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The Yanks are Coming (#MURICA) (The Official USMNT World Cup Thread)

Uncle_Sam

By Uncle_Sam,
in 2014 World Cup Forum

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William Hall

William Hall

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I don't think that team is as bad as you guys make out. That squad can make it out of the group, I don't know whether they will but they're capable of it.
Beat Ghana, draw Portugal and don't lose too heavily to a German side in a game that to them will be a dead rubber. I know it sounds hard but it's possible.

I have no idea why I'm suddenly so confident about the US.

Hmm.....

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Uncle_Sam

Uncle_Sam

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It's great to beat those guys after 2006 and 2010. But, let's be honest. We pretty much made Ghana look like Barcelona. We played like sh*t, even by our standards. Still, we got the win and that's what really matters.

Portugal does look vulnerable, but after watching us tonight I still can't see us winning that one. A draw might be all we need though.

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Warhawk

Warhawk

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Portugal does look vulnerable, but after watching us tonight I still can't see us winning that one. A draw might be all we need though.

Well, I think that's the point, really. I certainly think we're capable of keeping it respectable against Germany, or at least more respectable than Portugal did. And that would likely be sufficient to advance.

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Uncle_Sam

Uncle_Sam

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Well, I think that's the point, really. I certainly think we're capable of keeping it respectable against Germany, or at least more respectable than Portugal did. And that would likely be sufficient to advance.

I hope so but Germany is VERY good. They were my pick to win it all along. They're a juggernaut and I could see a big loss to them. We're going to have to play better with the ball and off the ball in possession than we did tonight. Our defensive organization was good except for the nanosecond of lost concentration on the goal, but Germany is much better and will more capable of breaking us down than Ghana.

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Warhawk

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I hope so but Germany is VERY good. They were my pick to win it all along. They're a juggernaut and I could see a big loss to them. We're going to have to play better with the ball and off the ball in possession than we did tonight. Our defensive organization was good except for the nanosecond of lost concentration on the goal, but Germany is much better and will more capable of breaking us down than Ghana.

We could, sure, what I mean is that I don't think our style and mentality lends itself to a total collapse, like what happened to Portugal. They just kind of imploded.

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AllStar4

AllStar4

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How was the Nielsen rating?

@BRUBromley: 7.0 overnight rating for USA-Ghana on ESPN; 6.8 for the NBA Finals Game 5 on ABC #usmnt #worldcup

Team USA on cable > Spurs vs. LeBrons on a network. And that's before you consider the Spanish language broadcast on Univision.

Fun song, had never heard it.

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Warhawk

Warhawk

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@BRUBromley: 7.0 overnight rating for USA-Ghana on ESPN; 6.8 for the NBA Finals Game 5 on ABC #usmnt #worldcup

Team USA on cable > Spurs vs. LeBrons on a network. And that's before you consider the Spanish language broadcast on Univision.

Fun song, had never heard it.

To be fair, Game of Thrones on premium cable > Team USA on regular cable > Spurs vs. LeBrons on network.

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Warhawk

Warhawk

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Who will want to watch Spurs voluntarily anyway? Best player they have is Lamela and that tells you the story

I was considering that joke, went with the Game of Thrones reference instead.

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Jason the Yank

Jason the Yank

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UPDATE: ESPN’s telecast of the United States-Ghana nail-biter in the opening round of the FIFA World Cup on Monday averaged a big 11.09 million viewers, according to Nielsen, making it the most-viewed soccer match ever televised by the network. It obliterated the previous high of 6.16 million for the 2010 match between USA and Algeria.

It’s also ESPN’s most-watched telecast of any kind since college football’s BCS National Championship (25.57 million).

Tournament to date through 15 matches, ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC have combined to average 4.112 million viewers through the first 14 matches — increases of 19% (vs. 2.1) and 23% (vs. 3,346,000), respectively, over the 2010 World Cup.

http://variety.com/2014/tv/ratings/usa-ghana-on-espn-earns-mondays-top-overnight-masterchef-bachelorette-lead-primetime-1201221921/

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georginho_juventusygr

georginho_juventusygr

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@BRUBromley: 7.0 overnight rating for USA-Ghana on ESPN; 6.8 for the NBA Finals Game 5 on ABC #usmnt #worldcup

Team USA on cable > Spurs vs. LeBrons on a network. And that's before you consider the Spanish language broadcast on Univision.

Fun song, had never heard it.

Closer to being an American national sport!

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upsettingshorts

upsettingshorts

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It's something that's largely misunderstood. The "lets have Chris Paul be our #10" stuff is always nonsense. Taken as an argument simply about wealth and population, sure, if more people cared more about playing soccer versus other sports, we'd probably have more good players. But then, the same could be said of plenty of other countries, about lots of other sports. If Great Britain's best athletes played basketball, they wouldn't have had to rely on Luol Deng shooting the ball a hundred times a game in the Olympics. Etc.

