Good morning and Happy Monday! Thanks for reading today.
When I hopped online today, against my better judgment after the Platner discourse last night, I was immediately bombarded with claims that Donald Trump cost the US Men’s National Team the World Cup — or at least a quarterfinal berth.
While I believe that Trump sticking his grubby little hands into Flo Balogun’s red card suspension was terrible optics and politics, and I have zero doubt he put all kinds of pressure on this team that wasn’t needed, I bristle at the idea that the USMNT was on a trajectory to make the quarters without Trump’s interference.
Let’s talk about why. Don’t worry, I promise this won’t be an Xs-and-Os post.
I started playing soccer when I was around six years old. As I made my way through the US Soccer “system,” for lack of a better word, from local AYSO programs to club soccer to showcase teams, I have witnessed the bottomless hope that US Soccer will get its ish together and produce a men’s team worthy of a country as big as the US. They have never managed to do it. Every men’s WC team is “the greatest US (men’s) team ever assembled,” if you believe the commentators, and yet we always find ourselves getting bounced in the Round of 16. There have been two exceptions: In 2002, when the US men beat Mexico to advance to the quarterfinals, and in 1930, when the US came in third.
The traditional wisdom goes something like this: In the US, our best athletes play basketball, football, baseball, or hockey. In other countries, the best athletes play soccer. That idea is true in the same way that "The Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery” is true. Only on the surface, and if you don’t look any deeper. (The states’ rights to do what, though?)
The United States has a population of around 350 million people. Belgium, the team that waxed the USMNT’s ass on Monday, has about 12 million. Norway, another team in the quarters, has less than six million. England boasts around 59 million people. Argentina, long regarded as the holy land of soccer, is a country of 46 million people.
So yes, the US has at least four other sports that are competing for the best athletes, but we also have a much, much bigger population than most of the countries we compete against. With a pool of 350 million people, there are enough potential players to find all the Michael Jordans, the Walter Paytons, the Connor McDavids, and the Shohei Ohtanis, and still field a highly competitive national soccer team.
Between 3 and 7 million kids ages 6 to 17 play soccer in the United States. While the biggest youth sport in the nation is basketball, soccer is played most often by little kids, aged 6 to 12. So what happens to the kids that age out of AYSO, the soccer version of Little League? Well, the best go on to play for club teams. And that’s a problem.
In the US, thanks in large part to US Soccer, we’ve turned the beautiful game into an elitist sport. That means we’ve already cut our player pool down by … oh, I dunno, let’s say 75 percent before we even start looking for national team players, because too many kids are priced out of the game so early on.
I found this piece I wrote in 2016, and I’m dismayed at how much of this is still a problem in US Soccer 10 years later. But, as I said, this has been a problem since I was a kid in the 1980s.
In the United States, unlike almost every other country on Earth, soccer is an upwardly mobile white sport, propped up by the club system that promotes the players with the most resources, not the ones with the most talent.
The biggest issue in U.S. Soccer is the pay-to-play club system, which is geared towards families that can pay $1,000 to $5,000 a "session," based on the club's prestige, to have their children coached by professional coaches from Europe and South America. Money aside, most club teams practice two to three times a week and play tournaments or matches every weekend, often involving significant travel time and expenses. Players are seen and evaluated by coaches at showcase tournaments -- invitation-only events that pit the best clubs against each other.
If players are lucky enough to belong to a club with a professional team sponsor, professional scouts from the English Premier League or Bundesliga may hold special "talent ID camps" to identify promising players. Again, the camps cost money to attend and are often held during regular working hours.
At the time I wrote this, my kid was still smack dab in the middle of his club career, and I probably got the idea for it while looking at his club fees for the season. And, compared to other clubs in our area that travel internationally to compete, we paid a pretty reasonable fee. Still, those fees are a barrier for many kids. And while US Soccer, as well as some MLS and English Premier League teams, have opened academies that are supposed to seek out the best talent in areas that aren’t flush with cash, it’s not nearly enough to catch all the talented players slipping through the system.
