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I will probably be mocked for this, but gently caress it whatever here is my take. 1. Bruce Arena's Squad Selection He hosed up big time, just by actually following MLS, which like half the people posting these hot-takes don't could tell he is a grumpy old gently caress who hates doing anything new. His teams are built of okay(ish) veterans covered over with high priced DP's the MLS kept pushing into the Galaxy. He had his guys and pretty much ignored the academy and never gave chances to the guys coming out of it, I mean LA was hosed up this year because they pretty much decided to go all in on academy players who never got bled into the first team for the last ~5 years by Brucey. So right off the bat Arena is going to call in the ~veterans~ who have been poo poo-clogging along for years without giving time to the handfuls of US MLS players who aren't old time USMNT on the back slope of their careers, or people he coached in LA (Cough Zardes/Gonzalez). Sure he might give them a 10 minute cameo at the January Camp or Gold Cup, but lol if they are ever going to earn serious minutes. This squad selection was loving awful, 1. Zardes he has been loving useless for years in MLS, there are legitimately a dozen better uncapped Americans in the league ffs he was injured when called up and wasn't loving replaced. 2. WTF is with calling in DeMarcus Beasley? That guy is ancient he loving tried to retire already and we keep calling him in... there are better loving American leftbacks they just haven't had ~20 years of USMNT caps!~ 3. Gonzalez, yes bring the guy who has been consistently poo poo for the USA since 2013 Gold Cup, and leave a guy who plays in the EPL on the bench behind him. Also don't call in a guy like Miazga who is supposedly playing reasonably well for Vitesse. 4. Nagbe has some good skills, but is like the meekest least fired up player I have ever seen. 5. Call in Benny Feilhaber who is an rear end in a top hat and hasn't been playing great this year and hasn't been on the USMNT in any real capacity since like 2010? 6. Wondo... seriously I don't think I have to explain this. 7. Finally loving Goalkeeper Howard is past it and has been mediocre in MLS, Guzan hasn't been good for years but he is playing better than Howard in our lovely league and wtf with Rimando he is older than both of them. He could have picked better MLS players, but no he picked a poo poo ton of old and out of form guys who made these last matches an uphill battle. 2. Bruce Arena's lovely tactics All we had to do was not lose the game, regardless of player competence he should have loving rotated the squad and played an actual defensive formation. He brought a poo poo ton of D-Mids and Centerbacks to these games and pretty much used Bradley exclusively as our only defensive midfielder. This worked okay when Panama had to open themselves up to score because if they beat us they would advance to the World Cup, which made playing a bunch of "attacking" options like a pair of loving wingers in Nagbe & Arriola as central midfielders. Both of whom are lovely defenders. Put this midfield on short rest and in front of the slow and useless Omar Gonzalez and a geriatric Howard of course we were gonna get hosed. If we had like Dax McCarty who isn't a great player in midfield he is at least competent enough to loving mark that guy Alvin Jones who couldn't even make the cut on an MLS side (he trialed at a few clubs this summer). Instead he was wide open to send longshots at Howard whose reflexes have atrophied to the point that he could barely make those saves. So Bruce Arena failed abysmally on just understanding what needed to be done this game and set his players up to fail. Sure those players aren't good, but FFS they still should have been able to at least eek out a draw if he did the bare minimum of even just rotating the guys who started on the weekend. 3. Arrogance The USA acted like we were going to stomp our way through the Qualifiers, at no point did the media ever point out "Well this game is a must win" it was always "Well if we want to make the World Cup we should win this, but we might get lucky and other teams will gently caress up". The US player pool for CONCAF is actually pretty good, but US Soccer and the media which barely pays attention keeps hyping them up as "We can challenge Argentina" (lolno). So we go into matches expecting an easy win, and the other team wants to be giant killers and show up the uppity US players. Some of whom think they are hot poo poo because like Bradley they cashed in an okay European career for millions in DP money. Media and others including myself kept sucking off the USMNT saying "Wow they are so talented and good of course they should win" then most of them put in no loving effort and act shocked when they lose to shittier teams that seem to care. loving Omar Gonzalez said "This was supposed to be a celebration" in an interview after the game... no you dumb gently caress you celebrate after the game is won not on the field while your scoring an own goal. This exemplified in Bradley, people keep acting like instead of a decent but flawed player he is this world class d-mid who could