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After Sacking Berhalter, What’s the Next Step for the USMNT?

July 19, 2024
Investigation Piece

The United States Men’s National Team once again finds itself in need of leadership on the touchline after Gregg Berhalter and the USSF parted ways in the aftermath of a disastrous 2024 Copa América campaign on home soil.

 

In an end result that seems to suit the vast majority of the supporter base after the Stars and Stripes have failed to make good on a very solid current crop of talent, there perhaps has never been a more pivotal moment in the programs history than how the USSF seeks to negotiate turbulent waters in the hopes of coming out on the other end for the better.

 

Chris Richards: Crystal Palace’s American Defender

 

For all of the negative backlash surrounding Berhalter, at the very least, the former Hammarby IF and Columbus Crew manager does deserve some measure of credit at trying his very best to unite the program in and out of the dressing room, despite results not living up to the hype surrounding who he had under his command.

 

What is needed now, more than ever before, is a manager who can come in and harness the talent inside an ever-growing player pool and mold it into a side that not only dominates CONCACAF (which currently stands as a base-level requirement), but one that can actually stand toe-to-toe with big(ger) sides on a more frequent basis.

 

This is one aspect that many fans bemoan regarding the direction of the program, as highlighted in a previous piece where Berhalter was not tested nearly as often as predecessors Jürgen Klinsmann and Bob Bradley.

 

To do so, a far more experienced head is needed to take charge, and in that light, seeing the federation be linked with interest in the likes of Jürgen Klopp (who has already rejected an advance), Mauricio Pochettino, and Gareth Southgate, certainly at least gives off the appearance that the USSF wants a far more experienced manager to come into the fold.

 

 

And while we can certainly debate the merrits of what the next man in charge should bring to the table, there is a deeper discussion that needs to be had regarding why the next man, or woman, in charge, really may not matter at all.

 

One of the sound bites that many American sports fans regularly subscribe to is the notion that we produce the best athlete in the world. Citing our record at both the summer and winter olympics, and the fact that we are the home of the NFL, NBA, MLB, and the NHL (in part with Canada) often offers them enough proof to buy into that notion.

 

In certain ways, those claims are not without merrit, especially, of course, when it comes to basketball and American football. But for so long, there were barely any foreigners who ever featured in the NFL, thus making it moot. 

 

There certainly have been, and continues to be, those from other continents to arrive on American shores and dominate the basketball landscape in the past, but ask most “legacy” fans who the greatest NBA players of all-time are, that entire list almost exclusively consists of American-born players. Much the same can be said about baseball as well.

 

Josh Sargent Shining for David Wagner’s Norwich City

 

But times are changing, especially when it comes to basketball in recent years, where most would consider some of the games’ top players to not have been “born and bred in the USA.” The likes of Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece), Luka Dončić (Slovenia), Nikola Jokić (Serbia), and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada), are at the tip of the spear in the best league in the world. In fact, Dončić, Gilgeous-Alexander, and Antetokounmpo were top three in points scored in 2023-24, while Jokić sat fifth.

 

The basketball cartography has shifted of late for one key factor; many nations outside of the US have fully embraced basketball culture all the way to a grassroots level. Videos of professional ball in Serbia surfacing is a prime example of just how quickly the sport has grown there, while nations the likes of Spain, Greece, Turkey, and France, have continued to support their own domestic leagues. The same can be said of Argentina, which had produced former San Antonio Spurs stars Manu Ginóbili. 

 

Beyond having professional leagues of note, these nations, and many others, have seen a year-on-year growth among its youth and their connection to the sport through exposure, which has certainly been aided by the NBA intentionally targeting oversea’s exhibition and league games in a bid to continue to the globalization of the sport. 

 

The United States has long been exposed to football in a similar light, and many forget that the US was a participant in the first-ever World Cup in 1930 while also topping their group before losing to Argentina in the semi-finals. But it was not until the nation hosted the 1994 Men’s World Cup that the sport truly exploded inside its borders, the establishment of MLS, and once again playing host; this time for the Women’s World Cup in 1999.

