Hey folks, for obvious reasons I was unable to get out any USMNT content before the World Cup. Complaints can be sent to Sepp Blatter, who will fart on them and then light some money on fire. I did want to get my takes off before the 2026 cycle starts, so.

The US came and went in the World Cup, finishing second in their group after a 1-1 tie against Wales, a 0-0 tie against England, and 1-0 win over Iran. The Netherlands beat the US 3-1, and everyone's just kind of sitting around wondering whether they should be satisfied. Ha, no lol: 70% of people are sitting around wondering that and 30% of people are screaming about Gregg Berhalter bringing Cristian Roldan.

Let's evaluate the performance. First we should ask what a reasonable expectation is.

HOW MUCH TALENT, REALLY?

Sure why not

This is widely regarded as the most talented US team ever. I don't think that's entirely clear, and if it is indeed things aren't that much different. Take the 2010 team, which got out of the group on the famous goal against Algeria and the went out to Ghana in the round of 16. (In terms of performance this is the closest recent analogue; 2006 got farther and while 2014 got as far they played miserably and lucked out.) Let's look at the starting lineups by putting them in approximate bins. These players are in roughly equivalent situations:

Important players at also-rans in top five leagues.

• 2010: Steve Cherundolo (Hannover 96), Jay Demerit (Watford), Clint Dempsey (Fulham), Michael Bradley (Borussia Mochengladbach).
• 2022: Antonee Robinson (Fulham), Tim Ream (Fulham), Tyler Adams (Leeds), Yunus Musah (Valencia).

At Milan but not playing.

• 2010: Oguchi Onyewu.
• 2022: Sergino Dest. (Dest has ~4 games worth of minutes this season.)

Important players in the French League.

• 2010: Carlos Bocanegra (Rennes).
• 2022: Tim Weah (Lille).

EPL goalies.

• 2010: Tim Howard (Everton).
• 2022: Matt Turner (Arsenal, but the backup).

Very good career MLS players:

• 2010: Ricardo Clark (Houston Dynamo legend temporarily failing to break through at Frankfurt).
• 2022: Walker Zimmerman (Nashville SC).

Those guys are all relatively close in talent level. That leaves just three starters each worth discussing.

One is the "lol what" striker. In 2010 the US was picking between Robbie Findley and Edson Buddle after Charlie Davies's car crash. This year it was Jesus Ferraria, Haji Wright, or Josh Sargent. I think we can call this a wash.

One is Landon Donovan and Landon Donovan 2.0. Donovan was at LA Galaxy because he just wanted to stay at home but is the best player in USMNT history. Christian Pulisic is on track to match him. This is also a wash.

So then you've got Weston McKennie at Juventus, where he's not quite a locked-in starter but is clearly an important player, versus Jozy Altidore in the midst of his horrible no-good season at Hull. Clear advantage 2022.

[After THE JUMP: evaluating performance in four games]

Depth is by definition depth but I don't think there's much difference there either since 2010's bench had field players at Bolton, West Ham, and two at Rangers including Demarcus Beasley. (I know Bob Bradley had installed a very effective system with Davies in the roster but looking back at this it is completely insane that Bradley decided to try out the who-dats at striker instead of just moving Donovan up and making Beasley a starter.) 2022 responds with Leeds, a glass cannon at Dortmund, a 19-year-old at Mochengladbach, and then a serious dropoff. 2022 would have murdered someone for the opportunity to bring a pre-injury Stu Holden off the bench.

The 2022 team has the flashy transfer values but that's because in 2010 these guys were almost all established professionals close to their ceilings. The only guys who had significant runway left were Altidore, then 20, and Bradley, then 22.

The upshot: the 2022 team was not a paradigm shift in terms of talent in the player pool. The youth revolution only got the US back to where it was before Klinsmann ran everything into the ground. It's the next cycle that promises to move the US from a country that has almost exactly eleven guys who can hang at a world-class level to one with a talent base that can expect more than four games.

Meanwhile, the performances were better. The 2010 team needed an all-time gaffe to tie England and drew Slovenia, then went out to a team considerably worse than this Netherlands team. Meanwhile we're about to get into 2014...

HOW DID THEY PLAY?

It's been a while so I'm not sure if these memories persist, but games against world powers used to be agonizing exercises in just trying to get the ball. I find the enduring popularity of Jurgen Klinsmann utterly mystifying—just look at the replies to this Taylor Twellman tweet—since Klinsmann tanked one World Cup cycle and the one time he got to the World Cup, the results were superficially the same as Berhalter's but felt massively different. The USA got out of the group in 2014 but spent almost all of the Ghana game on the back foot and were essentially Costa Rica in a group finale against Germany:

The US had their worst game ever in a World Cup in terms of possession. Germany controlled 67.5 percent of the possession, the most they have had in the tournament so far. It was also the most the US have ever given up in a World Cup game. The previous record was the 2002 quarterfinal when Mexico had 66.3 percent possession against the US. … For much of the game, the USA were unable to get out of their own half. Germany had 525 touches in the opponents' half, while the USA had 189.

