This will be the first World Cup the USA men’s team have failed to qualify for since 1986.
I am a U.S. fan but I’m kinda glad they were eliminated. They didn’t deserve to go. They have been playing so lackluster and unskilled for a while now.
Congratulations to Panama who qualified and Honduras who beat Mexico and will play in a one match knockout with Australia (I think) for a spot in the WC.
We probably would have boycotted by then anyway!
I don’t ascribe to the “they played poorly so I don’t feel bad” school of thought. This was/is crushing.
It wasn’t just that they played poorly this game, they have played poorly since 2002. I glad that the US didn’t take the place of another team that deserves it more.
Taylor Twellman went off on ESPN. He echos my feelings on the sad state of U.S. soccer.
Back in 2006, we were travelling in Ireland and were having a pint one night.
Ireland had failed to qualify, which an Irish fellow was lamenting at the bar.
A rather loud-mouthed Canadian patted him on the back and said, “Oh well, it happens. Canada didn’t qualify either.”
The Irish fellow stared at him and I could read the thought bubble over his head: “Oh God! It’s come to this! We’ve sunk to the level of Canada!”
For once, we pretended to be Americans. 
Right teams but it’s a home and away tie.
Thread relocated from IMHO to The Game Room.
Thanks. I think I knew that at some point but it slipped my mind.
Of course it has to be a home and home… :smack: otherwise, where would they play a single match :smack::smack:
For the first time ever. Panama City went completely bonkers last night-the streets were packed with cars blowing their horns and flashing their lights until midnight. It’s totally quiet today: the President declared a national holiday. Also, I think everyone is hung over. 
Absolutely terrible. They need to fire everyone. And they seriously need to reform the pay to play system of youth soccer. MLS Academies are starting to do a pretty good job developing talent, but they can’t do it alone. There isn’t enough scouting.
I hear this knee jerk reaction every time we have a bad performance. But what would you replace it with? ‘Pay to Play’ was a direct reaction to how bad we were in the past. We had garbage rec level soccer with dad coaches (who never even played). ‘Pay to Play’ was the only way to actually get better coaches, training and real competition.
In a perfect world we would have a massive number of pro clubs everywhere with youth academy systems in place. But we don’t (and won’t) have that. ‘Pay to Play’ is the only way for most players to get any real training and coaching in this huge country.
if you have better (and, importantly, practical) ideas I’d love to hear them.
Why do you suppose that is? The local radio jocks this morning said it’s because 1) America’s best athletes don’t play soccer and 2) youth soccer coaching is awful. They focus too much on short passing and they’re not allowed to play “boom ball.”
I don’t follow US soccer intensely (only during the World Cup), so I’d be curious to get the opinion from those who do.
But without pay to play, how will white suburban moms use little (insert stereotypical Brayden-type name here)'s soccer team as a status symbol? We can’t have that.
This is interesting, as I believe in the UK the theory is the opposite - if you allow kids to develop a game plan that relies on hoofing the ball up the field (i.e. the opposite of short passing), the kids who happen to be physically bigger/stronger/faster will be the best players at that level, but they won’t necessarily be the most promising, and none of them will develop the control and passing skills required to play the game properly. So over here, I don’t think they’re even allowed to play on a full-size pitch until 12 or so, which in theory means they develop better ball skills.
I first played football in the UK about 25 years ago, at the age of 7, and it’s always been “pay to play” - there is a (small) annual joining fee and then a very small fee to play each match, which is supposed to go towards the cost of facilities, equipment, refereeing, and administration - I presume there is also public liability insurance, provided centrally via the FA. Why would/should any of this be free? Or am I misunderstanding what the opposite of “pay to play” would entail?
The first point is certainly true. There are 300+ million people here, but the soccer playing athletes are a much smaller section of it.
The second point is half right and half laughably wrong.
Youth soccer in America currently probably has 3 tiers. The first is your recreational AYSO level. By far the largest and is what people think of when they say soccer is the biggest participation sport in the US. Coaches there are mostly dads that never played soccer themselves. There is literally zero development quality here. The second tier is the “pay to play” or “travel team” tier. Coaches here tend to be college level players or perhaps guys that played in low level foreign leagues. They tend to be expensive and draw from affluent suburban neighborhoods (although this is changing). The problem here is the money restricts the people that can join these teams, and they often play to win rather than develop players (mostly so they can advertise as X-time state champions to weather helicopter parents). This emphasizes athleticism over skill. The third tier is the MLS academy system. Coaches are almost exclusively ex-pros. Players train in pseudo-professional set ups. Many kids end up training with the first teams of the affiliated MLS sides. Problems here is that they cover a very small percentage of the population, and, I think that teams are too new to have a great handle on what it means to develop players. Dallas is probably the only academy that is regularly producing pros.
The idea that American youth development favors short quick passing over direct “route one” play is odd. I imagine you misheard it because it’s basically the exact opposite.
“Pay to play” in the US usually means a club with fees of several hundred dollars a month.
I hear these opinions from people who don’t know soccer. 1) We have never had an ‘athletic’ problem in US soccer. Our teams are famous for being bigger, faster, more athletic than other teams. 2) I’d wager that youth coaching everywhere is awful (for the most part). Our coaching system isn’t perfect but any means but it has improved dramatically from when I played.
Pay to play is not a relatively few dollars to your local AYSO affiliate or YMCA (or whatever youth league for whatever sport) to defray basic costs and play at the local municipal field. It’s not generally considered to be school athletic fees either. It’s thousands of dollars to spend all your weekends traveling, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles, simply to play a sport. Lots of practices, lots of tournaments. It’s endemic in basically all youth sports these days in the US. It’s also sold to parents as “your kid’s best chance to get a college scholarship/go pro.”
I teach part time at a small elementary school (in the US) where lots of kids play soccer, including on travel teams. Soccer is certainly the most played sport among these students. And a bunch of them like to wear player shirts to school. Soccer is certainly the most, um, sartorially popular sport among them.
Anyway–I asked around this morning. A couple of kids knew that the US had been knocked out, but others I talked to didn’t, and no one seemed to care especially, or indeed at all. And perhaps that makes sense–the shirts I see are usually Messi, Ronaldo, other non-US players, and to the extent these kids actually follow the professional ranks (and my sense is that very few of them do) it’s the English Premier League, Bayern Muenchen, Barcelona, that kind of thing. And when the World Cup happens they’ll cheer for “their guy” and his team, not for the US (even if the US had been in it, that is).
Just find it interesting how little it bugged them…despite the abiding interest in soccer, these kids at least seem much more invested in the ups and downs of local professional baseball, football, basketball, and hockey teams. Not sure whether this is because pro soccer for these kids is so personality-driven (and Ronaldo and messi will be in the World Cup, so who cares about the US), or whether it’s just a function of the US producing much lower-level players than in the other sports, or the (related) fact that the glamorous leagues are NOT in the US (no student cares as far as I can tell about US pro soccer teams at all), or what. --On the other hand, no one here cared last year when the US won the World Baseball Classic, so maybe it’s just that leagues, rather than international competition, is what drives my students…