A call for revolution for U.S. soccer
Soul-searching commences after World Cup failure
COUVA, Trinidad — When soccer holds its world’s fair in Russia in June, the American pavilion will be glaringly absent.
A bumbling, stumbling, tumbling World Cup qualifying campaign ended Tuesday night with a calamitous 2-1 loss to already eliminated Trinidad and Tobago, the 99thranked nation in the world, when merely a tie was necessary to eke out the final automatic World Cup berth from one of soccer’s weakest regions.
“Unacceptable,” tweeted former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a U.S. Soccer Federation board member. “For us in Ussoccer more than a wake-up call. Time for revolution. Need long term plan that is smart.”
After American soccer’s Waterloo, the fallout almost surely will lead to a new coach and possibly a new USSF head. There also figure to be calls for a re-examination of the player development structure, from youth teams through academies designed with the hope of producing elite prospects.
“There is no denying that this is a setback for all of us involved with the game in our country,” Major League Soccer said in a statement.
New York Cosmos owner Rocco Commisso, chairman of the lower-level North American Soccer League that has sued the USSF, called for federation President Sunil Gulati to resign along with board members and senior administrators he put in place.
While fans fulminated over the front office, the next national team coach must instigate a ruthless roster purge. The Tim Howard/clint Dempsey/michael Bradley era is over, and pretty much any player older than 26 will be past his prime when the World Cup in Qatar kicks off in November 2022. The Americans won’t even play a competitive match for nearly two years, until the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup.
By then, Christian Pulisic, at 19 already the top American, should be surrounded with other players on the rise, such as 19-year-old midfielder Weston Mckennie, who has started Schalke’s last three games in the German Bundesliga. Haji Wright, a 19-year-old winger loaned from Schalke to second-division Sandhausen, is another top prospect, along with forward Josh Sargent, who agreed last month to sign with Werder Bremen on his 18th birthday in February.
The U.S. returned to the World Cup in 1990 after a 40-year absence, and soccer grew at an exponential rate, helped by the U.S. hosting the tournament in 1994. Major League Soccer launched two years later; cable television and the Internet brought top European clubs to American televisions and later laptops and cell phones.
European clubs discovered there was huge money to be made by playing preseason exhibitions across the pond, growing the sport’s audience.
American sponsors started treating soccer like a major sport, if not at the level of the NFL, baseball and the NBA, at least as prominent as the NHL, golf and tennis.
Still, the national team peaked with its quarterfinal appearance at the 2002 World Cup. The U.S. failed to qualify for the 2012 and 2016 men’s Olympic soccer tournaments, a generational talent gap evident when a creaky defense repeatedly broke down during qualifying.
“This has been coming for a while. I think it’s just kind of been building up,” former U.S. defender Marcelo Balboa said Wednesday.