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

The US is not going to be a dominant team in the way it is in basketball but in the medium-term it's perfectly possible for you to be at the level of a Uruguay, Portugal, Netherlands etc.

Hispanic migration combined with increasing interest among the black and white populations means player numbers and attention will go up.

CTE awareness will have a negative outcome for the NFL eventually, basketball almost shuts out everyone under 6 foot 2 or so, baseball has been very slowly losing ground since the 60s and the MLS is now a viable product that can aim to increase to about the size of the NHL in the next two decades or so.

1994 had a positive impact but 2026 will be even more so.

Can't see the USMNT winning a World Cup in my lifetime though.

just create a club and put short hood kids to play

if they make it big you get money as well

dont really get short black guys obsessing with basketball (theyll never make it as pros) when they could be playing soccer, which has a global market and it pays well

some rich guy needs to fund this, money will come after as FIFA contracts have to pay for clubs where kids trained before becoming pro

now its pay to play so the best talent is not there

in the us there's this idea that black people cant play soccer, it needs to change.

you get 20 years of career, can play worldwide (several americans doing this already)

US Men's Soccer has a decent roster. They need a new coach

Agree with all of this, but working against USA Soccer is the pay-to-play, private, travel club model that they tend to draw players from, which prices out far too many kids, and far too young.

I just read a peer-reviewed article that showed the women's team members come from the suburbs of affluent communities, almost exclusively on the coasts (largely California). Even with all of their success (driven by Title IX, with the rest of the world catching up), they draw from a small population within the U.S. population.

Both teams would benefit from grass-roots, low cost opportunities that grow the sport in all communities.

Soccer is way more popular amongst elementary/junior high people right now than it was 15 years ago. And I assume as this current crop grows up and has kids, those kids will be playing along with other transfers from families who didn't used to care. Basically it is increasing in popularity, and with a country of our size that will equate to a lot of people trying to be good at soccer, and we will be competitive. Croatia has been competitive and they only have 3.8 million people. It would only take about 5% of our population to be massively into soccer for us to be pretty great.

We don't have Argentina level talent and are unlikely to in my lifetime (I'm 25), but we have better than Panama level talent and lost to them and finished behind them anyway. Seeing some teams have great runs that are better than their talent level makes me wish we could see it even in 1 tournament.

The US could be a soccer powerhouse. The popularity of soccer in the US is as high as it has ever been. There are more soccer clubs than ever and great opportunities in college to further develop talent. The problem with US soccer (other than Berhalter's crappy coaching) is that the US development system needs serious reform. The US system is focused on very early identification of talent and then isolating those kids to play on elite travel teams. That means that elementary and middle school aged kids spend most of their practice time in a sink or swim environment where the emphasis is on performance in game situations. The coaches are looking for the kids who have the best speed and ball handling skills.

What all the other countries who are soccer powerhouses do is spend the early development years emphasizing mastering fundamental skills and really learning how to play positions. There is stratification based on ability. But the club system in other countries invests a lot of time in all the players to make sure everyone knows how to properly kick a ball and how to play the different positions. My son played club soccer for five years and just quit after 7th grade. His club team is one of the better ones in our area and most of the coaches have some professional playing experience. They rarely work on fundamentals and spend most of their time doing scrimmage/game simulation drills (3 v 3s, etc.). They are just trying to find out which kids should be moved up so they can have the most competitive traveling team possible. If a kid has trouble making a solid pass with the right spin that doesn't bounce out of control, they just don't get minutes in games. In every other country, the coaches would make sure that kid got to do lots of drills and got extra instruction to fill in the gap in his skills.

The result is that in other countries, the talent pool is very deep because everyone has strong fundamentals and learns how to play their positions. Then, when kids go through puberty, you see kids who weren't the fastest or strongest suddenly mature physically into a world class player. In the US system, those kids wouldn't be any good at soccer because all the minutes go to the kids who develop early.

your argument is confused. morocco, korea, turkey, croatia. these are countries that have made the semis in recent years. and usually the supposed best teams rotate in and out of being great that particular cycle. currently brazil is so trashy we tied them. some other tournament they might win it all. italy has won it all, but right now can't get to the quarters.

now, i think the winner is usually one of the elite. but a secondary point about morocco, etc. being semi teams is i think you can make the final 4 just on good but not great personnel meeting a great coach.

this is the best talent accumulation we have ever had. this is a ridiculous coach. he couldn't even win the US pro league (MLS) much less something bigger. he does not pick the best players, he has a weird idea of how to play soccer, and it takes him years to catch on to what is not working.

