The latest US Olympic qualifying failure- the third in a row- isn’t “different”, no matter how much optimists insist it is.
The Editors
Last Sunday night Guadalajara was added to Couva, Sandy and the other locales where the US men have fallen at the last hurdle to qualify for a major tournament. Once again when it mattered most the US failed to win a single match with qualification for a major tournament on the line. The 2-1 loss to Honduras represented the 4th successive time since October 2015, the US has failed to qualify for a major international tournament out of the Concacaf region.
The last several days social media has exploded with conversations about the US’ failure and what it really means. The Men’s Senior team recorded an impressive 2-1 win away in Belfast against a highly-rated Northern Ireland side the same day, perhaps mitigating some of the sting of elimination. However, it should be noted Northern Ireland, who have either qualified for or made the playoff round to qualify for the last three major international tournaments, elected not to play their best squad.
In 2015, when the US was eliminated by Honduras from direct Olympic qualifying, the men lost the same day in a one-off match to represent Concacaf in the FIFA Confederations Cup. Elimination in the inter-continental playoff vs Colombia the following March coincided with the USMNT’s embarrassing World Cup Qualifying loss to Guatemala.
This time may feel different, but should it?
Several points stick out from the USMNT qualifying disaster:
Arrogance
The US Soccer Federation, having not qualified from this region for the past two Olympics men’s football tournaments, thought they could get through the competition without fielding close to their best squad.
Among the missing and eligible: Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic (22), Juventus’s Weston McKennie (22), Borussia Dortmund’s Giovanni Reyna (18), Red Bull Leipzig’s Tyler Adams (22), Barca’s Sergino Dest (20), Werder Bremen’s Josh Sargent (21), Bayern Munich’s Chris Richards (21), Lille’s Timothy Weah (21), Boavista’s Reggie Cannon (22), Roma’s Bryan Reynolds (19), Valencia’s Yunus Musah (18), Orlando City’s Daryl Dike (20), who is on loan at Barnsley, Fulham’s Antonee Robinson (23), Atlanta United’s trio of Miles Robinson (23), Brooks Lennon (23) and George Bello (19), and Mark McKenzie of Genk (22).
The missing MLS pieces, with the exception of Dike, who is on loan with Barnsley, are a frustrating example of the complicated relationship between MLS and the US Soccer Federation, who are partners in some ventures and opponents at others. Leave that debate for another day– but with Pulisic, Reyna, Dest and others on the above list in the senior USMNT camp– the US can’t argue in good faith it had no chance at releases for the qualifying competition. And a player like Bryan Reynolds, who was sorely missed, doesn’t get much more out of reserve games in Italy than he would playing for country. The US Soccer Federation made the choice to send the team it did, and that sends an arrogant message.
This issue is made even more clear because under Berhalter, we have consistently heard about the strong relationship the leadership of the US men’s program has with top clubs in Europe but yet no effort was made to secure releases for players like say Bryan Reynolds who has logged a few minutes for AS Roma so far in 2021, but certainly could have been released. This is not to mention the three Atlanta United players in the U-23 pool who were absent , but that is a subject we will revisit later.
Mexico and Honduras, the two sides that qualified and beat the United States were also missing key figures, but given both those nations have been habitual qualifiers and we have not been, why the lax approach?
Devaluation of the tournament by USSF & MLS
The US’ failure to qualify for the 2012 Men’s Olympic games was an ominous sign about a generational dip that was about to hit the senior team. At the time it was seen as an important benchmark.
Fast-forward nine years, another missed Olympics and even a missed World Cup and somehow some have alleged the tournament wasn’t as important. This misses the mark.
For one, MLS commercially is in a whole different stratosphere than it was in 2012, and it seems at this point the economic health of the nation’s top men’s league has trumped any real concern about the competitiveness of the US men’s program at Soccer House. The unwillingness of the federation to apply pressure on MLS teams to release players smacks of the priorities of the USSF being all wrong. The CONCACAF Champions League holdouts are a terrific case in point. For years, we’ve heard MLS devalue the CCL when their teams fail. Which one is it? Is the tournament less important because of the window in which it falls in the MLS Calendar? Or is it so important a club can’t release young players to qualify for the Olympic games? In either event, US Soccer appears outflanked or worse, indifferent to what the largest domestic league is doing with US personnel.
Given longstanding complaints that the USSF protects MLS, these omissions are all the more curious. While many point to the relationship between Soccer United Marketing (SUM) and the federation as creating a situation akin to a subsidy of MLS, the federation apparently does not feel as if MLS owes it anything as it attempts to further goals in the general interest commercially of both entities, such as qualifying for an Olympic games. To be sure, many of these criticisms, particularly those alleging conspiratorial collusion, are over-the-top, but when the federation’s leadership does not apply pressure on MLS to release players for national duty, questions must be asked.
Sunil Gulati’s departure as USSF head has left American soccer leadership in turmoil– even if at the timel, a change was needed.
Organizational Chaos
Sunil Gulati took a lot of bullets as USSF President, but the latest US failure since his departure continues to show that in hindsight, his management style, while controversial, held the organization together. Since Gulati departed as President, the federation has botched its response to numerous lawsuits, conducted a men’s coaching “search” whose results seemed preordained (yet still took nearly a year!) and member organizations have continued infighting, but this time without administrative authority to try and mediate the situation.
