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Re: Sad day for the USMNT - BostonCard - 10-11-2017

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/global-club-soccer-rankings/

According to this ranking system Horvath... is not there.  The highest MLS club (Toronto FC) is 171st in the world.  Atlanta is next at 281.

BC

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-11-2017

(10-11-2017, 07:37 PM)Boston Card link Wrote:https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/global-club-soccer-rankings/

According to this ranking system Horvath... is not there.  The highest MLS club (Toronto FC) is 171st in the world.  Atlanta is next at 281.

BC

Yeah, 538's club ranking system is a classic example of "some data: better or worse than no data?" You can maybe compare North American teams to South American ones because Mexican clubs play in both North and South American competitions. European teams play each other all the time. Asian teams, the same. But the only times American teams play Asian ones in a competitive format is during the Club World Cup, a horrendously small sample size.

538 tries to make up with it with its use of Transfermarkt, a German site which somehow assigns market values to virtually every player in the world. I'm not sure how it determines its market values...but it's not a mark-to-market system. I can think of several examples of MLS players (either transferring in or out) being valued below the actual factual transfer fees paid for them.

So basically I have no idea what to make of the system. I can say with a lot of confidence that MLS is improving relative to its North American competitors. Mexican teams are probably improving relative to South American competitors. Aside from that? Shruggie.

Now, what does that mean for the eternal unsolveable Europe v. MLS debate? Not much. Like most debates it's probably more posturing about overly broad categories than anything else. It doesn't make much sense to head to a bad club in MLS...or Europe. The question is so situationally dependent that (IMO) the debate is a bit silly.

I don't think "American players playing in MLS" has much to do with the failure to qualify. The U.S. trotted out three players who are excelling in European squads currently, and left one on the bench. T&T trotted out...zero. As a pure question of talent the U.S. is top three at worst, and that's being conservative. Talent isn't a qualification problem. (It is a "win the World Cup" problem, if that's your jam.)

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - ColoradoTree - 10-12-2017

(10-11-2017, 02:15 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:[quote author=ColoradoTree link=topic=17658.msg205801#msg205801 date=1507755861]

I'm certainly no MLS apologist, as I tended to agree with Klinsmann that our better players should be playing in Europe, and I'm disappointed that Morris chose Seattle over Werder Bremen.  I sure hope that Morris will take the opportunity to move to a top European league if the opportunity presents itself again.  But not all European leagues are created equally, and the MLS has gotten better.

Meh, Klinsmann's rhetoric in this area was... more rhetoric than action. He took tons of MLS guys, even when he had European options. I don't know whether that affected player behavior (when choosing between European-based teams versus MLS ones), but it's plausible it did. The main point to keep in mind here is that Klinsmann liked to talk about things, and got an inordinate amount of credit for saying things people already believed anyway. Then he didn't follow through.
[/quote]

I mean, I mostly agree with you.  But I'm not sure I'd agree that he turned down Americans based at top European clubs in favor of MLS guys.  I mean, sometimes he did because the tournament at issue fell at a bad time to get Europe-based players here and back in time, especially when players were fighting to establish their own places at the club level, so time away from club training was too much of a negative. 

Just considering the 2014 World Cup roster, Klinsmann was criticized (by some) for having too many dual nationals on that team.  On that roster, Dempsey and Bradley were MLS-based, but they'd spent most of their careers in Europe up to that point (Bradley only came to Toronto in early 2014 and Clint came back to MLS in 2013).  That roster had Aron Johannson (then playing in the Netherlands), John Brooks (Germany), Mix Diskerud (Norway), Alejandro Bedoya (France), Brad Guzan (England), Tim Howard (England), Jermaine Jones (Turkey, but that was new, as he'd spent his career up to that year in Germany), Julian Green (Germany), Jozy Altidore (England), Timmy Chandler (Germany), Fabian Johnson (Germany), and Geoff Cameron (England).  Sure, some of those guys are MLS-based now, but they were Europe-based then.  Who did he leave off the 2014 roster in favor of an MLS guy?  You could argue Terrence Boyd being left off to include Wondo, but he was playing in Austria then, and the Austrian Bundesliga isn't terribly good, while Wondo has always been a reliable scorer in MLS.  (Boyd's form since then hasn't made that choice look like a mistake, either.)

