Update Me on the USMNT's World Cup Prospects

The Game Room
41

All of which were friendlies, and thus relatively meaningless efforts. And note the one loss: they aren’t patsies. :wink:

During the World Cup finals starting with 1986 in Mexico, of the teams other than Mexico that qualify from CONCACAF, only Costa Rica in 1990, and the US in 1994 and 2002 have managed to advance from the group stages. Heck, even the US is only 2 out of 5 in that effort starting with 1990. Canada failed in 1986, Jamaica failed in 1998, and Costa Rica has failed the last two WC Finals.

Unless and until the CONCACAF teams other than Mexico start routinely progressing out of the group stages at the WC Finals, people will be rightly dismissive of the abilities of teams like Costa Rica, to say nothing of Honduras, El Salvador, et al. Yes, they are difficult road venues for us, though a large part of that is because it is us, more so than that the venues are inherently difficult (Central America has no great love for the United States). But I have no doubt that Ireland would regularly and routinely finish ahead of Costa Rica, El Salvador, T & T, Honduras, and so forth, were they required to qualify out of CONCACAF.

Which is why I assert that the United States would be much better off pulling an Australia and jumping federations so as to have a tougher row to hoe. That would quite quickly make us better competitors, even if it did mean we did not routinely get to go to the big dance.

42

Somewhat of a digression here. I’m only a casual fan of the US team, so I don’t pay much attention at all. I know what you state here is true of the FIFA rankings, but I thought the ELO rankings adjusted for these problems.

43

No, Elo rankings are subject to the same issues. You see this with ratings creep, for example, in chess Elo rankings.

ANY ranking system, to be accurate across a wide spectrum of participants, relies upon a healthy proportion of interaction among the rated population. Where there is only limited interaction among sub-groups in an Elo rating system, the system breaks down because it allows the accumulation of points from results within the subgroups, then doesn’t allow for re-distribution of those points at the same rate to other sub-groupings with stronger relative members.

Looking at the Elo rankings for soccer, one can see the result by noting that the 7th ranked team in Mexico. Yet Mexico has NEVER made it to the semi-finals of the WC, and doesn’t even regularly end up in the quarter-finals. Nor will the upcoming WC Finals be any different. But Mexico fattens up on competitions like the Gold Cup (the equivalent of Euro 'xx or the Copa America for CONCACAF), WC Qualifiers, etc. To Mexico’s credit, their continued participation in the Copa America makes their results somewhat more believable than the ranking of the US at 15th. But for a real laugh, notice the Chileans sitting 12th, despite friendly losses to Japan (0 - 4), Honduras (0 - 2) and Turkey, and draws with Panama (!) and Belgium. The results seem to be overly influenced by the current CONMEBOL WC qualifying campaign.

44

Ugh, another typo. 3-0-1. 3 wins, one draw.

I’d agree with you depending on the definition of routinely. I think Ireland would qualify at least 75% of the time. I think Ireland would be pushed very hard by Honduras and Costa Rica though. All it’d take is a down game against anybody in the group and they’d drop some points. The worst teams in the hex are still better than the worst teams in UEFA groups, especially considering the venues.

This horse has been beaten though. I don’t think it’d be a cake walk for marginal European teams, others do. Meh.

45

To get a little more back on topic, some really terrible news today as it looks like Charlie Davies, starting striker for the US, has been seriously hurt in a car accident.

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=685080&sec=us&cc=5901

46

No, it isn’t. You seem to miss this point entirely. The US is in an easier qualification group due to geography and FIFA’s desire to grow football in the US. It really is not harder that it is given credit for as has been pointed out to you now numerous times. Ireland would do a lot better in the America’s group than they do in Europe because it is a lot easier given the level of the teams and the fact that two teams qualify.

47

The horse hasn’t been beaten you just refuse to listen to the facts. CONCAFF is a very weak qualification group. With two teams qualifying the US and Mexico are almost assured of qualifying. Given how poorly both of those teams have done in the WC I am very confident (as our others) that a team like Ireland would do just fine in CONCAFF. Quality teams like a France or a Germany would utterly and totally dominate. It’s a weak, weak group skwered for the Americans and Mexicans.

And I agree with DS that the US may be better servied by switching to a tougher qualification grouping.

48

What? I’m absolutely aware of everything you just said. I’ve actually said all of that in this thread. Just because Ireland would do better in CONCACAF than it does now does not mean it would be a cakewalk. There’s certainly some wiggle room in there.

49

I don’t think its really fair to hold CONCACAF against the US or Mexico. Europe is made up of mostly smaller countries. North America is made up of a few really big countries and several really tiny ones. There really isn’t much that can be done about it other than going to another region which would require traveling 5,000 miles or more for every away game for the sole purpose of making it harder to qualify.

I feel for Ireland, but I don’t see a real solution. You can make it the Europe plus Brazil and Argentina Cup, but that sort of defeats the idea.

50

FWIW, how do things look for Canada?

51

In fairness, I think the US would probably beat Ireland over two legs. Ireland, however, would qualify almost every time from the US group.

The solution is to either mix things up or perhaps create a qualification tournamnet over two stages because they current set up is unfair to European countries which results in the WC being geographically diverse but not cointaining the best teams.

