OT: Great weekend for US soccer players in Europe last weekend
This is a little OT, but there are not a lot of sports leagues that are active at the moment. I know that there are a fair amount of soccer fans on this board and I'm guessing that there are probably at least a few people on this board that have a passing interest in the US soccer team but don't necessarily follow how the guys do for their club teams. Last weekend was one of the better weekends in recent memory for US soccer players playing in Europe.
A few highlights:
- 17 year old Giovanni Reyna, Claudio Reyna's son, finally got his first start for Borussia Dortmund against Tyler Adams and RB Leipzig. He played very well, considering that it was his first start for them, and he provided a really beautiful assist on their first goal of the game.
Reyna had previously appeared as a sub a bunch of times and had looked very good in all of his previous appearances. Actually, he probably would have already had a start or two under his belt if he hadn't gotten injured in warm-ups the first time he was slated to start and been sick another time. Tyler Adams played the second half for RB Leipzig.
- Christian Pulisic finally made his return for Chelsea and scored a goal in his first 5 minutes back on the field. He had not played since he suffered an injury on New Year's Day.
- 20 year old Chris Richards made his first appearance for Bayern Munich's first team in the Bundesliga. For anyone who doesn't follow soccer that somehow made it this far into the post, Bayern Munich is one of the 3 or 4 biggest clubs in the world.
- Kenny Saief scored a nice goal in the Polish league.
- In all, seven Americans were in action in the Bundesliga with 2 more (Zach Steffen and Fabian Johnson) out injured and another American - Alfredo Morales - on the bench for his team. Weston McKennie (who scored a goal last Wednesday), John Brooks, and Josh Sargent all went 90 minutes. I believe it was the first time Sargent has played a full 90 minutes for Werder Bremen. Werder Bremen looks very likely to get relegated, although it's possible that could be good for Sargent's development if it means he has more opportunities to practice attacking and scoring goals in actual games. I've seen a few of his games in recent weeks and Werder Bremen almost never has the ball. It's not an ideal situation for a young forward trying to work on his game.
- In England, DeAndre Yedlin got on the field in the EPL for Newcastle. In the Championship, Antonee Robinson and Duane Holmes were back starting after previously having been injured.
- In the German second division, Pellegrino Matarazzo coached Stuttgart to a 6-0 win over Nuremberg. The win wrapped up promotion to the Bundesliga, unless they lose their last game and the team behind them in the standings wins and overturns 11 goals in goal differential. Assuming that nothing extremely out of the ordinary happens on the last match day, Matarrazzo, who was born and raised in New Jersey, will become the first American-born coach to coach in the Bundesliga.
- The Dutch League didn't resume action after the Covid-19 outbreak, but Sergiño Dest had a breakout season for Ajax.
The US has a lot of very promising young players at the moment. Things could be shaping up nicely for the US to have a decent team in 2022 and a very good team by the time we host the World Cup in 2026.
Here's a picture of Gio Reyna and Tyler Adam's after they played against each other on Saturday:
![[IMG]](https://michigan.forums.rivals.com/proxy.php?image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwnfz750x04651.jpg&hash=2612beb1a82a1a5477df4665065f8a13)
Great OP. There's a lot of soccer out there. It's been awesome to watch it the last few weeks when the Bundesliga restarted a month or so ago.
Definitely a lot of potential among the youth for the US right now. There seems to be a better push for youngsters to head to Europe as soon as possible to help their development.
Reyna has looked so smooth on the ball every time he's played this season. He may not have the pace of Pulisic, but the guy seems like the most natural and fluid soccer player I've seen for the US.
I agree. Every time I've seen him play as a sub he's been really good with the ball and he's tried to make something happen just about every time he's gotten a touch.
Saturday was a different role for him because instead of trying to make something happen against tired defenders he was trying to play mistake free soccer and make good decisions over (almost) a full game. There were a few plays where, in past weeks, he probably would've gone flying into some open space and asked for the ball and instead he just dropped back and provided support and made sure he didn't get caught out of position. All in all, he had a very good game and it was great to see him perform well and make at least one game-changing play in his first start.
I noticed that as well. He seemed to pick his spots when to run forward. Even on the play where he picked up his assist, Brandt had to pause for a half second for Gio to get far enough up the field to make the pass.
I know Pulisic and Reyna will probably be compared a lot over the next few years, but they're very different players when it comes to their style of play. I see that as a definite good though when it comes to the national team.
100% agree.
Thanks for this post. Claudio Reyna is one of my least favorite USMNT players of all time, but I have high hopes for Gio.