 

 

On the back of growing popularity and subsequent exposure to top leagues in Europe, first through Fox Sports World’s coverage of the Bundesliga and Serie A, and then ultimately the explosion of interest in the Premier League and its now-continued stranglehold on the US market, football in the United States is massive. And yet still, for so many, it falls by the wayside.

 

A harsh reality that cannot be ignored, is that football culture in the US remains sporadic at best. This takes nothing away from the enclaves that do exist and remain incredibly passionate about the beautiful game in places like the Northeast of the country, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, parts of Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest, but this is a nation that has long been in love with baseball, American football, and basketball. 

 

Football will never be a first-choice sport for the majority of young kids in this country unless they grow up or reside in regions where that culture already exists. Even those that do so often choose to pursuit the big three sports, and many view football as a sport to simply use to stay fit when their sport is not in season. 

 

Those factors have seen the failure of real pick-up culture to exist more broadly across the country. In the places where you can find it, the competition and camaraderie is superb, and it is often populated by people who hail from other countries who indirectly, and directly, help spread their love of the game among the populace.

 

Sergiño Dest Finding his Footing at PSV Eindhoven

 

Beyond sporting preference, young players that do want to live and breathe the sport, or even invision playing at a high level to work toward a collegiate career or beyond, must then content with the realities of pay-to-play. An even bigger obstacle comes by way of the sheer size of the country.

 

A quick look at a map will show you that the state of Texas is the size of France, and a flight from New York City to Los Angeles is the same flight time as if you were flying from NYC to London.

 

The United States is a massive nation, one whose footballing enclaves are spread across the country, which makes it difficult to have a central location to truly focus its development efforts like you can in so many nations in Europe and in other parts of the world.

 

Take Belgium for example, a nation I have spent a considerable amount of time in. If you are a boy or girl from Meldert, a town roughly twenty-minutes from Brussels by car, getting a trial with KV Mechelen would only require your family member to drive forty-minutes in each direction to make sure you make it to training. To drive clear across the country, from Ostend on the coast, to Eupen near the German border, only takes 2.5 hours. 

 

 

Because of this, it has been far easier for so many young players in Belgium, and similar countries, to have easier access to top development clubs without the need to negotiate on a geographical level.

 

One of the biggest struggles for youth football in the United States is access to the level of youth club that gives your child not just the proper training environment, but the chance to be scouted by bigger clubs or universities given the legacy that hotbeds maintain when it comes to player exposure.

 

This is a system that I have grown up in, played in, was recruited in, and coached in for over thirty years. There are some good things about it, especially when development enclaves actually do things right (see: New Jersey, or the Philadelphia area as a good example of this), but it remains a far cry from a system that will allow the United States to truly reach its footballing potential.

 

So much of that also comes down to how costly it remains for parents to give their children access to the right club(s), which sometimes has meant they have had to pick up and move their entire lives in the hopes of something coming good. We lack a true footballing culture from top to bottom, and at the top resides a league with its own set of issues; from a lack of promotion-relegation, to the likelihood of corruption among its leadership and its ties to the national team.

 

Tyler Adams: Future Leeds Captain?

 

There is no debate that the US needs a manager capable of extrating the maximum from one of the best talent pools the country has ever had, but such a capture does not solve any number of long-standing issues that are a plague to the sport inside our borders.

 

Many fan taking to social media and calling for the entire system to be burned to the ground and rebuild are hardly uncommon, and while a sensationalist revolution is probably needed on some, if not many, levels if football has a real fighting chance to become part of our national sporting identity, it is likely to never come to fruition in a way that we have seen elsewhere.

 

What makes it even more frustrating for the American fanbase is how quickly Concacaf rivals Canada have developed their own program. In recent years, Canada has finished ahead of the US in World Cup qualifying as well as putting together a far more credible Copa América campaign this summer which saw them reach the semi-finals while the US was “grouped” despite the easier draw they received. And all this, with a talent pool not nearly as accomplished from an overall standpoint.