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upsettingshorts

upsettingshorts

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Right but like I said that's not the point. The only sense in which that statement is valid is when it speaks to number of "Soccer Player Chances" and nothing more. If 1 in 100 people choosing what sport to play might one day have the mentality and aptitude to be good at soccer, and only 15 of those people ever try... you're not gonna end up with that many. It doesn't matter if they ever ended up being any good at their chosen sport because many of their skills would not translate.

Practically, as an example, I might have been better at soccer than I was at baseball or American football for a variety of reasons, but I wasn't interested in it at all until my mid-20s. Would I be playing for the USMNT had I been kicking it around since I was a kid? Of course not. But repeat that example a ten thousand times and maybe you get a few more good players.

Ultimately though, it's a losing argument. Plenty of small countries fight "above their weight class" in plenty of sports. Cuba does spectacularly well in baseball, for example. There are simply other factors that matter more, as all those articles about Belgium's youth movement will keep reminding us. But really don't mind me, I'm just practicing for future arguments with friends who say this sort of nonsense all the time. Preaching to the choir here.

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Uncle_Sam

Uncle_Sam

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Our problem is not the quality of athletes choosing soccer, it's the development process in our country. If our best athletes (Lebron James, Richard Sherman, etc) chose soccer they might not ever develop because our system is behind. It's getting better, but it still has a ways to go in order to start producing world class talent.

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mlyons

mlyons

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Our problem is not the quality of athletes choosing soccer, it's the development process in our country. If our best athletes (Lebron James, Richard Sherman, etc) chose soccer they might not ever develop because our system is behind. It's getting better, but it still has a ways to go in order to start producing world class talent.
I'm not sure I really buy that argument. The development process for soccer isn't any different than it is from any other sport in this country, and it's not like we lag behind other nations in producing baseball and basketball players. There really is something of an elite corps of athletes at the 13-15 year old level who excel at every sport they play and are pressured at that point into focusing on one, and very few of them are choosing soccer right now. I expect that's in the process of changing right now for two reasons: first, kids (and their parents) are starting to notice that it's possible to make just as much money playing soccer at an elite level as any other sport, and second, parents are really starting to get freaked out about the long term health problems American football causes to its athletes.

American football genuinely is a talent drain on American soccer at this point. The seasons are at the same time in most places, so kids genuinely have to choose between pursuing one or the other. Historically, anyone remotely close to as good at American football would choose it instead of soccer, but I expect that's about to change.

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Uncle_Sam

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Maybe the answer is somewhere more in the middle but we have as many young people playing soccer as a lot of these countries have people total. We have enough quality athletes choose the sport but the development isn't good enough to produce elite players.

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mlyons

mlyons

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Right, because we have more kids who want to play sports than there are spots available on the (American) football team. Most of the really elite athletes have traditionally picked American football over soccer as soon as they were forced to choose between the two. The number of kids playing soccer drops off drastically at the middle school and high school level, with the athletic ability dropping off even more drastically. That Buzzfeed article was crap, yes, but the point about Kobe Bryant is an interesting one. He, by all accounts, liked soccer more as a kid, but when it came down to crunch time and he had to pick a sport, soccer wasn't really considered. I think that's the thing that's going to change, and it's going to make a bigger impact on the quality of American players than any sort of national development program.

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Uncle_Sam

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I think it's going to take both. Hopefully better athletes do start choosing soccer, but if we're going to move into the top ten or so soccer countries the development is going to have to get better. The national development program is good, but the clubs need to keep assuming more of that as well.

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Uncle_Sam

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Oh well, obviously hated giving up that goal at the end but honestly we would have loved knowing that these were the results we were going to get. Now we just need to make a deal with Germany to just look across the halfway line at each other for 90 minutes.

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Jason the Yank

Jason the Yank

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Right, because we have more kids who want to play sports than there are spots available on the (American) football team. Most of the really elite athletes have traditionally picked American football over soccer as soon as they were forced to choose between the two. The number of kids playing soccer drops off drastically at the middle school and high school level, with the athletic ability dropping off even more drastically. That Buzzfeed article was crap, yes, but the point about Kobe Bryant is an interesting one. He, by all accounts, liked soccer more as a kid, but when it came down to crunch time and he had to pick a sport, soccer wasn't really considered. I think that's the thing that's going to change, and it's going to make a bigger impact on the quality of American players than any sort of national development program.

True, but many of our top athletes came from underprivileged (that means "poor") backgrounds, so two factors have been at work here:

1. The idea of being able to get out of the ghetto thanks to a big contract. The more soccer gets popular, and the more American players are able to move to Europe/MLS throws money around for the best American players, the more you'll see poor kids opt for soccer.

But...