Nowadays, the number of Americans playing in top European leagues is disappointingly small.  You've got Pulisic at Dortmund, Brooks at Wolfsburg, Fabian Johnson at Gladbach, Yedlin at Newcastle, Timmy Chandler in Frankfurt, and Johansson at Werder Bremen (though he's on the outs there).  Caleb Stanko might stick with Freiburg this year instead of getting loaned out again, but he certainly won't feature much for them if he stays. 


Re: Sad day for the USMNT - BostonCard - 10-12-2017

Also, there is a question of whether it is better to start (and star) in the MLS or sit on the bench in Europe.  I think that was one of the considerations for Morris.

BC

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - ColoradoTree - 10-12-2017

(10-11-2017, 07:46 PM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:[quote author=Boston Card link=topic=17658.msg205853#msg205853 date=1507775868]
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/global-club-soccer-rankings/

According to this ranking system Horvath... is not there.  The highest MLS club (Toronto FC) is 171st in the world.  Atlanta is next at 281.

BC

Yeah, 538's club ranking system is a classic example of "some data: better or worse than no data?" You can maybe compare North American teams to South American ones because Mexican clubs play in both North and South American competitions. European teams play each other all the time. Asian teams, the same. But the only times American teams play Asian ones in a competitive format is during the Club World Cup, a horrendously small sample size.

538 tries to make up with it with its use of Transfermarkt, a German site which somehow assigns market values to virtually every player in the world. I'm not sure how it determines its market values...but it's not a mark-to-market system. I can think of several examples of MLS players (either transferring in or out) being valued below the actual factual transfer fees paid for them.

So basically I have no idea what to make of the system. I can say with a lot of confidence that MLS is improving relative to its North American competitors. Mexican teams are probably improving relative to South American competitors. Aside from that? Shruggie.

Now, what does that mean for the eternal unsolveable Europe v. MLS debate? Not much. Like most debates it's probably more posturing about overly broad categories than anything else. It doesn't make much sense to head to a bad club in MLS...or Europe. The question is so situationally dependent that (IMO) the debate is a bit silly.

I don't think "American players playing in MLS" has much to do with the failure to qualify. The U.S. trotted out three players who are excelling in European squads currently, and left one on the bench. T&T trotted out...zero. As a pure question of talent the U.S. is top three at worst, and that's being conservative. Talent isn't a qualification problem. (It is a "win the World Cup" problem, if that's your jam.)
[/quote]

Well said.  The U.S. has more than enough talent on the current roster to qualify with no trouble.  That it couldn't speaks to problems outside the talent development sphere.  (That said, problems obviously exist in the talent development sphere, .)  To me, that suggests that either our coaches failed to set the right tone, or our players are irredeemably uncoachable.  I don't think it's the latter. 

You're right, the talent problems we've been talking about (and that seem to be the bigger focus of the various postmortems I've read) shouldn't be necessary to qualify, though they'd make qualification easier, of course.  And to me, it's less about winning the World Cup than it is cracking through to that next echelon where it doesn't seem outlandish to think that we could.  Prior to this debacle, it felt like we'd settled into a place where we expected to get through the group stage and could maybe hope to win a game in the knockout round if we got a favorable matchup, but we recognized we couldn't reasonably expect to go any further than that.  I'd be perfectly content if we could get to a point where the thought process of a quarterfinal against a top European or South American club isn't, "they have no shot," but is instead "the odds are certainly against them, but if certain things fall into place for them, they're good enough to capitalize on Team A's mistakes and steal a result." 

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - North Woods - 10-12-2017

The talent pool from the U.S. is arguably better than it's ever been, including an improving MLS plus a lot playing internationally. You can see a pretty big list here including many under the radar: http://www.yanks-abroad.com/content.php?mode=players

As others have said, talent isn't the problem. We used to compete with lesser talent because we were scrappy and prepared. While talent levels are getting better in other CONCACAF countries (ironically helped by MLS in some cases) we have more talent available than most of our region apart from Mexico. Complacency and a sense of entitlement are the problems, which starts with leadership but is shared with the players as well. That shouldn't be the case of course: even if we had qualified we are a long ways away from competing on a world stage.

I wish we could have fielded our 2002 World Cup team. Although also coached by Bruce Arena with many from a then-weaker MLS, the spirit was much different. As Tony Sanneh (2002 defender) posted on Twitter Tuesday night: "Remember this moment and never assume. You are not great unless you are able to be great."