totally ball in Europe, but came back to MLS to lead it into MLS 2.0 or whatever the gently caress they want to call it. He was handed a starting spot on the team by daddy, and played regardless of his ups and downs and whether other players in the pool might be better until he was cemented in as literally the only guy we have to play D-mid. Jermaine Jones is washed up now, but in retrospect he was loving spot on when he said "Its never Bradley's fault" everyone kept coming up with excuses every time the captain hosed up and blamed others. He never had to fight for his national team position, and once he no longer had to fight for his club position like he did in Europe he turned to poo poo. Then Dempsey was stripped of his captaincy and it was handed to Bradley on a platter and he continued to gently caress up. You could say Dempsey has issues, but at least he had a little bit of grit the dude climbed from a no-name redneck from Texas to playing at Furman University to the EPL and scoring at world cups. He had some grit even if he wasn't technically a world class player. Instead of being underdogs who were going to scrap out wins, the culture seemed to shift to well were good enough to win and that's okay! 4. Youth Development We seem to have hit a bump where MLS is big enough that it isn't a completely terrible league. (People will probably disagree with me on this) So you can finally be a good enough player and eek out a decent 6 figure income by being an MLS player, there really is no incentive for say mid-tier talents to try to jump ship to Europe and catch on in say Sweden and try to play your way into an actual good league, or forgo MLS Academies/College etc. and do what Pulisic did and take the gamble you could be good enough to end up in Dortmund's first team. In the previous generation MLS was clearly garbage so if you wanted a chance at success most decent players jumped ship to Europe ASAP, now eh its not necessary. So the US player pool is way broader than it once was, because say... Jordan Morris or something I guess ends up an actual professional in Seattle, instead of say going to Werder Bremen and having like a 10% chance of becoming a Bundesliga quality striker, who should run train on CONCAF instead of a maybe sort of good enough to beat CONCAF teams guy. The MLS academies still suck, but it seems like the most recent U-17 and U-20 teams are doing decently, which might mean the system is working. It certainly seems like younger guys are actually thinking they are good enough to take a chance in Europe. McKennie jumped ship from Dallas pretty much ASAP and that Sargent guy also is going to Werder unlike Morris. While not a solution, I think MLS and the DA academies are at a point where they are okay enough that some of those talents have a chance at actually making it to Europe. The key then becomes actually letting them go if they want to instead of trying to hold onto them. rare Magic card l00k posted:the MLS system is designed to put the best young talent on poo poo teams, so they practice with the shittiest players and learn from the shittiest coaches in the league, they have to compete for starting spots against said poo poo players and it also spreads the best players out among everyone so nobody has to learn how to play against a team that is full of actual good players in order to reach success I think this is pretty on point too, the best MLS teams pretty much don't ever bother playing young Americans, so the ones who do get actual game time in MLS are the ones on the shittiest teams under the worst coaches. Then they turn into serviceable players in the league and end up earning call ups to the national team (if there is room for them behind all the old veterans with ~50+ caps) and blocking out young players either fighting for spots on actually decent MLS teams or in Europe from actually getting a chance with the senior team. Then if these journeymen type guys go to Europe, they are too old to really improve and just kinda sit on benches or bounce around bad teams for a few years until they get tired of not playing and return to MLS for more money than before. I do think this loss hopefully pushes guys like Tyler Adams, Andrew Carleton, Acosta etc. to make the jump to Europe and actually try like the earlier generations of USMNT players. 5. USSF Just Doesn't give a gently caress as long as the spice flows. Luckily they just lost a poo poo ton of money because the USA just failed to qualify, so even if Gulati doesn't care the board and companies with a stake in soccer in the USA are probably looking to shake things up. Hopefully they will turn this to unfucking minor league soccer in this country and fixing pay to play instead of doubling down on MLS only policies and just sucking themselves off about how it is so bad that we lost the 2022 WC bid to Qatar. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Oct 11, 2017 |
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Oct 11, 2017 22:54
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wicka posted:Gyasi Zardes is maybe the worst player I've ever seen in a USA jersey. I'd rather have Eddie Johnson. Eddie was at least good enough to get to the EPL to fail miserably.
