Again, US men's soccer miles away from where it thinks it should be

Share

The United States will not be part of the 2018 World Cup in Russia, and we will leave you to make all the political jokes you like about the rich veins of irony in that.

 

But this much is true, and indisputably so. When you lose to Trinidad and Tobago, you don’t get to complain about your fate. The U.S. earned the result it received by its play, by its roster, by its organization.

 

Truth is, except for the elite football-playing nations – Germany, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina – this sport is generational. Sometimes the talent is yours to command, sometimes it is not. It is no more complicated than that, and the U.S. was a hodgepodge of age and youth that never fully meshed, and will be remembered for its quizzical looks at each other when things went wrong.

 

But we try to make it that, especially when it comes to the U.S. The country is so big and so wealthy that the logic goes that it should never have fallow periods, but the young stars (re: Christian Pulisic) have always been too few and far between and overhyped by the country that invented hype and overhype. The U.S.’ great failing has been in believing what it tells itself about itself, and it is as it has been for 40 years – a second-level power who is subject to the same ebbs and flows of talent as, say, Sweden or Croatia or even The Netherlands, which failed to qualify this year.

 

And the U.S. is part of a group, CONCACAF (North and Central America), that is nowhere near as difficult as UEFA or CONMEBOL (South America), so this is a fresher reminder that the U.S. is miles away from where it thinks it should be, and probably will be for the rest of our lifetimes. It is structurally flawed from its youth programs up, and still it reached seven consecutive World Cups.

 

So maybe, in the final analysis, this is its true level – in more often than not, and a part of the World Cup without ever actually challenging for it. But “more often than not” includes times when it is not, and this was one of the times when it didn’t deserve to go any further than it did.

Contact Us