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-12-2017

Yeah, there's been a definite lull of top-tier talent playing in Europe over the past few years, due to MLS paying big bucks to attract or retain American stars -- which, by the way, isn't (in my mind) the unmitigated Bad Thing as it's sometimes presented as. And also, again, due to the gaps in the '90-'94 generation. (Which in some cases is about talent unrealized as much as not having talent at all. Juan Agudelo is, like, 90% of an all-time great U.S. forward.)

But then, pick it back up at the '95 players and you start to see movement. Matt Miazga went from New York Red Bulls to Chelsea (well, really, Dutch club Vitesse Arnheim, but who's counting.) Erik Palmer-Brown just signed with Manchester City. Weston McKennie is a starter at Schalke, etc. It's not mere happy talk to observe that the talent picture looks better with younger players. The question U.S. leadership should be asking itself is, was the lull from '90-'94 and the subsequent (seeming) rising tide from '95 on just random cycles? Was it deliberate policy change? etc. Fortunately there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be picked to improve development. There are a lot of obvious problems that have relatively simple solutions. (Implementation is hard, but I'd rather have a problem with a defined solution and a difficult implementation than a problem whose solution is totally unknown.)

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - dabigv13 - 10-12-2017

Regarding BeIN....

http://www.espnfc.us/paris-saint-germain/story/3227455/world-cup-bribery-case-opened-against-psg-president-nasser-al-khelaifi

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - North Woods - 10-12-2017

WIM, how do you reconcile the narrative about the stronger young talent with us failing to qualify for the last couple Olympics? I think they need to also ask questions about better talent not necessarily showing in improved results.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-12-2017

(10-12-2017, 10:43 AM)North Woods link Wrote:WIM, how do you reconcile the narrative about the stronger young talent with us failing to qualify for the last couple Olympics? I think they need to also ask questions about better talent not necessarily showing in improved results.

Yeah, there are basically four problems with the past couple Olympics, ordered roughly from least to most pertinent:
1) Bad luck: the 2012 Olympics qualification was brought low by some bad luck, as goalkeeper Sean Johnson dropped a shot that's surely his easiest-ever save. Of course you probably shouldn't need to be in that position in the first place, but then again bad luck is bad luck.

2) Some iffy coaching choices: in a weird parallel with the senior team's qualifying narrative, the failures can be pinned on one otherwise-good American coach who made some naive managerial decisions and one pretty bad foreign manager. Caleb Porter, the 2012 coach, who began his coaching life as a gung-ho aggressive idealist and has been beaten down into a more conservative manager. He has since adapted by changing his tactics (good!) and refusing to develop young American players (bad!). By contrast, the 2016 manager, Andreas Herzog, was a Klinsmann buddy. Like Klinsmann Herzog went through a weird phase where he decided to play as many defensive midfielders as he possibly could.

Big-picture the 2012 Olympic qualifying campaign was marked by poor logistical planning. While other countries decided to begin their preparations a year before the tournament started, the US Soccer Federation inexplicably started their planning like a few months before qualification. To their credit this was fixed for 2016.

3) Tournament timing: the U.S. has a unique challenge in youth tournament qualification. The qualifications are generally held in January and February. That scheduling is fine for domestically based players, and bad for players based in Europe. (The European soccer season -- except for Scandinavian countries -- usually runs from August to May or so. This means that European teams are, understandably, loath to release any player who's actually making a positive contribution to their fortunes. That means all their good players.)

As a consequence the U.S. misses out on the services of its best European-based players. In the 2016 qualification tournament's case, that meant DeAndre Yedlin and John Brooks -- both very good players for the senior national team, let alone a youth team.

4) Talent: most pertinently to your question, the age groups don't line up well with the generation gaps. Each tournament was an under-23 tournament. For the 2012 tournament, that meant players born in '89 or later. For the 2016, '93 or earlier. That meant that what appear to be higher-quality cohorts -- starting in '95 or so -- were super young for the 2016 tournament. According to this theory the U.S. will reap its harvest for the 2020 tournament, which features players born in '97 or later. Well...except for the problem that its best players (Pulisic, now Erik Palmer-Brown, others) are based in Europe. Whoops.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - BostonCard - 10-12-2017

One other problem I think has been MLS expansion.  MLS went from 10-12 teams through 2005 to 22 teams (with an expansion planned to 24). That means even as the number of decent players has increased, the team quality has remained somewhat stagnant on average (I think there is also less parity than there was before, so while the best teams have gotten better, the median team has not).  I think from the perspective of developing top talent, it would make more sense to have fewer, better teams and a higher level of competition than more teams.  But the MLS isn't working on that basis, and some people have argued that it is becoming a ponzi scheme, where franchise fees are really the only source of profits for existing teams.  That's not entirely fair, but at some point you reach saturation and start expanding into much more marginal cities that can't really support a franchise.  Still, this graph suggests average attendance is increasing, even in the face of the expanding league.

