Is culture the real reason U.S. soccer players aren't really good? Originally answered on July 16th, 2016.
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Answer by Jose Geraldo Gouvea:
I don’t think U.S. soccer players are bad, they’re just not as good as U.S. basketball, baseball, NFL/AFL, or hockey players … yet.
The real reasons why the U.S. soccer team has not yet excelled are threefold:
1) The development of soccer has been slowed and reversed several times over, meaning that the U.S. is behind the rest of the world and must still catch up.
2) Unlike the NFL/AFL, soccer isn’t just about strategy and strength. You don’t just pour a lot of money and effort on it and suddenly you become top. Soccer requires strategy and players’ ability to choose the best thing to do in each case. Soccer is not rehearsed, like American football, and coaches have very little actual control over the match, which means that players need a much higher level of skill than in most American sports. In American football, you can be a star if you just can kick a ball straight ahead. In soccer, being able to kick a ball straight ahead is something they expect that 10-year-olds will do. The level of skill and cunning required to play soccer at a pro level can’t be created overnight. USA Soccer has been making steady progress in the last 20-odd years, but they still need some time before they get there.
3) Competition. Most sports Americans like are liked by almost nobody else. Americans can live with the prospect of losing a baseball game to Japan, Cuba, or Mexico every now and then. They can accept that once in every decade, when they don’t send NBA stars, they might lose in basketball to either Russia, Argentina, Lithuania, Germany, China, or France. They don’t risk seeing a national American football team losing anything because there is no such a thing as an international American football match. The same goes for hockey, because the U.S. often loses in IIHF competitions, but they don’t give a damn about them, only sending second or third-rate players. The league (NHL) even manages to deny players the right to play for IIHF tournaments. Only in the Winter Olympics do they see real competition, but they don’t like ice hockey so much that they are upset about a loss.
But soccer is another beast entirely. There is a hell of a lot of competition. U.S. soccer is entering a field where almost everyone else has been playing for more than a century. There are many strong nations: Germany, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, France, Spain, Portugal, Poland, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Belgium, Serbia, Croatia, England, Scotland, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Australia, Japan, Algeria, Switzerland, Nigeria …
Just because you're getting good doesn’t mean you will start winning right away. France and Spain were always strong and put out impressive international performances for decades. Yet France only won the Euro for the first time in 1984 and the World Cup in 1998. Spain only won the 2010 World Cup and the Euro first in 1964. Powerful and populous nations like Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Colombia, and Chile never won. England (the cradle of soccer) only won once.
If Americans expect to become soccer champions, then they should really keep watching basketball and sabotaging FIBA so that game doesn’t develop well in the rest of the world. Other countries may become really good and still remain trophyless for decades or even centuries.
As for winning their regional tournament, the CONCACAF is notoriously weak in competition because it has many, many small countries with little talent to be pooled. This year’s Copa America made this evident. The U.S. should do what Mexico has been doing since 1993: Accept every invitation to play the Copa America. That’s how Mexico evolved into what it is now. Before the 1990s, Mexican soccer was ridiculed all over the world. A Brazilian humourist, speaking about Mexican domination of CONCACAF, said: “Mexico is king in the land of the blind, but has only one eye.” For some reason, however, the USSF has turned down the invitation several times. Perhaps because they think they can evolve their game alone, without playing with stronger national teams. Or because they think that winning against Mexico is enough for them.
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