Gulati’s decision making process was often accused of being arbitrary. But the reality was this – he was a strong leadership figure whose institutional knowledge of both soccer in the United States and the federation’s members and international football helped guide the ship forward. The agnostic or even antagonistic views toward needed reforms like calendar change, promotion and relegation and solidarity payments were and continue to be problematic but chaos is a far worse situation. Dan Flynn’s departure from the organization has not helped in the short-term either. Stakeholders may not own it publicly, but many have conveyed privately to TYAC a feeling that things were running more efficiently when Gulati, Flynn and Jay Berhlater were steering the ship.
This chaos inevitably leads to problems on the pitch. While the US men have played well in friendlies or late, they are friendlies. In the first competitive test of the post-Gulati era, the US men failed- again- to meet the challenge by missing out on Olympic qualifying.
Penchant to take any criticism personally
Infighting has plagued US Soccer since the summer prior to the Catastrophe in Couva, when, per multiple inside sources, Geoff Cameron was among a number of US players to, at least in private, question the direction of the program and the players who were being selected for key qualifying matches.
From a development standpoint, the US are blooding perhaps the most talented generation– and certainly the deepest– in federation history. To suggest the US qualifying failure shows a systemic development problem is too myopic a critique, even if a team full of MLS and other professionals should have been good enough to get out of CONCACAF.
What remains true, however, is an internal power struggle that plagues the chemistry and grit that, at least until 2014, with limited exceptions, defined the US Men’s National Team.
Criticism, whether external or internal, was either used as a productive mechanism for improvement or blocked out as “noise in the system.” Rarely was it internalized to the point of toxicity- alla the Cameron situation late in World Cup qualifying– or did external criticism trigger a response that played out dramatically for the soccer world to see.
Airing of dirty laundry, so to speak, was for the French and Dutch national teams. The US stuck together, even if the football offered little more than a pragmatic unit that was tough to play against.
That’s changed now, and last week’s very public spat between Jozy Altidore, the best forward in the US pool for the past decade, and Taylor Twellman, a veteran analyst and marvelous player in his own right whose career was unfortunately short-circuited by concussions, duked it out on social media. The substance of the argument matters less than the tacky form: Altidore, like Crystal Dunn, is correct that it is difficult to be a black player in US Soccer and like Dunn, he is a hero and role model to so many young players. But Twellman is also right that the US qualifying failure is yet another sign of US arrogance on the pitch and a lack of the fierce mentality that defined former US teams. It’s not an indictment of Altidore– who was on a team that qualified!!- to suggest that.
1. Jozy Altidore is one of the USMNT's best-ever forwards.
— Subscribe to GrantWahl.com (@GrantWahl) March 31, 2021
2. Taylor Twellman had a terrific club career cut short by concussions.
3. Analysts are paid to have opinions.
4. Altidore & Crystal Dunn spoke today about it being hard to be a Black US soccer player, and I believe them.
Grant Wahl gets the whole debate right– and it is a conversation that should not have played out publicly but did. That public exchange is just the latest example of how fragile and insecure US Soccer remains after the catastrophe in Couva.
Mentality
It’s pretty plain to those of us who observed the USMNT in an era when we were more successful at both the youth and senior levels that American men now play scared in matches with qualification on the line. Time and again the US men look tentative and fearful of making match-decisive errors. This leads to a neutered play and a disjointed look on the pitch. While Jason Kreis’s selections and management can be heavily critiqued, the mentality that doomed the US men in Guadalajara predated him.
After the latest US failure, isn’t it fair to ask whether the current crop of US players are strong enough mentally for these sorts of do-or-die clashes? Time after time the Americans are losing in this position. Why?
Continued failure in CONCACAF outside of youth competition
Finally, the Olympic qualifying failure is yet another example of the United States Men’s Soccer program failing to have competitive success in CONCACAF outside of the youth levels over the past 6 years. Yes, the US have performed well at U-20 competitions and acquitted themselves quite well at U-20 World Cups. But in the three years after U-20 competitions, the alleged “depth” of the US has failed vis-a-vis “B” and “C” teams of other CONCACAF nations in competitive settings.
Meanwhile, the US Senior team has won a Gold Cup (in the summer of 2017), but also lost a Gold Cup and failed to qualify for a World Cup.
US fans and outside observers often love to poke fun at CONCACAF, which remains the wild, wild west of international soccer, a shadowland where potential meets a rather profound history of corruption and underachievement. The narrative suggests the US, with its huge population and immense resources, should easily get through a region as “soft” as CONCACAF.
There’s a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy to the arrogance underlying that assumption. Time and time again, recent, repeated failures demonstrate that the Americans don’t take the region seriously. Too much rhetoric and ink are spilled on a coming “golden generation”, with little mind paid to the fact that generation has won nothing but friendlies at this point and continues to struggle mightily in CONCACAF.
It’s time for the US to take CONCACAF opponents seriously again, like they did throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when qualifying for the World Cup remained priority number one. Approaching the region like the tricky, complicated morass of muddy, dim pitches, turbulent travel and politics and poor refereeing that is– as opposed to a “soft” region the US “should” dominate- is the only path forward. After so much failure, it is on the players to understand that and recognize the truth is CONCACAF, not sustained individual player success at big European clubs- remains the US Men’s program’s most daunting challenge, until proven otherwise.
Neil W. Blackmon, Jon Levy and Kartik Krishnaiyer edit The Yanks Are Coming and all contributed to this article.