2. The "pay to play" model of club soccer. IIRC, the fed has told youth clubs that if they want to be part of the USSF Development Academy, they'll have to ditch pay-to-play. Which is good for the poor kids, but then how do you support the youth clubs.

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mlyons

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2. The "pay to play" model of club soccer. IIRC, the fed has told youth clubs that if they want to be part of the USSF Development Academy, they'll have to ditch pay-to-play. Which is good for the poor kids, but then how do you support the youth clubs.

Well, that's kind of my point. There's this idea that we have to have Euro-style development here to make the sport grow, but I think that'll actually be counterproductive. Our current system produces fantastically talented athletes in American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with a pay-to-play system. There's no reason to think soccer is such a fundamentally different sport than the other four that we would need to scrap that system for the same thing to happen. All we really need is for people to care as much about soccer as they do about the other sports. Changing the whole youth setup around so that professional clubs take control of kids as young as 10 like they do in Europe (which seems to be where USSF and other people who want national development reform are going) is just going to make soccer seem like a more alien sport.
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Uncle_Sam

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Well, that's kind of my point. There's this idea that we have to have Euro-style development here to make the sport grow, but I think that'll actually be counterproductive. Our current system produces fantastically talented athletes in American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with a pay-to-play system. There's no reason to think soccer is such a fundamentally different sport than the other four that we would need to scrap that system for the same thing to happen. All we really need is for people to care as much about soccer as they do about the other sports. Changing the whole youth setup around so that professional clubs take control of kids as young as 10 like they do in Europe (which seems to be where USSF and other people who want national development reform are going) is just going to make soccer seem like a more alien sport.

Definitely don't agree it would make the sport seem more alien. If I was a kid that loved soccer and a club like the Houston Dynamo offered to put me into their academy I would jump at the chance, and I doubt there are any players that wouldn't. If anything, I think if all of our sports operated like European soccer clubs then the skill level would get better. We've already seen in basketball how the gap between our national team and other countries has shrunk largely because foreign players are gaining more skill than ours despite the average foreign coach not being as good. There are a lot of changes I believe that soccer in our country needs to take but the development system is certainly one.

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mlyons

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Definitely don't agree it would make the sport seem more alien. If I was a kid that loved soccer and a club like the Houston Dynamo offered to put me into their academy I would jump at the chance, and I doubt there are any players that wouldn't. If anything, I think if all of our sports operated like European soccer clubs then the skill level would get better. We've already seen in basketball how the gap between our national team and other countries has shrunk largely because foreign players are gaining more skill than ours despite the average foreign coach not being as good. There are a lot of changes I believe that soccer in our country needs to take but the development system is certainly one.
No, the gap is shrinking because other countries care about basketball now.

What exactly do you think is so fundamentally different about soccer that it needs a different youth development paradigm from all of our other sports?

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Jason the Yank

Jason the Yank

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Well, that's kind of my point. There's this idea that we have to have Euro-style development here to make the sport grow, but I think that'll actually be counterproductive. Our current system produces fantastically talented athletes in American football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with a pay-to-play system. There's no reason to think soccer is such a fundamentally different sport than the other four that we would need to scrap that system for the same thing to happen. All we really need is for people to care as much about soccer as they do about the other sports. Changing the whole youth setup around so that professional clubs take control of kids as young as 10 like they do in Europe (which seems to be where USSF and other people who want national development reform are going) is just going to make soccer seem like a more alien sport.

Does it? Sure there's Pop Warner and Little League and AAU, (and hockey most of the NHL players are from Canada), but those haven't turned into the business that youth soccer has become.

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Uncle_Sam

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No, the gap is shrinking because other countries care about basketball now.

What exactly do you think is so fundamentally different about soccer that it needs a different youth development paradigm from all of our other sports?

Just caring about a sport isn't going to make for better players. And I would bet that most countries that can compete with us about basketball don't care about it near as much as we care about soccer. The difference is that the development model they used is much more suited to develop many of the skills than ours is. Evidence: Spurs are a bunch of foreign players.

Soccer needs a different youth development paradigm because it's a global market. If we want our players to be more valuable on that market we need to develop them with better skill. That will in turn increase the quality of our national team.

Also, if the other sports implemented the Euro-style develop system then those players would be better also. Skill is important in basketball, it's just not as important as it is in soccer. And football is not a global sport so our players are going to be better than the rest of the world's because no one plays it.

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Uncle_Sam

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paraphrased: we are less in need of "world class athletes" as we are world class coaches at all levels.

Exactly, thank you. Obviously it would be great to get the best athletes but what we need more is youth coaches who can develop better footballers.

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kontermann

kontermann

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not only that but the quality of the football facilities has to be amended to european class and to employ coaches who dont see soccer as a "sissy sport" and force students into gridiron and basketball -or worse- lacrosse. Maybe the good showings of the US team will help.

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