They only made the knockouts because Portugal beat a Ghana team that skipped training sessions after their federation tried to cheat them out of their pay. The knockout round game against Belgium saw Howard set a World Cup record for saves. The path forward from that was hard to see, and it wasn't much later when the US was played to a standstill by Haiti in a Gold Cup match, then deservedly lost to Jamaica in the semifinals.

Now we get into the realm of Fancy Stats. Many dismiss these when they do not line up with their priors, but in a low-event sport like soccer I think they're critical if we're trying to sanity check any of our beliefs. And hoo boy, soccer fans have some beliefs. You will not find a single Michigan football fan with a take like "they can't run the ball" or "Blake Corum is bad," but after a major soccer game you can hop on r/ussoccer or (back in the day) the bigsoccer.com message boards and find literally every take under the sun. There will be people swearing up and down that player X was man of the match while at the same time others rant about how he should be dropped forever. Fancy Stats are helpful when we try to argue against people who say things that are patently insane. 

Anyone saying that this was not a positive US World Cup is patently insane. On the surface, 2-1 against Belgium and 3-1 against the Netherlands are kind of the same result. But watching those games felt entirely different. One felt like watching one guy defend the Alamo from a ravenous horde of waffle-throwing maniacs. The other felt like trying to open up the world's biggest Christmas present only to be shivved in the back by a Bass Pro Shop.

I rather prefer the second, and vastly prefer how the US set up and performed in this World Cup than their most recent outing. The Athletic's John Muller has the definitive 1,000 foot statistical overview of this. I highly recommend getting an Athletic subscription; for those that don't, the upshots are that while US possession was 53%, middle of the pack and on par with 2010, the field was tilted in the opposite way that it was in 2014:

That is a stat that passes the sniff test, with Spain, Argentina, Germany, Brazil, Portugal, England, and France leading the way, and then the little ol' USA next. The Netherlands is the only team generally considered world elite to not slot in at the top. The US ranked even higher in the percentage of possessions that reached the final third, another stat dominated by world elite teams (and South Korea?) and had one of the best counter-pressing success rates in the entire tournament.

And then?

Well, then they crossed the shit out of the ball.

In and of itself this is a stat with much less grouping of elite teams—you can see France and Portugal down at the bottom and Brazil sort of idling around the middle. It does tilt towards crossing being bad, and that is the developing consensus at the highest levels of club soccer. It is especially bad when one of your games is Jesus Ferraria versus 6'5" Virgil Van Dyke.

All this paints a picture of a team that got almost everything right, especially relative to their talent level, but did not have a coherent plan for breaking down a bunkered defense. YMMV on why this might be. I do think Berhalter bears some blame here. Big, burly target striker Jordan Pefok should have been on this roster, especially when it goes 26 deep. It seems like Plan B when you can't break the bunker is to just meathead up; Berhalter was too committed to Plan A to bring Plan B. In retrospect, you've committed to Tim Weah as a right wing and you've got Jedi Robinson at left back; those guys are always going to be byline guys. You're going to be crossing.

But how much was that going to matter? I don't think it was likely to turn the dial too much. Pefok is one-dimensional and is playing for a mid-level side, where he was on a serious goal drought. Not a game changer.

More broadly, I don't think the pool really provided an answer. You have to start MMA in the midfield, but none of those guys is going to do much to unlock a defense. Adams is a superior defensive midfielder but lacks any regista traits. Musah is currently prime Darlington Nagbe…

…and while McKennie excels at late runs into the box and got the hockey assist on the Pulisic goal against Iran he's more of a play finisher than a play starter. You've got Pulisic, yeah, and then you've got Dest, but Weah is more of a vertical counterattack guy and striker's a big nothing. Two guys isn't enough.

I hear the ghostly cries: "what about Gioooooooooo?" The question is: who are you taking off for Reyna? The team is built around MMA. You're not taking off Pulisic, and Weah was maybe the team's most effective attacker. The answer in the second half against The Netherlands turned out to be playing without a striker, which didn't really work any more than having an ineffectual striker. I would much rather have played Sargent, who was decently effective connecting the rest of the team on his limited opportunities; he was not available.

Asking someone to do something they don't do at the club level is the kind of thing that sounds good in theory and usually ends in disaster. To me this is like one of those fourth down decisions that is massively consequential but if you punch it into a go-or-not calculator it turns out to be a coinflip. Berhalter didn't really have any good answers. This was maybe 20% his fault.

In summary:

“LVG let us have the ball. He knew we struggle to create chances and could get hit on counters. We played right into it.”

Uh… if nothing has changed, when has a team like NED ever looked at USA and said “you know, best way to beat them is prolly to cede possession and counter.”

— Dan (@DLev45) December 3, 2022

Even if the US is not there yet, they played differently than they ever had at a World Cup. They did not look like they were just trying to hang on. They got booted by a more incisive foe in the round of 16 while playing them largely even. That is a paradigm shift, unlike the talent on the roster.