I don't know if US Soccer will be able to sort out all of its nepotism and dysfunctional issues. I hope so, but I have my doubts. Sure would be a shame not to see this talent playing well together in US jerseys.
Claudio Reyna's giveaway really cost us against Ghana in that 2006 World Cup. Actually, my family and I attended that World Cup and had tickets to the next game against Brazil if the US advanced. There were 5 of us and we had 4 tickets to each game, so I went to the first two games and then I sat out that game against Ghana so that I'd have a guaranteed ticket to the USA - Brazil game assuming that we advanced. So that mistake was killer for me on a personal level, and even more importantly, I just really wanted the US to advance.
With all that said, Claudio Reyna made the official FIFA best XI for the 2002 World Cup, which is probably the highest individual honor that any US soccer player has ever earned.** So I'd put him on the shortlist of all-time US greats, for sure. Probably the third greatest field player in US history behind Donovan and Dempsey.
**Greatest individual honors that come to mind:
Claudio Reyna - 2002 FIFA World Cup - Best XI
Landon Donovan - 2002 FIFA World Cup - Top Young Player
Tim Howard - 2004 PFA (EPL) Goalkeepr of the Year
Clint Dempsey - 2012 FWA (EPL) Player of the Year - 4th place
I'm sure I'm forgetting some other notable honors. Anyone wanna weigh in?
For a number of years the USMNT game plan against non-minnows looked like this:
1) Bunker
2) Win ball
3) Find Reyna
4) ????
5) Score
Reyna had tactical nous most uncommon in US players, and the technical skills to take advantage of it. Capable of delivering pinpoint passes thru a wide range of distance with either foot.
Though I'm not sure his youth coaching for USMNT has been all that productive.
Brad Friedel still holds the record for consecutive Premier appearances at 310. His work for Sam Allardyce at Blackburn in the early aught's was magnificent. A couple seasons he basically kept Blackburn up in the top division all by himself. I greatly enjoyed watching post-game pressers with the opposing coach. Pretty much every week the guy would mention "that big American" and flat out blame him if his team didn't collect all the points from Rovers.
Claudio Reyna is generally considered the best American midfielder of all time... so do you just despise midfielders? Genuinely curious as to why you feel so strongly.
See my reply to UM85 below.
"Claudio Reyna is one of my least favorite USMNT players of all time." Can you elaborate as to why? He was often one of the few, and sometimes the only, bright spots on the USMNT during his entire carrier.
Without Reyna, USMNT wouldn't be where it is today. He was one of the first to establish himself in Europe...eventually becoming captain of Man City I believe. Moreover, without him in the middle of the pitch, USMNT would've been run off the pitch against quality opponents. His class on the ball was a generation ahead of his peers.
Pretty sure he was never captain at Man City. He might have been captain at Rangers at one point?
And considering who came after him in the US midfield, I'm not sure that saying he was "a generation ahead" is a compliment.
Just looked it up. It was with Vfl Wolfsburg. Actually kind of more impressive since it's a German club. He must speak very good German.
Yes, Reyna was captain at Man City. And yes, calling Reyna "a generation ahead" is a compliment. Not to the US pool at the time but it damn sure was a compliment to Reyna.
Your hatred of Reyna as a player is most irrational.
Cromulent and EGR mentioned the two biggest factors above.
1) That giveaway against Ghana. Hard to overstate how bad that was. He gave away the goal, got himself injured on the play, had to leave the game at 40'. Now you might say that I can't blame him for getting injured, but if he hadn't been dicking around with it deep in his own end (pun intended, NTTAWT), he could have avoided all of that. Just get rid of the damn ball, Claudio. AND then we score as soon as he leaves the field? Coincidence? Probably but I still am mad at him. AND then Ghana gets the cheapest penalty ever, which we could have survived if Claudio hadn't exploded the game already. AND then Fifa decides it's funny so they make sure we're matched against Ghana again in 2014 and kind of in 2010, building up a rivalry when we shouldn't even have had one. That one play had at least 8 years of repercussions. Also, I was in Europe during the 06 World Cup and had to hear about that play over and over and over again.
2) As youth director for US soccer, his philosophy was that winning isn't important. Bullshit. Winning is the most important thing that you can learn how to do as a player.
Now was he an amazing player with fantastic skills? Yes. But I didn't say he sucked. I said he was my least favorite USMNT player, and his 06 effective own goal and Devin Funchessian "Winning is just a statistic" attitude are the biggest reasons why.
The biggest complaint I've heard of Reyna's youth coaching work is that he doesn't actually, you know, *coach*. That basically all he does is throw balls out on to the field tell players to have at them.
