[washingtonismoney]

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.

[washingtonismoney]

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.