Media in America likes to focus on Europe, because we all know Europe does everything better than us Americans do.
We get to hear people talk about the English national team, that’s when we aren’t hearing or watching how screwed up the US system and national team can be.
This isn’t about the lack of promotion and relegation over here. If you want to read about that then just go on Twitter, get some popcorn and just read. There’s not enough words to do it justice on here. I’m here to talk about everything else.
Let’s start at the top, the Men’s National Team.
We have just come off two losses in World Cup Qualifying. That will, in all likelihood, keep us out of Russia in 2018, and maybe that’s needed. The President of US Soccer, Sunil Gulati, decided in 2011, instead of going with a manager that knew tactics and how to build up players ability, he went for a fitness coach to lead the us to the next World Cup. Much decorated former German international striker Jurgen Klinsmann was appointed because he was a big name. Let that sink in. It would be like Valencia hiring a pundit to manage them.
So not too long into his career here as national team manager, what happens? Sunil decides that Jurgen not only needs to be the manager for one cycle, he needs two cycles and the technical director job, because the narrative is that he’s the reason that Germany is so good at the sport, so he needed to make the whole sport better.
He has dictated what each club, both professional and amateur do, and everyone listens to him. In football, it takes years, even decades to see improvement. In 2014 the nation got to the knockout round against Belgium, but lost 2-1. However, we have found that Jurgen doesn’t change, doesn’t bring many new players through, and doesn’t change his tactics, if he even uses the proper tactics.
It’s 2016, life got a little more weird. In the week after we elected Donald Trump as our next president, (sorry world, we didn’t mean to make you laugh that hard!), we played our arch rivals Mexico, and lost because we played a different system in the first half, and couldn’t defend on the back post of a corner kick.
Two weeks later, Gulati did what no one thought he could or would do, give Jurgen his six million dollar buyout, and fired him. That was the biggest surprise in all of football this past month in the US. There were cries for a young manager, or the hiring of Marcelo Bielsa, every hipsters favorite manager, but what did we get? We got the safe hiring of Bruce Arena, a former manager of the national team, and a wildly successful one in Major League Soccer (MLS).
Where do we go from here? Well, despite what people were saying online that USA will miss the World Cup now, that we haven’t taken any points in World Cup Qualifying, we are going to make it. If we have to qualify through the play-off against Oceania, we will make it. With Bruce Arena back, he will solve our defensive problems and bring new life into the setup.
There will be players like midfielders Gideon Zelalem, and Benny Feilhaber who were both frozen out will likely be back in the fold. We will see more players that ply their trade in the MLS get a run in, such as New York Red Bull’s Dax McCarty, another midfielder who should finally get a shot.
Finally, we will get to see the end of Chris Wondolowski as a permanent fixture on the bench. The future is definitely bright now for American soccer.