But if Reyna is your least favorite Nats player, that opinion ought to be formed thru an appraisal of Reyna's career as a *player*. And no one could ever find fault with Reyna's competitive drive on the pitch.
If you're going to ding players for bad giveaways, Michael Bradley has been piling them up for several years now. Back in Reyna's era Jeff Agoos did his best the 2nd half of the Portugal upset to give that one away.
Ha, are you seriously telling me that I'm not allowed to have my own opinions on whom I like and dislike as a player?
For a teacher you sure are bad at reading.
You specifically said you disliked Reyna as a player for something he did *after* he retired.
1) Letting one play confirm or taint an entire career is dumb and you should feel bad. Zidane was one of the greatest midfielders of all time, despite his biggest career highlight being the headbutt and Chris Wondolowski's career is not a failure because he missed the equalizer against Belgium.
2) Winning is absolutely not the most important thing for youth development. As a youth director, your job is to develop individual players, not rack up wins. Reyna wasn't even the coach during his time as youth director; obviously, his focus shouldn't have been on winning games!
Even if winning is the most important thing, looking back, name the talented youth players the US should have won with between 2010-2014 (Reyna's tenure)? There's a black hole in US youth talent born between the years 1989 and 2000. You're telling me the youth teams full of Brek Sheas and Juan Aguedelos should have done better?
Imagine thinking that you ought to go around on the internet telling other people who they are allowed to like and not like.
Great recap, thank you. Excited about the future for these young men.
Yeah, it's a bit like following recruiting where it's fun to see all the pieces that you think your team will have, but none of it means a ton until everything comes together in the right way on a big stage.
With that said, I'm very excited to see the future of this team with Pulisic, Reyna, Dest, McKennie, Adams, Weah (hopefully), Sargent, and a lot of other young players that look promising.
Of the guys mentioned in your OP, Richards is the one I know the least about, and I didn’t realize he was so close to breaking into Bayern’s squad. Very excited to see another young American break into a big-name squad. It felt for a while like guys who got signed by the larger squads ended up loaned elsewhere and out of favor. Now with Pulisic, Reyna, Adams, maybe Richards, maybe McKennie depending on how you feel about Schalke at the moment, perhaps we are seeing the tide turn.
Schalke is a dumpster fire and Mckennie should leave as soon as possible. At least he is locked down for a starting job there. Beyond that, the team around him is useless. He is one of the couple bright sides on that team though.
Sargent is in a similar spot. Bremen is so bad offensively, that he almost never sees the ball. It's going to be difficult for him to develop his game much on that team.
Sargent and Weah are the two guys who have massive potential that I worry about. Lack of playing time (Sargent inexplicably found minutes hard to come by on a bottom feeder team for most of the season) and injuries (Weah has been out almost the entire season) at the critical points of their careers can be hard to overcome.
I'm trying not to get overly excited about Richards because it was just one appearance, and it's very difficult to break into the first team at a big club when you're a CB because that's probably the position that gets subbed the least other than goalkeeper. But either way, I'd way rather him get his first appearance for Bayern than the alternative. Hopefully, he gets a start or at least sees the field again for them in their last game now that they have the title wrapped up. It will be interesting to see if he's at least part of the first team for them next season or if they have him on the second team getting minutes or if he gets loaned out.
Even if it's not for Bayern, if he could break through and become a starter for a Bundesliga club, that would be huge for the US. As you mentioned, a lot of youth players on big clubs are eventually loaned out to lower division teams and never even make it back to the first division. For the US, Julian Green, Kenny Cooper, and Matt Miazga come to mind, among others, but then again Jonathan Spector and Tim Weah left big teams to play for another team in the same league which is still pretty good.
Thanks very much for this OP, really appreciate it. On a related note, I wish a requirement for young US Team potential players was that they were required to play in Europe. That's one thing Klinnsman had right--US pro soccer cannot prepare our players nearly as well as Europe can.
Klinsmann talked about that a lot but he actually gave more opportunities to MLS players than his predecessors did. But I agree that the more players we have making the jump to Europe at a young age the better.
? that you felt you had to justify your excellent post, while everybody else has just lost their minds on this board.
? tears of joy that there is actually content worth writing.
This was an awesome write-up.
You should do this weekly
Thanks! Maybe I'll do another write up next week if the US has another good weekend.
I’d give you a +5 if I could create 5 accounts. That’s the best summary of US up and coming players I‘ve read in a long time.
And I hadn’t heard of Sergino Dest. His footwork is mesmerizing. He may pass Pulisic as my favorite new player.
