In Which I Try to Restart That Thing with the U.S. Men's National Team...

The mood I'm battling.

Seeing as we may not get a 2020 Major League Soccer regular season, now seems like a good time to return to an old hook-up, aka, the U.S. Men’s National Team…

…yeah, yeah, I’d be stunned stupid if MLS let CBA negotiations scuttle a landmark season (25th anniversary’s a biggie), but these are stupid times, so buckle up, I guess?

Back to the task at hand, though, the U.S. Men start qualifying for 2022 Bizarro World Cup this year, so there’s no time like the present for all concerned to gear up, players and fans. And, honestly, I’d like to get on board, but…well, that’s gotten harder since those faraway years when, because I didn’t really have an MLS team to cheer for, the U.S. Men’s National Team was my team. Back then, half the reason I followed MLS was to learn about the player pool. 25 years later, I’m a lot, lot dumber about what the U.S. has for options and, in a particularly comic twist, following the U.S. Men reminds me of how I used to keep one eye on MLS while I tracked the Portland Timbers’ fate in the USL; that’s to say, the only time I see Christian Pulisic play comes during the rare occasions I see him play for the U.S. Men. Based on that visual diet – i.e., watching a frustrated Pulisic kick at the sub seats (and did I dream this?) after departing at the tail of another anemic performance – is it any wonder I find Pulisic something less than great shakes?

Also, don’t get me started on when and where they air the goddamn games. It’s like they want to fail.

As of today, I’m biting back all that anger and just…trying to get excited about the U.S. Men again and, hopefully, seeing them qualify for FIFA’s latest monstrosity (aka, Qatar 2022, coming that Christmas, apparently). Saturday’s friendly against Costa Rica will be the next step in that process (ESPNews, guys? Really?). The first step will be…honestly, just figuring out what they hell is going on – e.g., how are the CONCACAF teams qualifying for 2022 (or even Gold Cup 2021), and what the silly fuck was the CONCACAF Nations League?

Last question first, it appears the 2019-20 CONCACAF Nations League (“CNL”) has nothing to do with World Cup qualification, and I don’t know how that got in my head. Wait, I do know. Jesus Rube Goldberg Christ, who the hell is in charge of this shit? Near as I can tell, the CNL doubles as 1) a qualification process for the 2019 and 2021 Gold Cups, the, um, other regional championship, which thoughts leads to 2) a particularly strained attempt by CONCACAF to get at fans’ wallets. Put a pin in the Gold Cup for now – I’ll get back to it – but, now that entrants for the CNL final have been identified, those games will take place in June 2020. If all you can think about all this is, “wait, I thought that’s what the Gold Cup was for,” get a load of the teams that made the inaugural CNL Final: the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Same shit, same unbending realities, different tournament. I guess that put the winners' medals around their other necks? Fun.

Meanwhile, back to shit that used to matter, the CNL did identify 12 of the 16 teams who will play in the 2021 Gold Cup. Where do the other four teams come from, you ask? If you’ll join me at the next rabbit hole, we’ll learn that during the Second Round of Gold Cup qualifying, when “the four winners of Nations League C” (CONCACAF’S bottom feeders) play “the four third place teams of Nations League A” to round out the rest of those spots. All this, just to get to another Mexico v. U.S. final…which assumes the U.S. keeps its shit together, by no means a sure thing.

What makes all this truly special comes with how CONCACAF decided to run qualifying for the 2022 Bizarro World Cup. How’s it work? Here you go:

“The top 6 ranked CONCACAF teams based on the FIFA rankings of July 2020 will play home-and-away round-robin matches in one single group (often referred to as the ‘Hexagonal’). The top three teams will qualify for the World Cup, and the fourth-placed team will advance to the CONCACAF play-off round.”

This confederation is stupid, goddammit. To give a more generous read, someone once told me this was more about getting games for CONCACAF’s lower-tier teams and, by that measure, all this qualifies as a smashing success. Getting all those teams as many real games as possible at least gives them something for which to improve. Back to mechanics, all the teams who don’t make the Hexagonal will go into the eloquently-named “Lower-seeded group stage and knockout stage,” where teams 7-35 will play a larger shadow tournament under the Hex. The winner of that game plays the team that places fourth in the Hex, the winner of that game plays some middling team from another confederation and, good Lord and lucky bounces willing, CONCACAF will once again get four teams into a World Cup.

None of that affects the U.S. Men, obviously. No matter how bad they get, I simply cannot see a scenario (this side of climate change) where the U.S. falls to seventh in the CONCACAF rankings. So…what? I guess the best thing I can say about the CNL is that “competitive” games, no matter how contrived the construction, have to be better than friendlies on some level (right!? help me!!). I guess the main take-away here is that the CNL final will happen in June 2020, and World Cup qualifying will start on the last day of August. Suddenly, that CNL final looks like a decent idea, warming up against the region’s best and hottest and all that. So, who are we sending out there?

U.S. head coach, Gregg Berhalter, just named his 22-man squad for the Costa Rica game and, love it or hate it, I at least know the squad. It’s very MLS-heavy, and the only players I’d say I don’t know well enough are: Julian Araujo (just being honest), Christian Cappis, Brandon Servania (I’ve seen him, but…), Bryang Kayo, and Ulysses Llanez. As for the rest, would I send ‘em out against the world’s best? I mean, they’re not great (and Paul Arriola and Jonathan Lewis are forwards?), but…I don’t know, they’re competent and available and aren’t we still waiting on the (next?) savior of American soccer? And is Tyler Adams the latest iteration of that?

I want to close on a thought, and forgive me if it’s one I’ve shared before. It took 20 years of following the game for me to fully internalize the essential weirdness on international soccer. On the one hand, sure, the world’s best players aggregate into the world’s national teams, but those same national teams always take the field handicapped by unfamiliarity – i.e., they don’t play together week in and out (though they do cross various paths in club settings), the coach/GM/whatever the hell you call people who select the team can’t just go out and recruit the players fill needs in any kind of system. Because every other team involved plays with the same handicap, I suppose the whole thing works – or least that, better and worse players notwithstanding, it’s essentially fair. All the same, the international game accidentally dilutes the talent, and yet it’s necessarily by design. Go figure. The crazy thing to do would be to try to shove all those unfamiliar players into some kind of "system" (Gregg).

Back to Berhalter and this current edition of the U.S. Men’s team, he’s declared the team “ in a good place” and Gyasi Zardes a good forward (or an under-appreciated one) in comments to the press going into the Costa Rica game. As a personal gesture toward trying to rediscover my interest in the national team, I’m willing to take all that on advisement, but I don’t think he gets to do that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the U.S. fan-base so pissed off – not even during the Klinsmann years. Seeing the U.S. program forced to choose between, yes, Zardes, the ever-broken Jozy Altidore, and some player to be named later who never seems to arrive unquestionably has something to do with that. Zardes, in particular, who seems to make the team sheet with…unnerving(?) regularity, seems like a good, shorthand answer to the question, why hasn’t the U.S. Men’s Team visibly progressed? Why did it peak between 2002 and 2008?

To anyone who made it all the way to the end, thanks for listening to me think out loud about this. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have much to add to the conversation, but I’m also struck by the reality that no one else seems to have anything either. Maybe that’s why I want to start watching the U.S. Men again, despite all the Goldbergian obstacles to even making sense of what the Hell is going on: why is this team broken? What happened? Or, more to the point, what keeps happening?