[Image: 01-625.png]

BC

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-12-2017

Expansion may be a short-term/long-term kind of a thing in that case. For example, it's hard to argue that the entrance of Atlanta -- which is filling the city's new NFL stadium -- has been a bad thing. Over the long run, creating passion and spending dollars on youth development -- as Atlanta surely is -- can hardly be bad. While Atlanta's the poster child for MLS expansion (it helps that they've put an ambitious, entertaining team on the field), I think even the more marginal additions have been positive.

Actually the real problems in MLS are some of the older teams whose owners have become inexplicably lazy. Some of these owners have subsidized the league for ages. Now that revenue is appreciably increasing -- the new Adidas deal was a threefold increase -- it strikes me as kind of weird that some of them are shrugging their shoulders and willingly being left behind.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - BostonCard - 10-12-2017

I dunno,based on this analysis there are a lot of MLS teams with very "meh" interest.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/theres-a-big-five-in-north-american-pro-sports/

[Image: silver-google-searches-all1.png?w=1150&q...strip=info]

Includes our very own SJ earthquakes.

BC

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-12-2017

Certainly, though 2014 is an eon ago. (For example Chivas USA got contracted.) That being said, the bottom three teams -- Chicago, Colorado, and New England -- are the ones I was thinking of in my earlier post.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - martyup - 10-13-2017

Arena is out!  He resigned.

http://www.espnfc.com/international/55/video/3228138/arenas-resignation-a-consequence-of-failure

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-16-2017

Little update here -- the US u-17s are up 3-0 in the 64th minute in the round of 16, against Paraguay. If they manage to complete the win, they'd advance (duh) to the round of 8 (also duh). That'd be the best finish for the u17s since 1999, which had a few players you've heard of.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - BostonCard - 10-16-2017

The upshot is that the US has good company in the "not qualified for the World Cup final"...

Netherlands is out:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/10/portugal-switzerland-france-holland-world-cup

Argentina qualified by the hair on its chinny-chin-chin (and a Messi hat trick):
https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2017/oct/10/ecuador-v-argentina-world-cup-2018-qualifier-live

BC

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - washingtonismoney - 10-16-2017

(10-16-2017, 09:25 AM)Boston Card link Wrote:The upshot is that the US has good company in the "not qualified for the World Cup final"...

Netherlands is out:
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/oct/10/portugal-switzerland-france-holland-world-cup

Argentina qualified by the hair on its chinny-chin-chin (and a Messi hat trick):
https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2017/oct/10/ecuador-v-argentina-world-cup-2018-qualifier-live

BC

Indeed. As a French neighbor of mine reminded me, Les Bleus missed out on the '94 cup before winning it all in '98.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - dabigv13 - 10-16-2017

Counterpoint being that European and South American qualifying is way harder than CONCACAF. The teams being left behind from those groups are far better than probably the best teams out of CONCACAF. Chile for example is 9th in the latest FIFA rankings, while Honduras is 67. Chile got left out, while Honduras is in the playoffs for a spot.

If WCQ was done to maximize team quality, CONCACAF should probably get one spot automatically, and one play in spot.

Re: Sad day for the USMNT - czaja - 10-16-2017

(10-16-2017, 08:59 AM)washingtonismoney link Wrote:Little update here -- the US u-17s are up 3-0 in the 64th minute in the round of 16, against Paraguay. If they manage to complete the win, they'd advance (duh) to the round of 8 (also duh). That'd be the best finish for the u17s since 1999, which had a few players you've heard of.

Ended up winning 5-0 with a hat-trick from Tim Weah and will face Japan/England in the semis.  For those who don't know, Tim's father, George Weah, was a Ballon d'Or/FIFA World Player of the Year back in the 90s.  Obviously U-17 performance doesn't guarantee anything for the senior team, but at least there's some reason for optimism.  A handful of these guys might be on the 2022 roster as they'll be 20-21 at that time.Â