Warning. Since the USMNT is out of the World Cup, we will shut the site down for 24 hours.

Klinsmann would've coached the T&T game in your scenario. He'd totally lost the team at that point. The loss yesterday was not a fluke. USA was awful the majority of the qualification and the coaching was atrocious, yesterday included.

You are worried about the World Cup elimination? Seriously?

You're lucky if you make it to Christmas.

Yes, Rooney comes across as a fairly unlikeable, unintelligent man, who has not reached his full potential due to "lifestyle" issues, but hearing him talk about how he practices is pretty interesting. He will set up situations where one defender is there, one defender is there, the goalkeeper is there, the ball comes in from this direction and lands there and then work through a range of things that he could do. Then he does the same again with the defenders or the ball in a slightly different place. Repeat for hours per day.

Find myself agreeing with many posters. The fact that other sports take the best athletes does weaken your team. The fact that kids don't spend hours per day playing means that your top players aren't as good as they could be. Same argument applies in reverse for women - it's only recently started to be taken seriously as a women's sport in much of the world. Still, with the resources available, there is no way that a competently run US team should be failing to beat places like Trinidad & Tobago or Panama.

Geography class wrote:

The crossover with basketball skills is vast. Both favor coordination, quickness, agility, endurance, and importantly thousands of hours of skill specific practice starting at a young age to master (for short basketball players). USA is sacrificing most of it's potential soccer talent to almost exclusively supply all the short players in the NBA and college bball.

It's really hard to imagine two sports with less intersection. The crossover with basketball skills is almost nil.

To begin with, essentially nobody in the NBA is shorter than 6'2 (a handful of point guards). Almost nobody playing in the first division in Spain, Italy, England, France, etc. is that tall ... Look at Messi, Xavi, Iniesta ... runts. Even Ronaldo is only 6'1.

Soccer requires tremendous skill with the feet and absolute non use of the hands. Basketball requires tremendous hand eye coordination.

Soccer requires a decent level of purely aerobic fitness. Basketball requires very short range quickness and jumping ability.

Mud Duck Grant wrote:

The world powers in soccer do little else in the way of team sports other than soccer. Their BEST athletes play soccer. The best US athletes play American football and basketball and many of them play baseball and even ice hockey. You have to go waaay down the list before you get to soccer.

Worldwide probably the biggest team sports after soccer are basketball, rugby and cricket.

The world powers in soccer are: Germany, Brazil, Italy, Spain, France, Argentina, and, if one is in a generous mood, England.

Spain, France, Argentina, and Brazil all have strong basketball teams and produce a lot of top tier talent. Spain has probably the second best professional basketball league (where do you think Porzingis started his career?).

France, Argentina, Italy, and England all have important rugby sides. England and France have major professional rugby leagues.

England has a strong cricket team and the major professional league.

The only country with strong soccer that your reasoning might apply to is Germany which is pretty bad at everything else, although they are good at team handball (like the rest of the European soccer powers).

I went to high school with Sunil Gulati: Cheshire High '75.

I had to look at a pic to make sure it was the same person when he became a prominent name in soccer.

British Fan wrote:

Yes, Rooney comes across as a fairly unlikeable, unintelligent man, who has not reached his full potential due to "lifestyle" issues.

At 18 he was incredible, at 28 burnt out, if he had Fit Ronaldo's work ethic rather than Fat Ronaldo's, maybe it would have been different.

"I was thinking about this. A lot of it was just bad luck. Think about our schedule. Two of the team's closest to us end up playing some of their toughest games that have already qualified and don't need to try."

Is this supposed to be a joke?

Our schedule? Every team plays 10 matches. Against 5 teams, home and away. After 10 games, the points are added up. You can't get a more equitable schedule than that. It doesn't matter what order you play the teams in because the only result that matters is how many points you have after 10 matches. We finished 5th in a 6 team league.

We only won 3 games out of 10 in the easiest qualifying region (Oceania doesn't count) in the whole world. We lost to Trinidad. The last placed team who had lost their last 6 qualifiers. A team who picked youth players who play in the local league, which is basically a semi-pro league. We couldn't even get a draw against them.

Did the 24 hour shut down already happen? thanks.

If you are focusing on only the top level of the sports of basketball and soccer, you are correct. However the top levels and how much cross over there is means NOTHING in this argument.

We are talking about all the above average athletes, the guys that play JV or Varsity basketball in high school but lack the ability to play beyond that. Plenty of those guys are in the right size range for a professional soccer player but because of the lure of basketball, they put all their eggs in that basket pretty early on. Therefore, they never give soccer a try. If you've ever watch high school basketball, there are tons of 5ft 8in to 6ft 0in guards that pour everything they have into that sport, have great athleticism and quickness, but just don't have enough size to bridge the gap to the major college level. Tons of those guys could have great undeveloped soccer talent. That's where the US loses out.

Just goes to show, no country can be the best at everything (although the US gets pretty dang close to it.)

Actually, you should do a google search of the current German men's national team roster.

The comparison I would draw, though, isn't so much about the specific athletes who play this sport or that sport as about the DEVELOPMENT of the athletes you have available.