Take the US Men’s team’s current roster. Flo Balogun, by far the best player on the team, was developed at Arsenal’s academy in the UK. Tim Weah played in the US, but his father literally won the Ballon D’Or in 1995, and Weah had a tryout with Chelsea at 13 and went to play in France at 14. Malik Tillman, he of the insane set-play shots, was developed in Bayern Munich’s academy in Nuremberg, Germany.
Christian Pulisic spent much of his childhood in the US, but he began playing at age 7 in a town program in England, and he moved to Germany at 15 to play for Borussia Dortmund. Antonee Robinson was raised in Liverpool and played for Everton’s academy there. Gio Reyna played in NYC during his youth, but both his parents played for the US National team. Sebastian Berhalter’s dad is Gregg, a former USMNT player and head coach, and Gio played in Sweden in his early days and in Germany as a teen. Wes McKennie was born in Washington state, but came up through Borussia Dortmund’s academy while living in Germany
What I’m getting at is this: Even after all this time, and all these World Cup appearances, the US is still awful at finding and developing our most talented players. If you want to play soccer at an elite level in the US, your best choices are to 1) be born outside the US and play your early years in someone else’s academy system; or/and 2) have a parent who already has an “in” with US Soccer and access to international club teams.
I’ve seen some of this firsthand, both as a player and as a club parent. We knew kids who were recruited into the US Soccer system — their parents paid ungodly amounts of money (club fees, travel fees, travel expenses, showcase camps, all-star camps, etc) for them to do so. And sure, some clubs and academies give out scholarships to deserving kids who couldn’t otherwise afford the cost, but how many of those kids never find academy programs? And how many more fall out of the system because they didn’t develop in time to be snatched up at 11 or 12? What about the kids who became great at 15 or 16? We’re missing too many of them.
It also doesn’t help that American sports parents, as a whole, don’t seem to understand the concept of “development,” like the rest of the world does. I’ve seen parents screaming that at coaches that their five-year-old girls were learning to be “losers” because they were down 5-0. I’ve seen parents lecture Argentinian coaches because they didn’t believe in keeping score until kids reach a certain age. I’ve seen parents throw temper tantrums because three-year-olds were playing on a field without goals, being taught to play keep away from each other. That’s how other countries teach their kids soccer. Everything involving sports in this country seems to be about winning and losing, not developing talent. Or skill. Or a life-long relationship with the game.
And don’t even get me started on the parents who stand there yelling, “Boot it!” every time their kid gets near the ball. Please don’t do that.
The bottom line is that other nations have a completely different attitude toward playing soccer. They teach kids the fundamentals first. They want them to love the game. They want them to understand the nuances of the game. In the US, we want goals and trophies.
It’s heartbreaking that so much of what I wrote in 2016 is still true, because after every (men’s) World Cup, we hear how much US Soccer is doing to discover and develop (men’s) talent. But it never seems to get us anywhere.
So yeah, the USMNT was going to get walked by Belgium no matter what. And despite the 4-1 beatdown, Belgium’s two best players played a combined 24 minutes in that match; they still had another gear they never had to kick into. That’s why Belgium is ranked 8th in the world, and the US men keep topping out around 15.
Even if this USMNT team did somehow manage to get past Belgium, they would have run into a buzzsaw named Spain, currently ranked 3rd in the world. Frankly, given what we saw from this US team in qualifying, I thought they were going to get bounced during the group stage. They overperformed.
Sadly, despite all the WC ad campaigns that put Pulisic in the same room as Messi and other football luminaries, the US men are quite a ways off from being in the same conversation with Spain, France, Argentina, England, Brazil, and even Morocco and Egypt. “Why not us?” was a fever dream, not reality.
