Biggest Thing U.S. Lost Is Opportunity
Was it really worth it?
Were all those days and weeks and months of practice and meetings and strategy sessions and mind games and qualifying games worth the final outcome?
Is this all the payoff there is from those grueling trips to Costa Rica and El Salvador and Mexico and Jamaica and Canada and Guatemala and Trinidad and Tobago?
Surely there must be something else, something more?
“That’s the feeling amongst the team,” Cobi Jones said. “Four years and it’s over in a week. It’s disappointing.”
To say the least.
Disappointing for the players on the U.S. World Cup team, who expected more. Disappointing for their coaches, who expected more of them. Disappointing, especially, for the fans, who were led to believe that this U.S. team was better than it is.
No matter what the U.S. achieves in its final France 98 game against Yugoslavia on Thursday, it is fair to say that being ousted from the World Cup in a mere 180 minutes signifies a significant setback for the sport in the United States.
First, a black eye from Germany. Next, a black eye from Iran. Blinded by the light of its own dreams exploding, U.S. soccer now peers into a future that looks a lot less certain.
This was the end of the line for a generation of players. And a new generation obviously is not ready to take its place.
Americans have long been lukewarm toward soccer. Some have embraced it wholeheartedly, but the majority of the country only glances up every four years when the World Cup comes around.
This time, it had to glance quickly, because American involvement ended so fast.
Steve Sampson, the U.S. coach with the rose-colored glasses and the red-faced team, sees positives even in the most bleak scenarios.
On Sunday night, facing a crowd of reporters who sensed blood in the water, Sampson looked a little pale but still tried to put a brave face on the Americans’ 2-1 loss to Iran, which followed a 2-0 loss to Germany.
“We had a tremendous amount of goal-scoring opportunities,” said the man from Agoura Hills. “This is the style of soccer that we’re going to continue to play.
“I think all Americans love to win, and I think they will appreciate the effort. I hope they will appreciate the way that we played.”
But there is a growing belief that it no longer is good enough to say “well played” and then step aside and let the rest of the world get on with the tournament.
If the U.S. public is ever going to really care about the sport, then U.S. teams have to become competitive at the highest level. Also-rans are not going to cut it.
Sampson, his job once again teetering on a knife edge, acknowledged as much on Monday.
“The bottom line is the American public won’t be happy until we are world champions,” he said.
But until U.S. soccer produces an unending pipeline of talent the same way baseball and football and basketball do, that day remains a long, long way away.
There is a plan that envisions the United States winning the World Cup by 2010. Given the developments of the past week or so, a more realistic goal would be simply reaching the second round by 2010.
In two years, when qualifying begins for the Japan/South Korea 2002 World Cup, even earning one of the three berths that go to CONCACAF countries now looks problematic unless something dramatic occurs.
Alan Rothenberg, the man who has done more than anyone else to get soccer to the point it has reached in the United States, was not battening the hatches and predicting the worst after the Iran loss.
He, Sampson, Hank Steinbrecher, U.S. Soccer’s executive director, and Sunil Gulati, deputy commissioner of Major League Soccer, walked into the postgame news conference on Sunday night in Lyon like four pallbearers at a funeral.
They were grim, tight-lipped and haunted. Four men in search of a place to hide. Or a stiff drink.
All that was missing was the casket containing the now-cold future of soccer in the United States. Or so it seemed. But Rothenberg, like Sampson, went for the upbeat approach once the questions started.
“It breaks my heart,” he said of the loss, “but it doesn’t concern me at all about the future. Clearly, we’re a competitive team, which is what we want to be at this point. We’re going to keep getting better. We had the opportunity for a lot of young players to get some playing time. The program will continue to grow and get better.
“We certainly haven’t been blown out by anybody. We’re playing real hard. Today was the breaks of the game. If you play that game 10 times, we’re going to win it nine times. Unfortunately, this was the 10th time. We didn’t win it.”
That is a perfect example of how the United States continues to overrate itself. The reality is, if the game were played 10 times, the Americans would be lucky to get a split.
One of the great fallacies surrounding the sport is that the Americans are almost competitive now with the best in the world. The farcical idea is perpetuated by such ludicrous things as the FIFA world rankings, an American soft-drink-sponsored piece of nonsense that not even coaches and players take seriously.
How nonsensical? Coming into the World Cup, the United States was ranked 11th. Iran was ranked 42nd.
Nor can U.S. Soccer continue to point to victories such as those over Argentina in 1995 or Brazil in 1998 as evidence that on any day the United States is the equal of such former or current world champions. Both were considerably understrength for those matches.
Which is not to say that the national team has not grown during the past decade. The team--and indeed the program as a whole--is many times stronger than it was in 1990, when another American team was rudely and unceremoniously booted out of the Italia ’90 World Cup.
That didn’t kill soccer in the United States.
Nor was there a downturn when the Americans were eliminated by Brazil in the second round in 1994.
That didn’t kill soccer in the United States.
“Those who know the game well will see the subtle changes in the way the team plays,” Sampson said Monday. “We have come a long way from being a team that overly respected the opposition.”
But not far enough. Certainly not far enough to entice more than a sliver of the U.S. public into supporting the team. Hundreds of thousands of Americans follow the sport avidly. That won’t change simply because the U.S. team was bounced out of France.
But where the U.S. performance at World Cup ’98 will hurt is in failing to turn those fans away from their support of Brazil or Mexico or England or Italy or, yes, even Iran, and make them fans of the American team.
That was the opportunity that was lost here.
Here’s an example of where soccer in the United States lies. The third-best-selling sports replica shirt in New York City is the sun-yellow No. 9 jersey worn by Brazil’s Ronaldo.
U.S. soccer’s greatest challenge in the years ahead is to make sure that the best-selling soccer jersey in the country as a whole is at least one worn by an American.
But it will take imagination. It will take vision. It will take patience and it will take commitment. Not to mention money and leadership.
France 98 has been a disheartening experience for Americans. But it’s not the end of the road. It’s merely a fork. The question is: Which direction does soccer take now?