Both basketball and soccer require, physically, an extraordinary combination of gross and fine motor skills, which take years to develop. But the cognitive development is even more apropos. A good point guard in basketball, like a center in hockey, has to be able to make immediate decisions based on his perceptions of everything else happening simultaneously on the floor/rink/pitch. Their most important tool is their brain. Soccer, played well, by professionals, is an ebbing, flowing chess match with opportunities momentarily opening and then getting shut down by counter moves. Concentration, understanding and speed of recognition are key for everyone on a soccer pitch -- not just coordination, speed, agility and endurance, etc..

Ultimately, what is required to excel is both a natural talent or affinity and a kind of obsessive immersion in the sport starting from an early age. If you start too late, you can develop physical tools, but won't fully develop the neurological ones. It is like, if you don't start playing baseball early enough, you'll never be able to hit a curve ball.

"800 dude" posted a while back about "islands" in the US, like St. Louis and New Jersey, where kids are getting this sort of immersion. If so, thank god for New Jersey. Which is a sentence I have never before written.

Agreed.

I'd like to add one point that I feel is at the core of it all:

People can become great at what they love. Just loving it or wanting it is not enough though. All these factors people talk about 10000 hours physical ability and recognition etc. apply.

In the US people put their kids on travel teams etc and their kids like soccer. But you have to truly love soccer to have a chance to be great. The US has a crush on soccer not a lifelong consuming passion. The US loves winning. But first it has to love soccer nationally to harness its human potential.

It is changing now though as more kids grow up watching their parents in cerveza liga etc.

Needing just a tie it is stunning that Arrogant Arena refused to play 5 backs 4 mids and a striker. Any other World Cup coach would have packed it in and said we will take the tie and advance. T&T is not a scoring team. arena left Bradley on an island and allowed T&T to use speed between the 18s to have a shot at this game. It must have overjoyed the T&T coach to see that.

I think what's being lost is that it's not the best "athletic talents" who matter in soccer. It's clear looking across the world at the best teams that it's not just the quickest, or strongest, or smartest players who make it. To be a top player you had to develop a certain level of technique, which takes years of practice. If you have excellent technique, you can make it. And that's where the US is most lacking. A player with good technique can survive even if he is slow, or weak, lacking in creativity, or lacking in stamina. A player without technique though, doesn't matter if you're big, fast, clever, or can twat the ball really hard, it just isn't going to work for you at the top level. If we had a technically developed team, it wouldn't matter if they were our "second tier" athletes, they could still be reasonably successful

wejo wrote:

Clearly we're not good enough, but it shouldn't be that hard. We have MLS players...

Do you understand how bad the MLS is? I cant even watch it's so bad. Soccer just isn't America's thing. Im pretty confident I could walk onto a MLS team if I trained for maybe 1-2 years and in another couple I could make the national team. And I haven't played competitively in over 8 years. I've played with people on Olympic development teams and outclassed them by far. The kids who go that path aren't even that good at soccer. They just have parents who have the money to support travel teams.

This is exactly right. There are about 40 Americans 6'1" or under in the NBA, including several all stars. Tens of thousands of average sized Americans try for these jobs and fail.

There is one Brazilian in that category and zero short guys from the other "powerhouse" basketball and soccer nation's back woods mentioned.

Agreed. So many US players in the national team and MLS are technically deficient. They receive the ball with their head down, take a couple of touches to control the ball and then finally start thinking about what to do with the ball. Slow motion. There is no purpose in possession, the players take too long to get the ball under control and they don't think about what they want to do with the ball before they receive it.

A surprising number of people think if we just put really fast, strong guys out there and smash the ball down the field and let the fast guys run onto the ball and score, we'll be world champions. Because (depressingly) that's how much of youth soccer in the US is played (MLS teams often play like this too). The problem is top level soccer is not played like that. Technique, one touch play, tactical awareness and creativity are the hallmarks of top players and teams. US soccer is lagging way behind on this crucial skills.

kisa wrote:

wejo wrote:

Clearly we're not good enough, but it shouldn't be that hard. We have MLS players...

Do you understand how bad the MLS is? I cant even watch it's so bad. Soccer just isn't America's thing. Im pretty confident I could walk onto a MLS team if I trained for maybe 1-2 years and in another couple I could make the national team. And I haven't played competitively in over 8 years. I've played with people on Olympic development teams and outclassed them by far. The kids who go that path aren't even that good at soccer. They just have parents who have the money to support travel teams.

MLS can be dire to watch. Endless long balls. Crazy fouls. Players unable to control the ball properly. Most of the creativity and technique on display in MLS comes from non-US players. When you watch an David Villa or Giovinco they look like they are playing a different sport than the other players.

wejo wrote:

Unbelievable. US lost to Trinidad (the worst team in the region) .

Not at all true. Trinidad actually tied for 10th out of 41 CONCACAF teams.

You dont lose andres iniesta to basketball.

Think how different are the 100m and the 10k. Basketball and soccer are more different. One is hand eye coordination, jumping, and lateral quickness, the other is all with feet, requires poqer in the legs, some aerobic fitness talent ....

All that matters for the wc are the elites.

The us overemphasizes raw athleticism and ignores technical skill and tactical awareness.

The model soccer player should be andres iniesta or someone similar.