 

It is perhaps ironic that the USSF needs to look to Canada’s national sport, Ice Hockey, for some answers. Since the late 90’s, the United States National Team Development Program (NTDP) has sought to centralize youth development in hockey and has seen fantastic results on the back of their efforts.

 

 

The remit of the program is to “identify elite ice hockey players under the age of 18, and centralize their training while preparing student-athletes under the age of 18 for participation on the U.S. National Teams and success in their future hockey careers.

 

Its efforts focus not only on high-caliber participation on the ice, but creating well-rounded individuals off the ice.” During their residency, players are billeted with host-families in the area, drastically cutting down on the burden of player families when it comes to travel and expenses that are so often associated with youth development.

 

Not only has the US made the finals of the U18 World Championship for the last three years while winning it all in 2023 when they defeated Sweden in the finals, they have reached the finals on seventeen occasions in the last 25-years, winning the tournament outright in eleven of those gold medal game appearances.

 

As a result, the NTDP has produced NHL super stars on repeat for at least the last ten years, with 301 NTDP graduates now plying their trade in the best hockey league on the planet, with names the likes of Auston Matthews, Jack Hughes, Trevor Zegras, Cole Caufield, and Patrick Kane leading the way.

 

 

Most impressively, the current NTDP roster includes players from areas of the United States with little-to-no connection to hockey development, with areas like Compton, Hauppauge, Tustin, West Mifflin, St. Louis, Kennett Square, Manhattan Beach, and Woodbine proudly featuring on the list of hometowns and a far cry from the traditional hockey hotbeds of towns in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, and Massachusetts.

 

While it is notable to remember that the end goal of every hockey player is to reach the NHL instead of going abroad to play, most youth footballers in the US aspire to play in Europe rather than MLS, which is another reason why the nation has struggled to use its own footballing landscape to develop a better culture from youth level to the professional game.

 

We have seen this play out time and time again as our best talents leave as teenagers, or earlier, set off to Europe, which is so often where their footballing identities are truly formed and cemented. We saw it with Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Folarin Balogun, Antonee Robinson, Yunus Musah, and Timothy Weah. This does not include the cadre of US internationals like Malik Tillman, Kristoffer Lund, Cameron Carter-Vickers, and Sergiño Dest, who were born and trained abroad before ultimately opting to play for the national team.

 

Despite this hardly being new to the national team setup, with German-born players being brought in by Klinsmann and an example like Thomas Dooley representing the US during the 1990s, the overall inability to truly form a national footballing identity beyond athletic talent or size, something that has long plagued youth development sectors in the country on the whole, continues to also play its hand.

 

Weston McKennie: Andrea Pirlo’s Jack-Of-All-Trades

 

This is very different from a nation like Italy, Germany, or Spain, where players often remain their for their entire career dating back to youth level all the way to retirement. In that light, it is far easier to create and maintain a national footballing identity not just for the national team, but for the top domestic league.

 

As a nation that has been build and held up by its immigrant populations for centuries, having a national team represent the true racial and ethnic realitty of the country is a very, very good thing. It is something that must continue. But this does not remove the fact that American footballers are hardly capable of being looked at in a way which you can readily identify what they are about on the pitch like you can when it comes to so many other nations. 

 

Japan is another example of how a sport, when implemented correctly all the way down to grass roots level, can entirely transform a national landscape to produce gifted players who excel at the highest level while a national team’s identity was formed hand-in-hand, which has served both the men’s and women’s teams so well in recent years.

 

At some point, hopefully in my generations lifetime, we will see a United States team finally realize its potential on the pitch. But unfortunately, like many others, I am hardly optimistic.

 

By: Andrew Thompson / @GeecheeKid

Featured Image: @GabFoligno / Icon Sportswire

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