Young stars like Weston McKennie and DeAndre Yedlin (above) have given the developing young US core an increasingly diverse face, even in an era of political tribalism hostile to difference.
By Sanjay Sujanthakumar
A major challenge for US Soccer in the aftermath of the catastrophe in Couva is expanding access and increasing participation in underserved communities.
A very diverse U20 team, coupled with the black and brown faces that dominate the quickly forming core of the next senior men’s national team, provide hope, even in a contemporary moment plagued by political tribalism.
In the first month of this hollow 2018 for American soccer, the defection of Jonathan Gonzalez compounded distress and prompted an avalanche of criticism about not just how the Monterrey midfielder was fumbled to Mexico forever – an event that’s still depressing – but an overarching problem for US Soccer.
Including, appreciating, and ensuring that playing and coaching is affordable and accessible to people from – in the words of Bob Bradley, “all neighborhoods” – is still a seemingly eternal, unique, complex socio-cultural-economic challenge for the US Soccer Federation. A lineup disproportionately over-representing African-Americans and Hispanics for the MNT or U20s can’t conceal it. Former USMNT forward Eddie Johnson told Grant Wahl on the Sports Illustrated Planet Fútbol podcast, “I’m an African-American inner-city kid. Government housing. My story is the same as a basketball player or a football player. I’ve been around the drugs. I’ve been around home invasions. All the stuff you see that goes on TV, I grew up in that. I made it away from all that stuff… But we’re not telling those stories or going into those environments, and we’re not going to get our best athletes. Because our best athletes, they all play football, they all play basketball, and where do they come from? They all come from the inner city.”
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But exactly a year after the Catastrophe in Couva, US Soccer launched its new marketing campaign for the MNT: “The Future is US,” and since that fateful night in Trinidad, Dave Sarachan has steadily introduced youngsters effusing optimism and fearlessness. While we apparently had to wait for the Crew to be eliminated from the MLS playoffs so Gregg Berhalter can be announced as the next head coach, frustration with that delay is, at least in the main, outweighed by excitement surrounding the most precocious and professionally ambitious generation in the program’s history. The future is bright. And in light of midterm elections and a political climate poisoned by racism and xenophobia and rhetorically condoned by the oldest President in our history, in the latest MNT and U20 rosters, where African-Americans and Hispanics who have earned the chance to represent the crest are “over-represented” at least in terms of number related back to US population, you see a poignant reminder of what makes this country great regardless of politics.
Sixteen of the 28 players in the MNT squad (the strongest assembled under Sarachan) for the upcoming friendlies in Europe against England and Italy are African-American. Four more are Hispanic. At a minimum, DeAndre Yedlin, John Brooks, Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie, and Timothy Weah – and potentially Zack Steffen, Cameron-Carter Vickers, Reggie Cannon and Kellyn Acosta (as well as non-November invitees Jonathan Amon and Erik-Palmer Brown) – are set to join Josh Sargent, Paul Arriola and Christian Pulisic in forming a lasting core.
Diversity is also a staple of the U20s, who will face Costa Rica on Friday and Honduras three days later in the qualification stage of their Concacaf Championship, with the top two of the three clinching spots in the World Cup next year. A quarter of the initial roster named by Tab Ramos was African-American; half of it was Hispanic.
It isn’t just the young senior team core. Tab Ramos’s U20 team features a diverse group of developing stars, such as Atlanta United’s George Bello.
Ramos made three roster changes ahead of the qualification stage, and if the kids can punch their ticket to the World Cup, the squad in six months will definitely be different, with a sprinkling of senior team players such as Sargent, Amon, Adams and Weah possibly in the mix. But African-American defenders Chris Gloster (Hannover 96), George Bello (Atlanta United), Chris Richards (on loan to Bayern Munich from FC Dallas) and Mark McKenzie (Philadelphia Union), as well as Hispanic midfielders Alex Mendez (SC Freiburg) and Richie Ledezma (PSV-bound), winger Ulysses Llanez (Wolfsburg-bound) and striker Sebastian Soto (Hannover 96, where he’s recently trained with the first team) would likely be on the plane to Poland, and vital to Tab in building on back to back U20 World Cup quarterfinal appearances and competing for the trophy, before some graduate to the MNT.
During a 2016 panel discussion featuring Grant Wahl and Ramos at an American Outlaws event recorded on the Planet Fútbol podcast, Wahl said, “I would love to see even more Latino players on the men’s and women’s side, more African-Americans on the men’s and women’s side, get involved in the national team programs… over the years it seems like people would always say Latino prospects slip through the cracks of the US system. Is that happening less now?”
Ramos responded, “It does happen less. But for me… I’m just looking for good players, so it doesn’t really matter to me what they look like.”
Players will inevitably slip through the cracks and Ramos is rightly focused on getting results. His selection process isn’t based on affirmative action or advertising diversity, and age groups will vary in terms of race and ethnicity. While this batch is probably closer to being an outlier rather than the beginning of a trend, the timing of it in concert with the state of the Men’s National Team pool doesn’t feel coincidental.
Further, it is encouraging that the US player pool is becoming increasingly diverse even as the federation continues to drag its feet on initiatives that make soccer more accessible in underserved communities. At base, expanding access to soccer is a wonderful end-goal in and of itself. If it produces a wider American pool of senior team talent, that’s a marvelous external benefit to doing the right thing.
President Trump declared himself a nationalist. Nationalism now has a negative connotation for many Americans – not only minorities – because empirically it is a strain of political thought that has proven to be dangerous and divisive when in the wrong hands with access to the levers of power.
This isn’t just a continued debate in the United States, though.
France won the World Cup with a diverse team of dual nationals even as a raging debate continued about the value of immigrants at home.
England, who the USMNT will face in London on Thursday, can also relate as it experiences an uneasy and protracted divorce from the European Union. In an interview with The Guardian during the group stage of the World Cup, Gareth Southgate said, “We have the chance to affect something bigger than ourselves. We’re a team with our diversity, and with our youth, that represent modern England. In England we’ve spent a bit of time being a bit lost as to what our modern identity is. And I think as a team we represent that modern identity, and hopefully people can connect with us.”
In reaching the semifinals in Russia, the Three Lions did just that, converting the default cynicism of their media and fans into delirium, with a “modern” (by English standards) style of play that was positive like the nationalism it inspired.
The USMNT can only restore pride on this scale on and off the field when it has America’s undivided attention for the next World Cup. But until then – especially if the malignancy and divisiveness in modern politics persists – it’s worth noticing and admiring this team’s own beautiful modern identity coalesce.
Sanjay Sujanthakumar is a coach and journalist based in California. He is writing specially for The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @the_Real_Kumar.