he has controlled who gets to play and how they are organized and subbed for 6 years now. i am not joining the chorus ripping on a bunch of kids sprinkled around some of europe's best pro teams, as though between them and a coach known for finishing middle of his pro leagues, it's the players that are the problem. you are shouting at the tv to do x y z and telling yourself these are things my coach taught me before age 18.

no, i see the problem right now is while i supported equal pay for the women, what USSF has morphed this into is we can pay the men's coach no more than the women's coach, and so we hire the best women's coach and overpay her relative to the market for any possible women's coach, and then skimp on the men's coach to match her. which is how you get a national team coach whose prior high water mark was finishing 2nd in the league championship game, at home, which his team showed up for flat as a pancake and was down for good 2-0 within 15 minutes.

historically the US has paid coaches twice what berhalter makes, which would then open up the market for the job. what we have is a pile of excuses centering around the basic idea of keeping the men's salary harshly down to avoid some nonexistent lawsuit for not paying the women's coach the same salary. i am pretty sure the current women's coach is either the highest paid women's coach ever or close to it.

I think any fan knows this, but we watch anyway. Just since 2000 there's been some great moments, like making the 2002 WC quarterfinals, upsetting World No. 1 Spain in the 2009 Confederations Cup, or reaching the semifinals of the 2016 Copa America. Trouble is the nature of the sport means there aren't so many opportunities as there are for your NFL team, etc. We've also begun to really dominate our local rivalry with Mexico as of late, when it was always no better than even and often tilted their way for most of my life.

To improve our development I think we need to convince CONMEBOL to make this 16-team Copa format permanent. The ten CONMEBOL teams get in free and CONCACAF sends six based on whatever qualifying criteria makes sense. The Nations League can continue as our CONCACAF thing and the Gold Cup can go away. Sure, CONCACAF teams looked iffy in this iteration but as mentioned, our '16 squad placed fourth (with a roster heavily tilted toward MLS instead of Europe, if you can believe it) and Mexico has also had some strong results, so this kind of thing will come and go. But we need to be playing teams of CONMEBOL quality more often.

personally i see the problem as through roughly 2011 when bradley was fired, the US was very pragmatic, not the prettiest, but sound defensively and built upon counterattack concepts. with the grander idea being we could jujitsu better teams than us by being defensively difficult and punishing mistakes. this also emphasized we had a lot of taller players and good athletes to get down the field fast.

the snob critique was always they wished we were prettier to watch, and wanted to make this more about skill and less about organization and defense. 2011 and then 2017 were used as excuses to hire coaches who wanted to play more open soccer, about skill, more end to end, less of players being chosen for defense. including people who line up with the defense.

it's a fake distinction. uruguay yesterday was a defensive beast. many great teams are. you don't tend to win world titles with weak defenses.

to me the thing has been taken over by a cult who wants to make this more of a possession team. we favor possession over actual scoring chances. this reduces the amount of goals possible. the defense is then including guys picked more for offense, so we give up goals. it's a good recipe for 1-1 games.

the irony being possession soccer peaked in 2010 with that spain team. teams figured out how to beat those type teams. we are mimicking a style for which the cheat codes are already known. you dare us to try and pass the ball through the middle playing our possession game. you intercept the passes and counterattack us the other way.

no, the irony is having abandoned tough defense and getting the ball downfield in a hurry, that's the direction international soccer has gone. teams are more willing to play kickball downfield, eg holland, or to use pure speed players eg spain now. that should suit us but we are fighting the last war mimicking what was successful in 2010 when they tighetened up foul calls and referees handed out cards for breathing on someone. anyone who watched last night knows that era is over. long over.

no, we need to either go back to what we were doing, which worked, or imitate the current ideas, or at least come up with ideas intended less as abstract exercises and more as this will thwart what great teams are trying to do. the old stuff used to work because it was designed to negate the strengths of the best teams and punish when they got too aggressive. so if you want to compete in that environment, your scheme needs to punish the over-commitments of the current era's best teams.

to me the way to beat teams that like to fast break -- the trend of the day -- is you slow the game down on defense, get back, make them play half court. and you swarm the midfield and counter them yourself for pushing so far upfield.

berhalter is not ready for that world as his possession soccer premise is built on feeling uncomfortable when you have a break, turning back, and waiting for teammates to help possess. precisely when you want to hit gas he's telling them to break. he then has created a fairly mediocre half court possession offense where few of the players are dangerous run of play, and usually from sheer effort, not running the scheme.

There's a lot of great points in here. I've said my piece plenty of times on these boards about the issues with US Soccer as it relates to the mens program.

The US will NEVER be a soccer powerhouse until USSF de-emphasizes the "pay for play" system AND develops a youth system. Right now, they have no system. There is no focus. Your system can be focused on technical acumen (a la many European teams like Germany, Holland, etc) or it can be a system focused on creativity (a la Brazil/South American teams). The differences are stout for sure but it's very, very, very hard to be both. Just pick one and enforce it from the youth levels on up. The problem is there is no continuity and no clear message from the top down.

