Tragedy was assured for all but one of the 208 national soccer teams that began World Cup qualifying play two years ago. Yet even the surviving victor, Germany, had to wait for a goal in the final seven minutes of extra time in the title game to find out whether its 14-year rebuilding campaign had worked.
In 2000, Germany was eliminated from the European Championship without winning a single game. That performance spurred a top-to-bottom renovation of its soccer industrial complex, including revamping its approach to youth instruction, coaching, and an emphasis on keeping German pro players in the country’s domestic league, the Bundesliga.
Despite the U.S. team’s limited success in getting out of the group stage before exiting in the first game of the knock-out round of 16 this year, no such transformation of the national soccer scene is expected.
“Soccer will never be as big a part of our culture as it is in Europe or South America,” says Bill McDermott, a member of the 1967 and 1969 Saint Louis University national champion teams and current soccer broadcaster/analyst. “In those countries, the sole desire for many children is to grow up and play for the country’s national team. That’s not the case here.”
The primary German influence on the development of U.S. soccer will continue to be the team’s coach, Jurgen Klinsmann. The former star for the German national team has a contract that extends through the next World Cup, in 2018 in Russia.
Klinsmann’s most prominent act for this team was to keep four “Jurgen Americans,” players who grew up in Germany and had dual citizenship due to having American fathers and German mothers. Of those four, Jermaine Jones, Julian Green, and John Brooks scored goals; Fabian Johnson was the only one not to score a goal, though he played well.
Though the U.S. team made it out of the four-team “group of death,” edging out Ghana and Portugal, it only scored five goals in its four games. Aside from the Jurgen Americans, the other two goals were scored by team captain Clint Dempsey.
Dempsey is a bit of an outlier from the domestic soccer structure. Born in Nacogdoches, Texas, he lived in a trailer behind his grandparents’ house. He played pick-up soccer with neighborhood Hispanic children when he was young and did not start playing club soccer until later, when he would travel three hours to Dallas to play.
Dempsey’s creative style has been attributed to his unconventional early play, including playing as a teen in adult Hispanic leagues in East Texas. Just this year, after playing in the Premier League England, he signed to play for the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer.
Tom Michler, founder of New Dimensions Soccer in St. Louis, believes that for U.S. soccer to improve it needs to broaden its base of players and increase access and opportunities to a wider range of children, particularly in urban and economically disadvantaged areas.
“For me, the Cup should bring to the surface the issue of whether or not the American player can be developed to the degree necessary to compete competently and confidently on the field or is it time to really go into all neighborhoods to find players?" Michler asks.
“You have a need for greater coaching education, so that development is truly given its due, and you have to have a system that brings all the best players together for a particular age group, be it under-10, under-12, whatever. What we have are little empires—clubs and academies—that are much more about self-preservation than what is best for the whole of the game in our own back yard.”
Michler also points out that African soccer players are the “new Brazilian of old.” The “amazing foot work and speed,” as well as the ability to play gracefully in tight spaces, have not succumbed to structured play. “Players still play in cramped, uneven conditions, yet this seems to mold a player who is comfortable in such spots,” Michler says. “Some believe that we have that player and that condition, and that both are found in under-served areas of town, where opportunity to learn the game in a team environment is sorely lacking, yet potential participants abound with athletic ability, enthusiasm, and willingness to learn."
Michler’s New Dimensions Soccer has been running 4-versus-4 and 8-versus-8 leagues in the central city for nearly 10 years, and it continues to run soccer clinics at city public schools. Some of those clinics involve children who are recent arrivals. “However, many people feel that our players should be ‘homegrown talent’, not refugee and immigrants who have citizenship in our country,” Michler says.
McDermott sees another obstacle to future U.S. improvement in soccer is getting excellent players to the next level. “We need to continue to expose players to top international competition," he says, "and they need to be coached by people who have a real feel for international level of play.”
Though the U.S. team did well, McDermott says there was a reason that goalie Tim Howard made a record 16 saves against Belgium. “When you are defending, defending, defending, that’s what happens,” he says. “When Belgium brings in a player like [Romelu] Lakaku off the bench, and he scores the decisive goal, well, you see the gap we have between us and them.”
Vedad Ibisevic and Brad Davis
Bosnia-Herzegovina made it to the final 32 teams, and local hero Vedad Ibisevic (Roosevelt High School, Saint Louis University) scored a goal in a 2–1 loss to Argentina. Yet it could have been so much better. Bosnian coach Safet Susic did not start Ibisevic in the first two games against Argentina and Nigeria. “That was a huge mistake by the coach,” says McDermott. “How did they qualify for the World Cup? Not by starting Edin Dzeko up top by himself. Dzeko and Ibisevic are much better together, and they showed that.”
In the qualifying games, Dzeko had 10 goals, Ibisevic eight, including the goal that qualified his team for Brazil. Dzeko was also robbed on a universally criticized offsides call that would have given Bosnia a 1–0 lead over Nigeria, in a game that Bosnia lost 1–0. Bosnia’s only win was a 3–1 victory over Iran. One slight upbeat note for Bosnia was a Wall Street Journal article that analyzed the amount of “writhing time” players spent feigning injuries. Bosnia ranked 32nd, with the least amount of time spent on the pitch writhing.
The other St. Louis talent, Brad Davis (Chaminade College Preparatory School and Saint Louis University) got a bit of playing time for the U.S. team,scored a penalty kick goal in his first game back in Major League Soccer for his pro team, the Houston Dynamo.
Grand Goal-Scoring
The goal-scoring, outside of Germany’s 7–1 shellacking of Brazil, mostly came in the early stages of World Cup play, but overall there were 171 goals scored, which tied the World Cup record. Play started with a spectacular Flying Dutchman header by Robin van Persie. For sheer difficulty of a one touch off a long pass, you could not see a better goal than Australia’s Tim Cahill. And Gervinho’s one-on-one skills surfaced in a valiant but losing effort for the Ivory Coast against Columbia.
Money Matters
Outside the ultimate underdog Costa Rica, many of the games could have been predicted by looking at the competing nation’s gross domestic product. Not counting ties in the group stage, the nation with the higher GDP won 58 percent of the time. Costa Rica has the 80th highest GDP, but you have to love a country that disbanded its army in 1948. GDP-wise, the U.S. is first, and Germany is fourth; Bosnia was the lowest at 111th.
African countries were near the tail end, with Ghana (81st), Ivory Coast (95th), and Cameroon (99th). It’s not an irrelevant statistic, because countries with more money can build new and improved facilities, hire more and better coaches, and pay their players more—if they want. The rich get richer, while the poor have trouble scoring goals.
Greece (43rd) has its own troubles, but the Greek players magnanimously decided to defer bonus payments from the World Cup, so the money could be used to help finance improvements to its national training center for soccer. With its beleaguered background in the European Union as a debtor nation, the Greeks might have taken it a step further and decided to give the money to Germans—not that they needed it.
