Kicking it up and over is a skill issue.
I will just add this here. This is how you call a goal!!
Classic call! Soccer, oops! football is just a more important part of their every day life in much of the world than in the USA. This guyâs call reflects that. Could you imagine a Fox announcer blowing up like that? AhâŚmaybe if we won the World Cup but not for a round of 16.
Soccer is more similar to golf or tennis than basketball or football. Athleticism is a factor, but its a skill based game. You have guys who donât seriously play football or basketball until high school make the NFL/NBA based on pure athleticism. Soccer (like tennis or golf) needs to be started super young to develop the skill to be world class you can only get with repetition. Thereâs basically not a single case of a top guy picking up the game in his teens.
The fact that our men are a solid 12-16th best team and likely wonât move much is the reason our womanâs team is a solid 1st-4th and likely wonât move much: we started decades behind in menâs and started decades ahead in womenâs (due to Title IX and our nationâs focus on womenâs sports that European nations did not have). Developing players takes decades and any path to us being a legit top 4 type nation is literally a 100+ year plan, not something you can solve in a few decades. It takes literal generations to build the coaching infrastructure to develop youth talent to then become coaches and repeat the process.
Every town in England/Germany/France have volunteer dads with better coaching pedigrees than most of our highly paid travel clubs. Thatâs not something you can solve with infrastructure or central planning. It would take a cultural shift that we probably wonât ever achieve to the level needed to unseat the world powers. They arenât sitting still. We are trying to catch a moving target. USA soccer will likely always be in a place where we can make Ro16 with an occasional quarterfinal, but I think hoping for anything better, beyond maybe a single fluke run, is kind of a foolâs errand.
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The Simpsons were so right about it all
Thatâs why you watch the Telemundo feed.
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Seems to me the national teams best hope is to rely on the increasingly diverse population to help buttress the lack of skill.
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Rooting for Argentina and Messi.
Big no to Spain.
Câmon Argentina. 30 minutes to go before a shootout.
19-0 shots on goal in favor of dreaded Spain.
And just like thatâŚSpain will win. They dominated.
Canât see Argentina scoring down a man.
USA have had the same amount of shots as Argentina today
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At least it looks like it wonât be settled by a gimmicky thing like penalty kicks.
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Hooray Spain!
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Argentina treated the post-game with the same level of respect for the sport that they played the 120 minutes.
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Not exactly a SlapShot line brawl.