If USSF doesn't fire Berhalter, it's another example of institutional rot and the lack of cohesion within the Federation when it comes to the mens and womens program. Last year, the women failed to make it to the quarters of the World Cup. Head coach was immediately fired and a deep, deep dive was done into the program and the entire program was re-vamped and a new HC was hired.

The men, meanwhile, perform like absolute crap, barely qualify in what should be a ridiculously easy WC qualification, get dominated (on the sidelines and on the field) in the 2nd round (knockout) of the World Cup and they decide to keep their manager. After this disaster of a Copa, if they decide to keep him, truly moronic.

One of the best sports docos I have ever seen is "In Search of Greatness" and I believe that one of the key narratives in it explain why the US team will always be globally a good team (always a borderline final 16, absolute ceiling QF) at the World Cup level.

That narrative was how in the formative years of these truly great sportspeople, unstructured play and development in not just their primary/best sport but any sport that they did was huge. Gretzky would skate around on the ice as a kid attempting passes and shots that were not even close to the coaching manual and then go home and scribble down "fantasy" plays on pieces of paper. Pele grew up in the slums of Bauru, playing barefooted on dirt until darkness. Many great NBA players were/are the same - growing up always bouncing a ball, attempting crazy shots and layups for fun and playing out NBA title winning final shot scenarios time after time on outdoor courts or driveways. Watch a tennis match with the worlds best players in it. They are always doing something cool with the ball/racket away from points - how many times do you see a guy hitting some nonchalant behind the back/between the legs little shot on a dead point? All the time - and they seem to connect perfectly with it almost always. That's a result of growing up in the sport, trying anything and everything with respect to shotmaking. The worlds great golfers all have stories about being on the range or chipping green until darkness as kids practicing flop shots and crazy recovery shots, playing each other for a buck or a golf ball.

In the US with what sports does this stuff happen en masse? What are the sports that at school lunchtimes kids are playing totally unstructured that they then compliment with structured practice later in their days and week? It's basketball, football, maybe some baseball - and it shouldn't be a surprise that this is where all the transcendent talent ends up. In South America it's soccer, in NZ and Australia it's rugby and cricket. Is it any real surprise these continents and nations dominate internationally in these sports?

The development of talent in the US with respect to soccer is just so regimented and structured it will never produce enough transcendent talent to foster a truly world elite team. It's not actually an issue of depth or quality of athlete - youth soccer here is massive, but as someone else said, this youth typically comes from wealthy white America which believes in and can afford soccer camps and development pathways/"high performance programs" that are so regimented and structured and totally curb the creative development and raw passion for the game that exists in South America, many nations in Europe and even Africa. Why has Germany failed to even make it out of the group stages at the last 2 world cups since winning it in 2014? A lot of people in Germany believe that since that win, the corresponding boost of funding and impetus on developing players in an even more highly formal/structured program actually created robots who were overly iconized and lauded which ruined the national team.

Yes the team will forever be mediocre and knockout stage appearances should be celebrated. I don't know if "mired in mediocrity" is the right term - "mired in monotony" is how I see it holistically.

"The US will never be as good as European and South American soccer teams" is true.

"Gregg Berhalter should be fired" is true.

"This year's Copa America showed how Gregg Berhalter should be fired and how the US will never be as good as European and South American soccer teams" is not true.

I'm usually not one to pin the entire blame for a tournament upon the referring system, but our last two games were somewhat ridiculous, and we honestly earned a point from both (which would have sent us through)

However, Berhalter does need to be fired in order for this team to be competitive, and USA youth soccer as a whole needs to drop the "pay to play" mindset in order to properly develop young players for their teams.

We are also at the rough crossroads where we need our players to be playing in Europe, but we also need to develop the MLS in order to develop soccer as a whole.

I don't think this team is a lost cause at all. Pulisic, Adams, McKennie, Weah, Musah, Robinson, Dest. All good players. I think Pulisic and Adams could probably start for most national teams globally, and McKennie, Musah, and Weah could start for some. We need center backs. A coach. Some depth.