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Oct 11, 2017 22:57
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I think the problem for US Soccer in alot of ways can be summarized as this "We have been treading water and calling it progress for the last 12 years" I don't think MLS is the sham alot of people in this thread/forum think, but holy gently caress is the rest of the US Soccer structure a disaster and the leadership in Sunil has done a poor job of organizing that.
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Oct 11, 2017 23:12
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I still don't really understand how adding Pro/Rel makes things any different, it just means that instead of MLS playing in half empty 20,000 seater soccer stadiums they play in half empty High School football stadiums. Like I understand the concept in England and Spain and Germany etc. because there are actual legitimate second division teams that are worth a drat... there's like 3 in the entire US that aren't half assed. Unless the argument is that Pro/Rel would make those half rear end teams spend more money to chase promotion? I kind of disagree with the US needs to have 20 teams in a single table, there are like ~330 million Americans spread across half a continent, that would be like saying we need to form a European Super league of 20 teams? Feels Villeneuve posted:so here's a legitimate question: what's the most successful example of a european-style (pro/rel, single table, etc) league in a country where football isn't the most popular sport? J-League? Probably, maybe South Korea? Feels Villeneuve posted:hink a western/eastern league could work as long as both leagues are single table and they don't play each other until the final, like how baseball used to work before Interleague. I think that is the more sensible option for MLS, keep growing cover more decent cities and then cut into two regional D1 leagues of ~20(ish) teams that only play against one another come MLS CUP time and try to resist the urge for inter-league play. The two sides can meet in the US Open Cup during the regular season instead as the alternative. FartingBedpost posted:The American playoff/conference/draft system works fine for the NFL and NBA. Baseball’s the only outlier because of their immense feeder system (NBA has two sources of players that can’t really be used in pro/reg) but that’s used well instead of what MLS does. Wicka is pretty much spot on. Promote the Open Cup, get rid of the draft, and put in pro/reg. I think people over-estimate how much finishing last and getting draft picks helps in MLS, like maybe 3-5 players in the draft will turn into ~good mls players~ most will faff about the league on the bench for a year or two before they get real jobs or continue to chase the dream in USL/NASL never to return. I think the best thing about the last few seasons in MLS is all the fraud coaches getting fired. Yallop, Kinnear, Sigi, Arena, Heaps, Maestroeni, etc. are all gone and the coaches seem to be getting a little better. Unlike the years before the teams at least to me look like they are playing better and lovely MLS journeymen even if they still are in their 20's who were starters back in 2014 are now bench players or out of the league entirely. I do agree though that the league is in a weird place, I think there are probably about a 3-4 teams that are sabotaging the league from actually getting betterand we probably would be better off once Kroenke, Kraft and whoever the gently caress owns DC United fucks off. Simone Poodoin posted:Panama went from minnows to World Cup in 20 years or so. Reminder that they used to be a baseball country where nobody cared about football. They didn’t even have a pro league until 1988 and it was only in 1996 that they actually had a FIFA recognized league. As I said before, American exceptionalism is part of the problem, people refuse to look at what has worked for other countries because “America is sooo different”. Isn't this also Panama's "Golden Generation" of players, like I think their team is old as gently caress? I swear guys like Blas Perez have been their starting forward for like 20 years at this point.
