10th best country at producing professional soccer players, sneaking past Belgium and Denmark. However our club pedigree profile will look more like Serbia than those two and because national teams are drawn from the best that lower proportion of high end guys hurts us.

 

Good post. I think a lot of that old inferiority feelings about England and Europe still exist. My point has been that in the end its a sampling problem. We have many more inputs than other countries. We have enough inputs now to compete with other countries easily. We need a better infrastructure to get those kids through the pipeline - we need better focus on throughput to take advantage of those superior input numbers.

 

that's called "nailing it".

 

And don’t forget to add the typical BS poster/ random guy off the street post like he/she knows/could do a much better job coaching the US than an actual professional coach plucked from MLS.

 

Great point, although I like to think of myself as the exception who proves the rule.

 

Life is full of situations in which people of all levels of experience and expertise are required to develop opinions about a subject based on available imperfect information. We do it every day. Indeed, we can’t avoid doing it. We have to form beliefs in order to make choices, and we do it socially. We discuss with these evaluations of alternatives with others.

The “shut up and cheer” mantra is an empty scold. Of course we form differing opinions of players and coaches by discussing them. The “you think you know better?” rejoinder is a good ad hominem deflection when someone doesn’t have an argument-deciding substantive response.

 

Not, "Shut up and cheer," but, "Have some humility and perspective."

 

I think that American sports get a larger share of top athletes because of the larger number of very athletic Americans who play them at high levels and the larger share of people who say those sports are their favorite. What evidence do you have that this is not the case?

What is the evidence that our inputs are equivalent? That the seriousness, ages, and sex ratio of our players are the same as theirs? On that last point I found evidence saying it is dramatically more male leaning in UEFA countries.

You separate the concepts of throughput and value added because they reflect separate, important things that greatly affect outcomes.

For our purposes:
Throughput is the proportion of our raw material inputs we can process to finished products. How much value added is how much quality we can add to our inputs while processing them. It seems like you have consistently ignored this second component in your comparative evaluations of different developmental systems. It seems to be a vital component of an input size based argument. Why do we think coaches consistently say our youth club teams can hang until about age 16?

If we have much more input volume that will likely be a reflection of significantly greater societal interest in the sport which will correspond to greater investment, opportunities, and salaries. So it won’t be perfectly linear. 3.5x of our current output gets us from 25th to 10th with a club profile like Serbia but more depth.

 

I think more than anything there’s alot of areas in this country where there’s very little grassroots interest in soccer.

Obviously interest in the sport has grown tremendously over the last 30 years. But it’s still far behind sports like basketball or football. If you look at the states that produce the most professional athletes in this country you have lots of states that produce very little in the way of professional soccer players.

A lot of those places also don’t have much in the way of development infrastructure.

There’s lots we can do to improve our development system (like improving coaching education and making it more affordable and accessible). But the sorts of grassroots growth in the game that it would take to get to maximize the advantages of our population is hard and is just going to take time.

And the flip side is when you look at the elite countries, soccer is by far the most popular sport in those countries. It doesn’t have to be for us to be an elite team, but there’s got to be a lot more grassroots interest for is to better maximize the advantage of the size of our population.

 

I was very encouraged to see three players from Alabama go through the FCD academy and became pro's although that seems to have stopped now. was that an anomaly or will areas that never produced start producing players in spurts which could eventually move to a more steady flow?

 

I think we want that to become a regular occurrence as opposed to what appears to be a more fluke occurrence at current.

 

I think there are still clubs mining places like Alabama

Yes.............FCD had the higher profile homegrown signings of Servania, Richards, and Tessmann. But there have been other more recent players from Alabama at the FCD academy as well. Nichte Pickering, for instance, who's since signed a contract in the USL with Memphis. He was born in Birmingham.

With these less "sexy" states it's just about professional clubs having scouting networks to identify players. That's more of a needle in a haystack operation than in other states.

Building up the culture is just going to be a tougher road than in a place like North Texas or NY/NJ.