52

The solution is the one they are going to propose: expand to 48 and let more European teams qualify. Yeah, more minnows will also come, but that’s the price we pay for not being politically incorrect and rewarding Europe solely on the basis of its soccer prowess.

53

Maybe that’s for the best then? There are 53 countries competing in Europe for 13 spots. Doesn’t seem right to me.

I’d rather a larger tournament (it has gone from 16 to 24 to 32) than all contortions FIFA go through to fix it so that the big teams get through and the right number of shite minnows from FIFA friendly areas also get through.

54

Well, to be fair, there are 60 (!) member nations in CONCACAF fighting for only THREE guaranteed spots in the Finals. So it’s not a numbers issue at all, or at least not the number of countries in the federation.

The trouble is this: there will be 32 teams in the Finals. Ideally, we want the 32 best teams, as demonstrated by their qualifying efforts. But, we also want some geographical diversity, so that you don’t end up with all the Asian teams, for example, shut out of the Finals. So you have to allocate some spots to the member confederations. In CONCACAF, that used to be two out of 24, but now that Mexico and the US are roughly equivalent in ability, that would mean that no other CONCACAF nation would ever qualify. So we have added a third spot to CONCACAF, and given a fourth spot a chance against the fifth place CONMEBOL team, who otherwise would have been an automatic qualifier. But that third spot has to come from somewhere, and the most obvious pool of somewheres is UEFA, which used to have over half the field. Yet, if one looked at the results, one would have to admit that over half of the best 32 teams in the world would come from Europe at any given moment, maybe as many as two-thirds of them (21).

Thus, qualifying to get out of Europe is a much tougher dogfight for quality teams than qualifying to get out of CONCACAF is for quality teams. For teams like Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, T & T, Canada, getting out of CONCACAF is a hard slog, not unlike the process for UEFA teams like Poland, Ireland, Turkey, the Czechs, etc. The difference is, those teams are much better than the likes of Honduras, et al.

Of course, the other thing to point out is that UEFA teams only have anywhere from 10 to 12 games for qualifying, whereas the CONCACAF teams, especially the smaller federations, have substantially longer campaigns, with many more games to play.

55

There’s already the UEFA Cup for European countries, which is a fine tournament. Let’s not muck up the World Cup by making it more Euro centric. Yes, there are a couple of great teams in Europe, some good second tier teams, a bunch of third tier teams just good enough to ruin some other team’s day, and a few teams that are total crap.

Let’s look at who has one the World Cup over the years. And let’s eliminate Cups won on home soil, since these seem to skew things (for example, England have only one once, on their home turf, and otherwise the best they’ve done is a fourth place finish in 1990 in Italy). The winners on foreign soil are an exclusive club: Italy, Uruguay, (West) Germany, Brazil, Argentina. That’s it. Notice that only two European countries make that list. You can add France and England in with their solo home soil wins.

I think that European teams have plenty of representation and don’t have the hardest qualification road. I’d say Africa is harder to qualify out of, since you have to win your group. Asia and CONCACAF are the easiest qualification routes. CONMEBOL is a little tougher than Europe, IMO, although less likely to exclude one of their better teams.

If the USA were in Europe, they’re about at the level where they’d most likely finish second in any regular group, and then probably lose the playoff as often as they win it. There’s no second place side that I’d be terrified of playing, and no second place side that I’d be confident of beating. I think the USA would stand a punchers chance of winning any of the first three groups outright, but not a chance in hell of winning any of the other groups. They’d probably finish somewhere between fourth and sixth in CONMEBOL, either just in or just out.

56

But let’s be clear: if you take Brazil and Argentina out of the mix, no South American team has won the World Cup, or even been close to winning it, since Chile in 1962 finished in third. And while there are only usually about 5 good South American teams in any year, they usually manage to qualify fully half their confederation’s teams (5 out of 10).

Europe’s better teams should be in the tournament. They make this clear with consistent results in the Finals. Africa has no business sending 5 teams to the Finals, not when they only manage to qualify 1 or at most 2 of those teams for the knock-out stages. If you look at the list of potential stay-at-homes in Europe this year, that list could include Portugal, Greece, Russia, France, along with Sweden, the Czechs, Turkey and Croatia. Notice that this list includes some pretty successful countries recently in terms of European Championship results!

Of course, there is one positive value to the way things work in Europe: the qualifying tournament has a real sense of urgency to it for many countries. By comparison, the US and Mexico (and, increasingly, Costa Rica) can be fairly certain of booking their quadrennial excursions to the Finals without having to wait for the qualifying tournament to get done. Even an England can slip up! :stuck_out_tongue:

57

Canada failed to make the Final Round of CONCACAF qualifying. They finished 4th (last) in Group 2 in the 3rd Round (the semifinal round), behind Honduras, Mexico and Jamaica.

58

Any idea when this is going to take place (if it hasn’t already)?

59

Here you go; done on December 4th! :slight_smile:

Go to post #42 for the final draw. :slight_smile:

60

You know that’s a club tournament right? Entirely different from the World Cup. Club tournaments contain players from all over the world so I’m not sure how it’s suddenly a European only event (in terms of players).

Not that hard to win your group when there are so many poor teams in the groups. Looking at Africa, there are maybe two really good teams (Ivory Coast and Cameroon). Other than that, it simply isn’t a very strong qualification.