Let's Be Real: USA Men's Soccer will never be as good as the best teams in the world

Maybe if the US players stop worrying about which social justice armband they are wearing that day, they would actually beat a country 20 times smaller

Imagine believing this.

All true. The US doesn’t need to pull a single elite athlete from another sport for soccer to be a powerhouse.
I bet you could take the kids from a single US state like Florida and have them coached and developed by European coaches and they would grow up to beat the US men’s team made up of the whole rest of the country.

The problem with this hypothesis (and it's one I heard a lot in the 90s) is that the best talent doesn't come out of South America. It comes out of structured European development programs. England is way ahead of Brazil in developing elite players. And the thing about these programs is that they actually foster creativity because coaching science has developed a lot in the last 30 years. It's planned, it's intentional, but it isn't stifling.

are you serious, best athletes doesn't count? do you not watch mbappe? i was picking up some of my assists in D3 just flat sprinting past people with track speed. which is how i am on this site, i did track too.

no, the US used to be able to get some cheap goals just running past teams or scoring headers off set pieces. at some point this became passe.

what they are trying to do right now is be city or 2010 spain without their technical level. i am fine with you working to improve skill levels on the side. i think it's silly to try and win by skill alone when you aren't even close to the best skilled team. como te gustan las manzanas? trying to remove the athleticism and win against teams with athletes -- like panama does -- when you aren't actually much more skilled, is a recipe for mediocrity.

i used to love playing slow semi-technical teams. you just run by them and they usually have exaggerated ideas how much more skiled they are.

it's a running sport meets a skill sport. i have no idea why we switched from running to skill before actually creating superior skilled kids to use.

i mean, spain, barcelona in particular, those kids are trained up since U5 to play the way they used to. they don't show up at adult pro team barcelona dribbling circles. they worked on that for years.

this is what happens when you mimic barca, de-emphasize athletes, and aren't superior skill yet. or city. city doesn't have the player it wants, it opens a checkbook and buys one from free agency or transfers. we kind of have to work within what actually exists with the right passport. we cannot afford aspirational tactics. we need to play what fits the current player pool as they were developed.

wrong. buzz. last 2 times we played england in world cups we tied. you are conflating "english league" -- bolstered by billions of dollars in foreign players -- and what is actually domestic, which played berhalter's US 0-0 in qatar. and tied us in 2010.

england is adored by some fans because their teams are on network tv and their decentralized, rights-driven development scheme fits our affection for capitalism.

do you know what actual finalist france does? they centralize. they have a central camp for all their best kids. clairefontaine. regardless of if they are PSG or OM in age group ball. they train part of the year together at a camp. we used to do this with bradenton. but we decided to save a buck and imitate england. and we now see how that's turned out.

the problem with a lot of these theories is the vast majority of US/MLS academy teams are clueless. our local one is worse than traditional club. the last kid who could start for the first team MLS team from the academy was a good chunk of a decade ago.

there are a few good MLS academies like dallas who have produced several national team guys. richards, mckennie, etc. but i am sorry i don't buy this is superior to one residential setup that used to routinely churn out beasleys and donovans with the side benefit of they had played together and looked like it.

i'm sorry but if we're gonna imitate what wins, it's not england. it's argentina -- and you were dismissive of south america -- and france.

look, i am not anti-skill. i constantly worked on skill. i think the US is more skileld then ever.

we are conflating training for skill with the premise of the overall scheme. my deal is the current scheme is premised on high degree of skill which we don't have. it's a wish. most teams don't pick systems for wish fulfillment. they look at, what can my adult players do now. and they do that.

most sports teams do not design their scheme around i wish we were more x, so let's play a style that suits x players. they either already have x players, or they are pro teams that can spend money and sign x players.

put differently, in track terms, when i showed up to TF i wished i knew how to throw javelin. and i could maybe have even been a pretty quick miler. maybe if i invested 4 years with a willing coach, who knows. but i'd been trained as a sprinter and hurdler. so that is the obvious direction for me which is about current reality instead of "i wish." the US right now is an "i wish" team losing because it's no longer designed to maximize the actual players on the team.

Vee Eye Tee...who are you? I know you said you played, but did you ever coach the game? fIf not, you should! You're knowledge of the game is really, really good.

I played D-1 soccer and coached it after college. My brother played high level D-1 soccer (Top 25 level program). I showed him this thread and he said "That dude knows the game"

This is true and most of the issue with USA soccer.
Our youth coaches blow. Our pro coaches blow. We don't develop talent. It's "pay to win" for slightly better coaches where talent STILL isn't developed.

Think about our recent squad

Musah - Grew up in Italy and England

(Jedi) Robinson - Born and Grew up in England

John Brooks - Born and Raised in Germany. Has never spent more than 2 consecutive weeks in America

Sergino Dest - Born and raised in the Netherlands

Gio Reyna - Grew up in England (moved to US at like 9 and moved back abroad at like 16)

Jesus Ferreira - Grew up in Colombia (moved to US at like 12-13)

Carter-Vickers - First stepped in America at 18 (Born and raised in England)

Malik Tillman - Born, raised, lived in Germany for his whole life.

Alex Zendejas - Moved to USA from Mexico at like 12

Folarin Balogun - Moved to London at 2 and lived there since.