Thanks OP. Looking forward to your next post.
Thanks a ton!
Yeah, Dest's skills are crazy. It's kind of a waste of his talent to play defense, especially for a team like the US that can't have its defenders involved in the attack as much as some of the powerhouses that dominate the ball a lot more. But either way, we're very lucky to have him. :)
Great post! Would love to see this become a regular feature...I know I'd eagerly consume it
How do we feel about Berhalter's ability to harness all this young talent that is coming through the pipeline? For the last 3-4 years I've kept telling myself that the USMNT has as much talent as it has ever had (albeit young talent), but haven't seen this carry over to performance on the field.
Perhaps I'm letting only a handful of results influence my perception (esp vs. Mexico), but it seems like we lose/struggle with teams that are in our tier, get outclassed by the blue-bloods and comfortably beat only the truly woeful teams.
I don't feel great about Berhalter's ability for anything other than being a stop gap coach when the US decided to move on from Klins. It seems like for every 1 game that they show some sort of cohesion we have 3 where the team looks like they are lost or that they weren't given any sort of gameplan.
Also to the post above regarding Claudio, I think people hate him for the same reason people hate M. Bradley. While he was definitely one of the best US players on the field in almost every game they played people just had too high of expectations for them. Bradley was a pillar in the Mid but most of the other US fans I know absolutely hated it every time he got the start for his papa's (and then definitely in Klins') US teams.
Bradley's decline started the moment he took the big $ at Toronto. Tough to blame him; it was way more than he was ever going to make in Serie A. But the inferior MLS competition dulled Bradley quite a bit. It wasn't his fault the Nats' talent pool was so shallow. Nor was it his fault his skill set was such a poor match for Jermaine Jones'. Truly less than the sum of the parts their partnership in the middle was.
Yeah, Bradley was fantastic and never really got the credit he deserved from some fans. And I agree, after he returned to MLS he never really hit the same form that he had for Roma. But either way, he had a really great national team career.
I'm not a big fan of Berhalter. He seems too stuck in his ways - determined to play out of the back all the time - which is a good strategy in some situations but he insists on us playing that way even when we're playing right into the other team's hands.
But, I doubt that we'll change coaches between now and 2022, barring some type of disaster, so I hope that he learns to be more flexible and make better adjustments.
God bless this real, live, sporps content.
Never thought I'd be this excited for a soccer event that's still two years away.
As we all learned last time, qualification is an essential step that shouldn't be overlooked. Hopefully we're on track to have a better squad with a better approach and new energy. But the team that failed to qualify in 2016 was objectively head and shoulders more talented than every single team in the region other than Mexico. That team blew multiple opportunities to advance over outclassed competition. Just having a sparkling new generation of talented youngsters won't be enough. We need to have a whole new attitude to compete.
Really enjoyed that Pulisic goal on Sunday. As a Chelsea fan, I am a bit surprised that there's a good chance they're still going to qualify for Champions after shaky play all season.
Looking forward to the knock-out rounds for Champions later this summer. I have a futures ticket on Bayern Munich to win it all I bought last December in Vegas.
Pulisic's movement off the ball is outstanding.
In soccer you have to be capable of running around for a long time. If you're not good at kicking a ball that's ok as you can be a good defender just by getting in the way.
More than welcomed post, remember this blog is sometimes a USMNT blog when Brian feels like writing about it
Yeah, his USMNT posts are always fantastic!
Since you brought up the Championship, Tim Ream started and played all 90 for Fulham in their heartbreaker against Brentford.
Don't get me started on Kenny Saief.
Yeah, I mentioned Holmes and Robinson because they were coming off of injury, but Ream would've been worth mentioning as well. Cameron Carter-Vickers played 90 minutes for Luton Town.
Matt Miazga was out injured for Reading and Geoff Cameron was suspended for QPR.
Crazy idea - since Europe did such a better job of getting rid of COVID than we did/are doing, maybe we plan all NFL games in Europe this year? Like a whole season of it. Each NFL team is assigned a European city (I'm sure we can find 32 cities, some of the biggest like London, Paris, etc can double up like we do with LA/NY in the US) and we just do a one year European tour? Better than playing in empty stadia in the US and it would be great for the European fanbase. The timezone thing would be a challenge but we could figure it out.
Might be too late for this but something along these lines could work, and maybe just for the first 4-6 weeks, not the full season.
That's definitely an interesting idea. The soccer that's being played in Europe is still being played without fans. I'm not sure if I've heard if and when they'll start having fans at games again.
Meh.