The good news is that World Cup qualifying for the number two-ranked women’s team in the world (that’s the USWNT) has already begun. Only 352 more days until a US team with a legitimate shot at winning the whole thing begins play! The CONCACAF W Championship takes place in November, and the top four teams will qualify for the 2027 World Cup in Brazil. Until then, the NWSL, where many of the world's best players currently compete, runs all summer long.
In other news: Oh goodie, more Graham Platner stories are coming out; Trump is embarrassing us all in Turkey; Meta somehow gets worse; and The High Note.
Here we go.
Yay, more Graham Platner nonsense
And by “nonsense,” I mean “it’s nonsense that so many people lined up behind the clearly horrible person AFTER it was revealed that he had a Nazi tattoo.”
The latest is that Platner reportedly removed condoms during sex without his partner’s knowledge or consent. In many civilized countries (Canada, Germany, and the UK, for example), this is considered sexual assault.
Lyndsey Fifield, who said she dated Platner from 2013 to 2015 in D.C. and has previously accused him of physical abuse, said that she told Platner on multiple occasions that he had to wear condoms during sex because she was not on birth control.
“He would pull condoms off,” she said in an interview. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”
In a statement in response to questions about Fifield’s allegation, Platner’s campaign called the claim “categorically false and politically motivated.” The statement noted Fifield supported now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault before his confirmation.
How much grosser can this guy get? Did his wife know all this about him before they got married? Ugh.
True to form, Platner hasn’t stepped down yet, and he wants a say in the candidate who replaces him. Yeah, that’s not how this works, pal. Even Bernie Sanders is telling Platner to step aside now (finally), and Platner is still acting like this is somehow his decision. If that doesn’t speak to his arrogance and sense of entitlement, I’m not sure what does.
Democrats have until July 13 to replace Platner on the midterm ballot.
Trump continues to be terrible in Turkey
(puts paper bag over head)
I guess he’s over the Reflecting Pool and back on his Greenland bullshit. Let’s clear some things up:
Greenland is not “surrounded by China ships and Russia ships;”
Trump has not “settled eight wars;”
The 2020 election was not “rigged;”
$19.2 trillion is not being invested in the United States by foreign countries; and
Joe Biden did not give Ukraine “hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment” during his time in office. JFC.
Hopefully, that addresses every false claim he made in his brief meeting with Turkish President Erdogan yesterday. I feel like Leslie Knope at Harvest Fest:
Meta somehow gets worse
I love that we’re doing all of this in service of a technology that keeps insisting to me that “Platner” is spelled with two ts and that Benjamin Franklin was a US President. Oh, but it’ll get “better” if we let it steal more content from authors and artists. Blergh.
The Cheyenne Board of Public Utilities has stopped accepting industrial wastewater from data center fill-and-flush and closed-loop cooling operations after tracing a rare bacterium in the city's reclaimed water to Goat Systems LLC, the entity Meta uses to build its Cheyenne campus. In a notice reported by Cowboy State Daily, the Board said Goat Systems was in significant noncompliance for discharging water carrying Cupriavidus gilardii, a metal-resistant bacterium that interfered with two water reclamation plants and pushed the reuse system offline for months of cleanup. The Board revoked the contractor's fill-and-flush discharge privileges on March 24, and a wider suspension now covers every data center connected to city services.
We should definitely keep letting Zuckerberg do whatever he wants, because this is fine. BTW, I ordered Careless People, the tell-all book about Meta, and I am very much looking forward to grinding my teeth and cursing Zuck’s name while reading it. Especially this part:
In the words of Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon.”
The High Note
Each Day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face, a song in your heart, and the will to fight another day.
We got a cool video for “Here” over the weekend.
I know it’s “cool” to hate Mumford & Sons, but I’ve loved them since I first heard “Little Lion Man.” And I like Coldplay, too, for that matter. Anyway, yes to Oscar Isaac in more music videos.
Hey, survive and advance out there today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.