The woman's team is another issue. The world has caught up and snatched our twenty year head-start, and I don't see us reclaiming it any time soon. Mark my words, USMNT will be better globally than USWNT within 20 years of today.

i keep hearing this "development" stuff. if you literally want to change how our kids are wired, you go back to age 5. you don't "develop" 25 year olds. they are fairly completed and all you can do is pick for skillsets and coach them some.

berhalter's error is thinking he can rewire the plane while it flies and plays games. and so what i am watching is he picks someone like mckennie who while sometimes productive, is sloppy as heck. and so in some key game like last night you have a sloppy mid who completes just 60% of his passes, shooting balls over the net, mis-flicking balls over the sideline, and otherwise not fitting the supposed possession scheme.

what mckennie is, is an athletic box poacher. you race downfield and send him in a cross. he crashes the box and tries to score it. that fits a counter-attack style. or a style based on set pieces. it doesn't work if you want to possess the ball. he is sloppy as heck. who tries to play possession then stocks the midfield with sloppy physical mids who can't keep the ball? it's a misfit.

i don't know if the coach is too dumb to see it's a misfit or if he's just another euro-snob who thinks you throw the best 11 CVs on the field even if they don't fit the scheme or play well with each other. it's kind of a fanboy all star team that in practice isn't well designed to work together. i mean, if i was designing an offense with jedi crossing as much as he does, i would have a striker who headed the ball well. if i want to start mckennie i need to play an offense that suits him. horses for courses, not abstract all star teams of players with the best resumes.

no, i basically agree with arena's critique of berhalter. too much analytics. not enough watching with his eyeballs. you can have reyna and wright dominate the nations league tournament and wright will barely get off the bench for copa america, and reyna will be relegated to second fiddle setting up teammates behind pulisic, who hogs the ball. the actual games don't matter enough or result in rewards or accountability. and if nothing is done to the coach over 1 win all month, against lousy bolivia, then the rewards and accountability problem goes up and up and up.

this obviously isn't working, it's just judged as an ongoing abstract project forever. we're working on it. we're working on it. etc. all you have to do is judge it in the present tense and be done with it. this was lousy and no reason we should be behind panama. and the forgotten sales pitch was this choice was to close the gap with the elites, which clearly isn't happening.

But it is not and will never be the main sport in this country. It needs to be in your blood.

There is no idea that black people cant play soccer they simply don’t want to. They are huge fans of basketball and football not soccer. They grow up idolizing basketball and football athletes and probably couldn’t name a single soccer player. Certainly not one who plays for the US.
Maybe if an American black guy comes along who becomes a star in the sport and is featured in a lot of commercials that might change but so far that hasn’t happened.

USSF was one of a handful of countries that actually put money into their women's national team. They also relied wayyyyyy to much on the college system to develop the players. It also helped that literally no African teams put money into womens soccer and well, the entire mid-east still barely (if at all) considers women as first class citizens so there is no way they'd form a womens national team.

Now that a lot of nations are pouring money into womens soccer at both the national team and club level, the USWNT seems to be playing catchup.

The "best athletes" hypothesis is silly, for a bunch of reasons.

1) There's no such thing as a "best athlete." Different sports have wildly different requirements. There's a reason, for instance, that the average size of soccer players is significantly smaller than the size of athletes in other American pro sports. Most NFL or NBA players simply can't cover the distance necessary to play most positions on the soccer field.

2) There isn't any "athletic ability" sorting going on between soccer and other sports. There may have been a time, 40+ years ago, when kids who got cut from the football team decided they'd walk onto the soccer team, but those days are long gone. Nobody is telling people they're "too athletic" for soccer, and soccer is so brutally competitive that nobody is playing it to escape the better athletes in other sports.

3) If the "best athletes" hypothesis were true, we'd expect that crossover athletes would almost always be comparatively better at soccer than at their other sport, but usually it's the other way around. Steve Nash, one of the greatest point guards in history, could maybe have played pro soccer, but there's no way he'd have been as good as he was at basketball. And that's despite playing soccer his whole life and picking up basketball late.

4) Even if we grant that there are athletes in other sports who could make great soccer players, given the absence of any sorting of top athletes away from soccer, it shouldn't matter. The US has far more youth soccer players than most countries, largely because it's just a huge country, but soccer is also a wildly popular youth sport.

The real problem is that soccer requires an EXTREME amount of training to develop high level skills. It's probably closer to tennis, golf, or gymnastics in that regard than basketball or football. We still don't have the coaching talent or infrastructure in place to develop enough prospects. Yes, we identify a handful early on and push them into a very small system of intensive preparation, but the system is too small and leaves too many behind.

Also, our national team has just chronically underperformed in recent years, at least as compared to the market value of the players. We haven't had a competent manager in over a decade.

Yeah, I grew up as a passionate US Soccer fan, but back then we were an overperforming team with a small amount of talent and a ton of heart. It was easy to be a fan. And there were just enough real players to produce some moments of actually thrilling play. The 2002 World Cup was riveting.

Now, it's so so different, and I have a hard time getting excited about these games. We have plenty of talent, at every position, and we play with zero intensity.