Just proves that so much of our talent is raised abroad. Until we start seeing some real improvements in youth development, our team will be unable to compete with top teams globally.

argentina won the world cup what are we saying they can't develop players. the real problem is their countries are broke and their domestic teams can't afford huge salaries and so anyone any good gets exported to the US, mexico, or europe, in part so their payroll checks quit bouncing. as i understand it the game down in brazil and argentina is to sign contracts you don't really honor well, then even it up when they sell your contract to europe. that's as big a reason everyone leaves as anything else.

No one cares.

Until you realise it's not Soccer but Association Football then you don't have a hope.

pulisic played traditional club. maybe one guy off your list played well last night with money on the table. some of them like brooks and zendejas are literally cut. bluntly, your list reflects berhalter's selection biases.

half the problem right now is who this coach picks. i don't buy it's our best people. i think after years of the same guys over and over it's taken for granted but no one has roster competition they have to fend off to prove it.

everyone loves weston. weston doesn't play big games other than mexico well, gets beat on defense all the time. jedi and dest can't defend and their attacking upside disappears against better teams.

there is some good youth talent coming up, figueroa's kid, cole campbell at dortmund. if this coach stays i expect them sandbagged just like reyna, weah, and richards were.

personally i think klinsmann, while an astute scout of talent his first cycle, did us a horrible disservice by promoting this euro-snobbery stuff. we now have a team as you say full of kids trained there or playing there, often at big name teams........and so what.

i bluntly think people have confused "development" someplace with "signing" someplace. it's the difference between reyna and pulisic and donovan coming up through age groups, and someone like aaronson's brother being sent straight into a first team and then shipped out on loan. a lot of americans in europe are on loan to a second team precisely because past about age 19 or 20, they aren't going to send you to the academy to be taught, they are paying you to show up and have the goods. in which case pretending like they are being developed there is nonsense.

eg pepi was developed here. when he signed in germany and holland, it's to play with their starters on saturday. he rises and falls more on whether DALLAS did its job.

Totally disagree.

You use England as your example? Really?

The reason English soccer maintains some relevance is actually something that I mentioned. It's the sport that kids are playing at lunchtimes, afterschool and in playgrounds on the weekend, and in cul de sacs until dark across the country. The "structured development programs" simply collect, order and harness these developed talents and because there is so much of it, an adequate national team comes out the other end. These programs don't create the talent - they simply arrange and organize it. In England that's hardly worked as the national team, despite all the talent and arguably the best pro league on the planet hasn't won sh-t since 1966.

last point, but you understand FIFA has an 18 year old rule, right? as in, unless you are dual citizenship, i can't just go and sign in england at 16 and have them train me up. i can only go pro here. or play amateur ball here.

what recent history actually shows is these passport players and servicemen's kids from germany come and go. my theory on where bruce arena went wrong is he didn't have his own set of english kids and germans to call up. that dried up around 2015. really, based on missing the olympics in 2012, domestic development had already dried up. pulisic was the only stud for years. and to rebut your theory, there weren't a bunch of germans to save us. the older germans were the ones losing to costa rica 4-1 at their place, or to mexico 3-2 in OT, or to mexico 2-1 at the end, or to guatemala, etc.

that pipeline doesn't always flow. other countries are not in the business or providing us players. they will not make sure we have enough quality around. it's a patch. sometimes there will be more or less passport players for those patches.

since we have zero control over does dortmund magically have some amazing icelandic-american kid we can use at wing, our job is make our own. we cannot depend on fulham etc. to have schooled us up a team, and you're exaggerating how good a team they make, and whether they are prepared to integrate with our players.

dest, for example, is straight out of ajax central casting for wingbacks, and cannot defend his position to save his life. this is what happens when you outsource.

there is a narrow window where we can get a kid like richards over to a team like bayern munich, right at age 18, where he gets trained up and developed by german coaching, and played in age group ball, and brought along. year or two later and he's an asset transfer expected to show up and produce.

and the irony? the reward for guys like weah, richards, and reyna from this dumb coach is since it's hard to make PSG, bayern, or dortmund, he holds them back from making the national team because they don't have first team stats and analytics for him to read spreadsheets on. you can see how good they are on videos, but he won't call them until their pro team promotes them to the first team.

even though we have plenty of history of donovan, pulisic, green, etc. being great on our national team despite coming from germany as age group players.

we will instead pick brendan aaronson first because he's getting regular minutes for philly. even though he was cut from the same U20 team weah, richards, etc. made.

i think cole campbell and keyrol figueroa look excellent. you bring them up to the same people who hate this coach. those same people then mimic the coach and say, "but he's on dortmund's U19 team." yeah and he had 2 goals on england's kids the other day, too. so what. talent is talent. reyna looked ready to me playing U19 for dortmund. skill is skill.

so the reward system for the choice you are promoting doesn't exist. this specific coach will sandbag the ones who aren't starting in europe. and the better team you pick in europe the harder it is to play.

This is a really good post! I just want to add another point showing how that hypothesis is silly. Having other, popular, sports, is also not something that is unique for the US. Thinking it is, is just an effect of not knowing as much about other countries as your own. Its like listening to a foreign language and thinking that its just the same sounds over and over, while your own language has so many nuances, intonations, words, dialects etc.

You lost me at "US Men's soccer".It's called football.I didn't read test of the rant as the result. It's probably typical yank whinge.