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Oct 12, 2017 18:15
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wicka posted:I still don't really understand why people insist on pretending that any argument in favor of pro/rel includes "let's implement pro/rel literally tomorrow and see what happens." It's a long-term goal that requires a large amount of work, the bulk of which would entail funding and support the second division until the day comes that those clubs are stable enough to be promotion candidates. Simply saying "in the future, second division teams can be directly promoted to MLS" would go a loooooooooong way towards them establishing dedicated fanbases, which is really the #1 obstacle to them being financially stable at present. Most cities don't give a gently caress about their NASL and USL teams for the same reason that AAA clubs don't sell out 40,000 seat stadiums: no one cares about permanent minor league teams. Okay thats fair, if it is a future goal I understand. My issue with the idea is a ton of people seem to think if we do it tomorrow it will fix the system. If it becomes our goal is to have a functional Pyramid that could experiment with it by say 2026 then yeah I am alot more sympathetic to the idea of Pro-Rel than instituting it next year or tomorrow. Gigi Galli posted:hard to argue with this. As a Sounders fan I am sincerely embarrassed. G-Hawk posted:Maybe a bunch of players over the age of 30 who have returned to the MLS from Europe for a pay day and last few seasons should not be the players on the national team. The U.S. has a generation gap and Arena took that even further by leaning on just about the oldest squad he could. I guess there are many things you can criticize about the MLS structure but really the majority of the national team should not be playing in MLS anyway. I think that is changing, compared to the last few years there seem to be more prospects in the U-20 range making a stab at Europe. I know this isn't a good excuse, but part of the problem is these ~30 something guys coming back to MLS from Europe are still getting called in regardless of how well they are playing at the club level. Like Besler in these last two games... he isn't even the best center back on his team, yet because he has ~experience~ he keeps getting called in despite the fact he isn't that great at the international level. He also is an example of not really having ambition because if I recall he was supposedly getting offers after 2014 WC from European Clubs, but unlike Poodin's favorite Costa Rican Giancarlo Gonzalez he took a pay-raise in MLS instead of challenging himself in Europe. The frustrating thing is performance in MLS doesn't seem like it matters for the USMNT because whether or not they are top quality players, guys who have good years in MLS almost never break into the USMNT, guys like say Lee Nguyen in 2014 he played really loving good... I think he got a 15 minute cameo in January friendlies once the USA was down like 4 goals... and never got called up again. Instead we kept playing Bradley as a #10 where he was incredibly poo poo, until we just kind of gave up and went back to a 4-4-2. Also guys like loving Gyasi Zardes kept getting called in despite not playing well for three loving years in the league he was a lock starter under both Klinsman and Arena??? Same goes for the Goalkeeper Pool, instead of actually reaching out to goalkeepers playing well the call ups always were almost always loving Guzan/Howard and Rimando. Once you got into the USMNT club, you didn't get your "rights" revoked until you started talking poo poo (J. Jones, Feilhaber) or completely fell apart due to age (Beckerman). The one good thing Klinsman did when he first took over in 2011 was he actually turned over the roster and brought new people into the system be they the dreaded German-Americans or guys who were actually playing well in MLS. The problem was he stopped doing that sometime after 2014 and just kept calling in the same players as they got older and older... like he tinkered around, but mostly just moved "his guys" around in random formation shifts and didn't really bring in much new blood... like Wood, Zardes & Yedlin are legitimately the only young(er) guys who broke into the first team under Klinsman. My only final comment is on guys like Bradley and Jozy. Jozy I have a little more respect for, he just wasn't good enough he tried like 3 times to be a La Liga/EPL forward and fell on his rear end and was bad, it was only after he completely poo poo the bed at S'land that he gave up and came back to America. I have no idea if even places like the Erediivse or whatever where he actually played well even offered for him to come back. Bradley instead is a loser, he was fighting for a starting spot at Roma and gave up once MLS waved a paycheck at him. Bradley never had to fight for his spot in the USMNT that his daddy handed to him, and after every bad performance idiots like me would defend him. It never was his fault, only the players around him yet he ended up being the constant. He was only ever pushed on the club level and once he took the money in MLS he didn't even have to fight for a club spot so he just got lazy and entitled, and being captain that attitude of "Unwarranted Self-Importance" contaminated the entire squad. He also chokes once you place a modicum of pressure on him, he sucked in the MLS Cup vs Seattle and has blown like every PK I have seen him take in a knockout tourney. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Oct 12, 2017 |
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Oct 12, 2017 22:27
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Guys I have a radical plan! Bring back Freddy Adu.
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Oct 13, 2017 02:34
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Dirk Pitt posted:Took way too long. Considering I was moderately worried it wouldn't happen at all, this is a good sign.
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Oct 13, 2017 16:41
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wicka posted:Omar plays for Pachuca. To be fair all the US players in Liga MX are pretty loving trash.
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Oct 13, 2017 20:39
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:00 |
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vyelkin posted:I think we can all agree on one thing and that's that if American athletes like Hulk Hogan played football America would not have missed the World Cup Oh Yeah!
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Oct 15, 2017 04:14
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