HOW THEY FAILED

Another way to look at the performances is to look at how things went badly, when they went badly. There were three main ways things went horse-shaped that I don't think are primarily coaching issues, and then some things that do trace back to coaching.

Second-half meltdowns against Wales and Iran. The US lost its pressing impetus in the second halves of both these games and started giving up chances. Against Wales this eventually led to the PK and an equalizer. Against Iran it resulted in 20 minutes of clenched rectums nationwide but nothing else.

This was in part tactical. Berhalter wanted to kill Wales on the counter in the second half and the US spurned opportunities in ways that are more PASS THE BALL TO THE OPEN GUY than anything coaching related…

66th-minute sequence was particularly notable. Wales pressed. The U.S. skipped a line, and won a second ball, just as any coach would have scripted it. Brenden Aaronson found Pulisic in a gaping pocket of space at midfield, and with Tim Weah streaking in behind the Welsh defense from the right.

But Pulisic didn’t see him.

Or he couldn’t get his feet right. Either way, he picked the wrong pass, and turned a 3-v-3 into a non-dangerous situation.

They're in the positions. You've got Weah streaking, and it doesn't happen. Player more than coach.

Against Iran they had a second goal ruled out by the barest of offsides margins and then ran out of gas in the second half. A lack of depth reared its head, especially with McKennie not quite in game shape after an extended pre-tournament layoff. Dest was not 90 minutes fit because he hadn't been playing, and the US had nobody near the level of either guy. Pressing is a team-wide activity; pressing while you've got a couple guys who aren't totally on point is also known as suicide.

So they had to drop back, and gave up their biggest strength, and soak pressure. Better transition play against Wales makes this a brilliant gambit instead of black mark. See: "Louis Van Gaal masterclass" discourse.

The best team goal in the history of the Netherlands. I mean, ok.

The Netherlands’ opening goal in their 3-1 win over the U.S. was beautiful and the most passes leading to a World Cup goal for them since data records began in 1966.

When one goal in the round of 16 gets a whole ass article on the Athletic, you tip your hat. As I was watching this my thought process went something like "Wow. Wow. Ok. Wow. This seems bad. This is bad. THIS IS VERY BAD."

Outside backs failing to mark guys for reasons that are beyond tactics. The second and third Netherlands goals were Sergino Dest and Antonee Robinson massively busting, in the parlance of football. Both guys had plenty of opportunity to make basic soccer actions that would have prevented goals—or at least made them vastly more difficult. That sucks, but I don't think either error can be laid at the feet of coaching. There's a reason Dest got chased from Barca and isn't playing much at Milan, and that's it. We have seen similar things from him over the course of his career. He's by far the US's best option there but has a fatal flaw.

Robinson… I don't know. Just the worst time to have the worst play of your career. Again, not a thing that you can reasonably fix by picking someone else or screaming "HEY MARK THE GUY WHO IS IN THE SPOT YOU SHOULD BE". This isn't U8s.

Berhalter issues. Inserting Shaq Moore, and then inserting him again, was baffling. Joe Scally may be 19 but has been a Bundesliga starter for almost a year, and there were opportunities to integrate him. The aforementioned lack of a target striker.  Continuing to use Pulisic as a set piece taker despite a whole year of evidence he doesn't do much. A complete lack of set-piece danger in general.

WELL?

Berhalter gets a B+ for this cycle around these parts. He picked up the shattered pieces of the corpse left by Klinsmann, integrated a new generation of players, recruited three important dual nationals (Dest, Robinson, Musah), won the Nations League, won the Gold Cup, took the CONCACAF mantle back from Mexico, and did all this with a lineup that almost never actually got to deploy MMA and Pulisic at the same time. He got the US to Pot 2 in the World Cup draw, managed a tough group—Iran was the top point-getter in Asian qualifying and 3 other Asian teams got through; Wales got through a Euro group with Switzerland, Turkey, and Italy last year—and played The Netherlands about as evenly as the US did in their best-ever World Cup performance, the 2006 quarter against Germany.

In the end they deserved what they got.

What is "luck" as it relates to xG? Some would say it's any difference between the expected and the actual. I think it's the things you can't control - opponent shot conversion and opponent GK performance. With that in mind - who are the "luckiest" teams in the tournament so far? pic.twitter.com/YHeCW5Vadh

— Paul Harvey (@Thundering165) December 7, 2022

I don't think someone else would have done meaningfully better. It's notable that foreign observers were generally very enthusiastic about the USA's performance, describing it as almost as organized as a club team, while the MLS-sux crowd on twitter just rails about every marginal decision while ignoring the larger picture.

As for what this means for Berhalter's future with the USMNT, I'd be fine with continuity here. I would not be torn up if he was replaced. I do think that the US coach should probably be American since this country's system is so different than everywhere else in the world. If I was in charge I would extend Berhalter through (hopefully) the 2024 Copa America and then re-evaluate then.