I do however care about the national teams for the same reason I care about the Olympics. If our nation is going to bother to compete in something, they sure as hell better put up a good show and try and win the damn thing. Out of all the major sports, soccer has the lowest bar possible to be considered a success. Most people stop playing it when they are about 9 so nobody really expects us to win the World Cup and most of these various cups and qualifying tournaments are set-up in such a way that about 70% of the time a tie is considered a wildly positive outcome.
This is especially true of the CONCACAF hexagonal qualifying tournament. This stupid thing seems designed to all but guarantee that Mexico and the United States get to go to the World Cup, plus one or two other squads. Somehow, the U.S. managed to blow the layup this year. Most people will look to tonight's game against Trinidad and Tobago, where the Trinis treated the U.S. like Harvey Weinstein treats affirmative consent, and be shocked by the outcome and the definitive proof that change is needed.
The truth is clearer than that though. It is very clear that Sunil Gulati has no idea how to develop a program. The main proof is in how he treated the Jurgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann was fired after losses to Jamaica, Panama, Mexico and Costa Rica. Prior to that though, Klinsmann led the team to consective victories over the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Germany. Pretty impressive stuff but Klinsmann was always tinkering with the lineup to mostly negative results so they replaced him with Bruce Arena. Fine.
The Arena regime started out ok with a 6-0 win over Honduras but the rest of The Hex went; tie-Panama, Win-Trinidad, tie-Mexico, loss-Costa Rica, tie-Honduras, loss-Trinidad. The results under arena got progressively worse. Losing to Mexico is no big deal but they played Honduras, Costa Rica, Trinidad and Panama twice each and went 3-3-2. In two games against Costa Rica, they were shut out 4-0 and 2-0. That stuff is embarrassing. At least Klinsmann showed some ability to beat upper echelon European teams, Arena took an inconsistent but occasionally impressive team and made them consistently crap.
The real reason why this qualifying tourney was a disaster is because US Soccer in general is a disaster. At the youth level it is still and sport played primarily by wealthy suburban kids due to the insane cost of the leagues and the incessant travel. I have kids and there is no way I could afford to pay the fees to play year round or be able to take the time to travel all over the place to the various matches. That creates a youth league that severely restricts who can participate, that feeds into a college soccer system that doesn't seem to develop talent much and that ultimately feeds into MLS which is a sham of a league that is just a way station for over the hill Europeans looking to cash in one more time and a place for Americans to play who aren't good enough to get into a European league. If an American in their prime decides to take the MLS money to play closer to home, its guaranteed that his development will stop and regression will begin.
Despite all that though, US Soccer has been on the rise until recently, in spite of itself. In a country of 350 million people, many of whom are soccer loving Latinos, we should be able to find 20 or 30 people capable of beating T&T, Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras consistently. If we can't, and it seems we can't, then its the top level managements fault. The only plan left is to fire Gulati and his Art Shell-esque right hand Arena. Just cut them both out completely. Then what needs to be done is for US Soccer to load up a T-shirt cannon with money and just fire it at any Italian, English, French, Spanish, etc. soccer official who can build a program from the bottom up. Just keep firing the money cannon until they have to accept.
Thats the whole answer. Play to our strenghts. We Americans don't do soccer. We do money though and there's no shame in paying an outsider to come clean our mess. No more shame than losing to Trinidad with the World Cup on the line.
(US Soccer, in better times.)
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