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

Incredible amounts of over-analysis here.

For the vast majority of the US, Soccer is a Fall sport. Any American kid with decent size and athletic ability is playing Football in the Fall by 7th grade. This holds especially true in states like Florida and Texas - where it's actually possible to play Soccer year-round. The American Mbappe is a running back, not a world-class goal scorer. We get some decent athletes playing Soccer, but nobody with any size. When we come up against a team like Germany, we're giving up 30-35 pounds a man to players who are just as fast and skilled (if not more so) as our guys. We look like a team of stick-figures compared to them. Impossible for us to be competitive.

Nobody else plays American Football, so we are unique with this size / talent drain. There's no female equivalent, so our women's team is able to be first-tier. Barring the rest of the world getting as bonkers about Football as we are, our men will always be 3rd-tier at best.

This is spot on. Not to mention fact that football (the helmet kind) is ingrained in American culture. MLS average attendance is 23k. Compare that to an Auburn - Alabama college football game which is 3x that.

Its like that even at the high school level. My kids go to HS with state champion boys soccer team and a mediocre football team. Yet when the kids meet up socially, its at the football game. Maybe its the cheerleader thing lol.

Very few HS boys, with the talent to become professional soccer players, also have the ability to become professionals in other sports. What hurts the potential for great international teams is obviously because most players switch to another sport upon entering HS.

Klopp or Guardiola. Spend the money, get the results.

US beat Pakistan in Cricket. Soccer wins are possible.

Lol. No.

1) Football is dying as a participation sport. In much of the country, JV football just doesn't exist anymore, and many schools are having to field joint varsity teams with their rivals or switch to 8-man leagues.

2) By 7th grade, any decent soccer player has been invested in the sport year-round since they were 5 or 6. This isn't the 1960s where you played every sport at the local rec center and then decided which basket to put your eggs in when you got to junior high.The only people quitting soccer for football at that point are the ones who weren't good enough to play soccer, and the only reason they have an option of switching sports is because football is desperate for warm bodies.

3) "Decent size" for a football player is too big for soccer.

4) "Athletic ability" is not one-dimensional. Soccer players at most positions need a middle distance runner's mix of speed and stamina, along with technical ability. Football demands mostly power. It's true that some people with good soccer talent can be successful in high school football, but that's mostly because the talent they're up against isn't elite. At the college level, the 150-pound running back gets obliterated. (Probably the most promising crossover athletes would be basketball point guards.)

Football games are on Friday night. It's a natural social event. It was the same at my school, even though we had 4 soccer teams (Varsity, JV-A, JV-B, 9th Grade) and one no-cut football team. That was over 20 years ago, not even in a soccer hotbed area.

Football did get a lot of soccer kids...once they realized they were never going to make varsity.

Bruh Messi is like 5'6 and he's the GOAT

I've been hearing that soccer is on the rise in the US and going to be huge for over 30 years now. Come on man. It's not going to happen. The majority of the best athletes don't play. Sure we can produce a few top guys but never more than a few at a time. We just lost to Panama and Uruguay that have a combined population that is smaller than LA County.

I hate to tell you this, but US Soccer doesn't have the money it would require to get either of these two.

They aren't exactly flush with money and there is an antitrust lawsuit against USSF related to USSF not allowing foreign league club teams to play league matches in America.

The world has caught up with the USWNT. The women’s champions league has really upped the European’s game. As we head into the Olympics there are more questions than answers. It looks bad for the US. They got by Mexico 1-0 and tied a weak Costa Rica team 0-0. On the plus side, they out shot them by 43 to 5, but only managed 1 goal. They need to hope two things happen: Swanson and Smith get their grove back in time for the Olympics and Rose Lavelle stays healthy. In general if you are taking 43 shots and only scoring 1 goal, it is for two reasons: you are forcing shots from too far out or you are forcing shots from bad angles. Lavelle gives them the best ability to attack through the middle. A lot of teams are going to run 5 player back lines, we’ve got to cut through that. Big picture, more Americans should play in Europe instead of the NWSL and the NWSL needs to revise their stance on DSD athletes. DSD athletes are taking away feature roles and big contracts from US athletes.

I know it's just a friendly with the F-list MLS team, but anyone watching the bloodbath USMNT is getting from Switzerland right now? Losing 0-4 after 37+ min!

Other posters have already hit this, but..

USA is already / can be a 2nd tier team like Belgium or Portugal.

Normally OK, but good enough to win a major tourney when they have a 'once in a generation' team.

Sure US soccer could be structured better etc., but each year more kids play, and each year our pros get better, with more playing in Europe.

Even my favorite Euro team, the Netherlands, does everything from win the Tournament to missing the qualification.

What a joy when they had the greatest generation Gullit, Rijkard, VanBasten and Koeman!!!

The US will eventually have a group like that come through. Pulicic certainly a step in right direction.

It has nothing to do with sending our "best athletes" and everything to do with soccer culture and awareness of the game. Messi would likely not be a professional athlete in any sport if he had grown up in the USA. This is a country that places a premium on height, size and speed and places zero emphasis on skill, nuance or the cerebral part of sport. I saw Iniesta in a mall once and if he was American he probably would have worked in a bank. Soccer is a complicated, nuanced sport that must be supported by the population around the players. The average taxi driver in Barcelona has a more thorough understanding of the sport than most American college coaches. The D1 women's game is a complete abomination with multiple substitutions, fouls on almost every play and mindless direct play. It is literally a different sport from what is played in the rest of the world. Thankfully, the men's game is more technical, but that is recent development, and poor referees, a lack of clarity of what style to play or how to play it, and a lack of fan appreciation and understanding will conspire to make it second rate forever. Ask T Henry what he thinks of the argument that the USA would win with "its best athletes" and he just rolls his eyes. Even raising this as an argument shows a complete lack of understanding of the game played at the elite level in Europe or SA.