Almost heaven?
Not even close.
Within moments of another U.S. meltdown in another World Cup Round of 16 Monday night, John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” was replaced on this summer’s American jukebox with chorus after chorus of another oldies classic “It’s All About Capturing the Hearts and Minds of the Nation” backed by its B-side “It’s All About Growing the Game.”
The U.S. has 14 million participants in organized soccer, the most in the world, double Germany’s 7 million, the second most on the planet. This World Cup, the first to be expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches and to be hosted by three nations, has already drawn a tournament record of more than 6 million fans, nearly double the previous World Cup record of 3.58 million set at the 1994 tournament held in the U.S. FIFA, which enjoys tax-exempt status in the U.S., will pocket an estimated $13 billion profit from the World Cup. Major League Soccer, created in part from the windfall of the 1994 World Cup, has 30 teams, most of them playing in state-of-the-art, soccer-specific stadiums. The U.S. women have won four Women’s World Cups, almost as many as the rest of the planet combined.
Yet even before Belgium players could break into their “Trump Dance” after the Red Devils’ 4-1 Round of 16 thrashing of Team USA in Seattle Monday night, U.S. soccer apologists were already well into their talking points that this tournament was really about winning the hearts and minds of the American public, about growing the game. Orange slices and small plastic trophies for everyone. Yes, even you Matt Freese.
American soccer doesn’t need to grow the game.
It needs to grow up.
That is not denying that this entertaining U.S. team under Argentine coach Mauricio Pochettino, maybe the first Team USA unafraid to take their game to the world’s best, a squad that looks like what America looks like, for three glorious weeks united a country perhaps more divided than any time since 60s, taking the nation on a wild ride that allowed it to dream that the country roads would ultimately take the team to the World Cup quarters, maybe semis or even final.
But the World Cup ultimately is not about culture change or winning hearts and minds, but winning matches. And once again, the U.S., essentially gifted a spot in the Round of 16 by FIFA’s decision to expand to 48 teams requiring a Round of 32, failed to step up in the knockout stage.
Jung, in a way the original sports psychologist, once wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
So the next step U.S. Soccer, the sport’s national governing body, and American soccer as a whole need to take is to look in the mirror. Which means owning what you are:
A mid-major.
Until it beat Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Round of 32, the U.S. had lost 10 consecutive matches to European teams. Team USA is 2-21 in its last 23 World Cup matches against European sides.”I feel like they lost the game even before they stepped onto the pitch,” Carli Lloyd, the former FIFA women’s player of the year, said on FOX Sports of a performance against Belgium that she characterized as “tentative” and “scared.”
Lloyd is right, but for a different reason. For all of Freese’s epic blunder and what Pochettino later described as his team’s failure “to connect to the match,” the loss is mainly on a U.S. system that, despite tens of millions of dollars being poured into it, has yet to produce a player even close to being world-class who wasn’t a goalkeeper.
“Let’s not get it twisted,” U.S. midfielder Tyler Adams said, “the better team won tonight.”
Better, as in at every single position. Not a single American player could start for five of the first six teams to advance to the World Cup quarterfinals, with Norway the possible exception. The last time the U.S. faced Belgium in a World Cup, a 2-1 Red Devils extra-time victory in the 2014 World Cup quarterfinals in Brazil, American goalkeeper Tim Howard made a tournament record 16 saves. Now the U.S. can’t even produce a decent goalkeeper. That Freese is apparently the best the U.S. has to offer is simply embarrassing.
The irony that the same week President Trump lobbied FIFA president Gianni Infantino to overturn the red card of U.S. forward Folarin Balogun, born in Brooklyn to Nigerian parents living in London who were visiting the U.S., the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship was apparently lost on the president.
The real MVP of this World Cup for the U.S. is not Balogun, who scored three goals in the tournament, or even Trump, but the JFK gate agent who deemed Balogun’s mother too pregnant to fly back to London.
It is a damning indictment of the U.S. system that the two best American players in this tournament were developed in other countries.
Balogun was just a month old when his mother finally returned with him to London, where he joined Arsenal’s renowned Hale End academy, where he trained alongside current Gunners and England star Bukayo Saka. Malik Tillman, whose free kick briefly tied the Belgium match at 1-1, was born in Germany to a U.S. serviceman father and a German mother. He came up through the Bayern Munich youth system.
The next step is realizing that pitching credit cards or appearing in a burger commercial doesn’t make you a world-class player, or in the case of American winger Christian Pulisic, the poster boy for U.S. soccer the past two World Cup cycles, even an impactful player.
While Pulisic was limited during the tournament by injuries, he was largely a non-factor when he was on the pitch, especially in the first half against Belgium when he was pretty much a disaster.
“You wanted some of these big time players to step up in big moments,” Lloyd said. “I got to be honest, I was little bit disappointed with Christian Pulisic. Whether he wants to be the star of this team or not, we didn’t see enough of him in this particular game and really the whole World Cup.”
Did the U.S. make progress under Pochettino? Undoubtedly. But this World Cup showed that Team USA remains a lot further than just a country road away from joining the game’s elite.
And don’t expect Pochettino to be behind the wheel on the road to the 2030 World Cup.
While U.S. Soccer has offered the Argentine a contract extension through 2030, it makes no sense for him to return. Pochettino is too good a manager to waste another four years on a U.S. program that won’t deliver him the players to beat the world’s premier teams. Pochettino said Monday night he planned to take a few weeks off and think about his next steps. Translation: he’s buying himself time to see if Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni steps down after the tournament, opening up Pochettino’s dream job.
Should, for some reason, Pochettino decide to stay with Team USA, American fans can look forward to the constant distraction of their national team coach being linked to every big-time club coaching job that opens up for the next four years.
More noise for a U.S. program with still many steps to go on the stairway to heaven.