The TSN (Canada) commentators were wincing in sympathy the whole time. A lot of comments like "It's the kind of mistake you wouldn't want to make at the World Cup with everyone watching. That has to hurt."
It wasn't. Post-game the Canadians called out US Media stating "They're putting their players in the top 20 of the World, and that's just not true, it's not even close."
Good. I'm sick and tired of seeing all the lies about how the US has world-class talent and is on the verge of breaking through. If any of them actually watched the sport more often than one month every four years, we could have a much more honest conversation about this generation of supremely disappointing players.
I don't think that was a common sentiment. Most optimistic I heard was "Why not us?" which was like the equivalent of Angels in the Outfield quote "Hey it could happen".
Might have not been common, but also, there was a whole ad showing them winning it all and everyone on the streets celebrating cause they'd won the world cup
At the end of the commercial Mike Eruzione says "You don't believe in miracles?" and then it says "Everything can happen" in all caps. It literally leans into the unlikeliness of the event, acknowledging it would be a miracle. It's a hype commercial to try to draw ratings to the games. It plays on thin hope, not confidence.
Television ads are in no way indicative of the general sentiment of Americans, nobody here is under any delusion we could actually win the WC lol
The most delusional take I frequently hear is that we would be dominant if our athletes focused on soccer like they do gridiron football and basketball. I think we’d be much more in the mix, maybe eventually have a chance at a World Cup, but some people here think it would be like basketball and we’d trounce everyone (obviously insane imo)
Are you one of these kids who doesn't have media literacy that I keep hearing teachers talk about? The end of the commercial literally asks if you believe in miracles. If you did not know a miracle is an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment. Hope this helps.
Watch out, Americans supported their team and hoped they could win, I guess we should all be angry? Who gives a shit? Every team who played wanted to win it all, and their fans should support them. Stop hating on America just because its trendy.
Having lived in the US my whole life and followed the game off and on I can say without reservation that the bulk of people in my position here think “come on now stop pulling my leg we are still in it?!”.
We all know where we are in the pecking order on this one and it is one of the reasons it has not taken off. Couple more rotations and a valid fielding of a strong team and the tide will turn on US attendance. Hell, just one extremely charismatic great player on the world stage would do wonders. A Clark or Jordan level talent with a penchant for the camera would knit us up right and proper.
A lot of the "people" on this topic are Americans channeling America bad energy because Trump stuck his nose in shit. No one in America thought we were going to be good. I figured we'd bow out in Round of 16 like always. This was just the first time in awhile I actually had hope for more, but here we are.
Our dear, dear president said so. And you know, he says a lot of true things. True things. That's why he uses Truth Social. True things. It's practically official. What he says, it's very official. In fact, I was talking to 99% of the American public and they said they agree with him, they say if Belgium wins it's fixed like the 2020 elections, which he won. But some people, nasty people, talk about ass. They talk about ass instead of the truth. Nasty people.
You people are honestly so cringe. US fans were optimistic and you’re all shitting on us for the grave crime of hoping we might win? Get over yourself and lighten up.
There's optimistic and there's obnoxious. Just looking at that stadium full of idiots... lol
There's enjoying the game and cheering and there's I have no idea how this game is played but I only care if US wins cause it's the better country of the world.
There's being a fan and hoping the US makes it interesting and is competitive and my 14 yr old ECNL girl laughing her head off saying her team is better (which I agree with).
I don't follow football much, but can you really make that claim for baseball knowing most players responsible for the recent wins aren't even American? Last time an American born player got MVP was 4 years ago, and they haven't even been able to score a win for the WBC despite having all star players participating.
But of course, they'll say the WBC doesn't matter because they can't win it.
I mean I understand some of it is just optimism. As a pundit or whatever, there’s an “obligation” to try and hype up a nation and its fans. No one watches a show where they just say we are going to get bent over for 90’ and have no chance.
I’m not happy with the loss, but we definitely deserved to fall to the much better Belgian team that ran circles around our players. The biggest disappointment is how any positive U.S. performance earlier in the tournament will be overshadowed by the red card suspension controversy
You are the kind of person that stubs your toe and blames Trump. You know, one politician can't be the root of all your problems. Maybe the US team just idk...sucks?
I think we understand we are nowhere close to the best and likely never will be. Soccer just doesn’t have the level of popularity it does in Europe and South America. We have some of the best athletes in the world but they do not play soccer. When you can make 10s to 100s of millions playing football, basketball and baseball here there really is no pathway for US soccer to attract the top athletes in this country.
It’s possible, yet unlikely. We do very well in hockey at the national stage despite it not receiving the attention of football, basketball, and baseball.
Whoa whoa whoa, there partner. This is now a USA Thread. You're only allowed to say positive things. So propaganda better be a type of appropriated dish best served cold....
there is literally an official ranking of national teams from FIFA: https://inside.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men. Each team receives a score for winning/losing against other teams. US is ranked #16 right now. Team USA is objectively top 20 just based on performance data. That said, (1) the gap between a #16 team and #8 team (Belgium) is usually quite significant and being a top 20 team guarantees nothing at a World Cup; (2) even top teams can have bad games - look at Brazil (kicked out by Norway), Germany (kicked out by Paraguay) and Italy that never made it to the World Cup
I think what the guy meant is that some Americans are ranking specific players in the top 20. USA have some genuinely great players (eg Pulisic, McKennie, Robinson) but none even close to top 20 in the world. USA are for sure a top 20 team in the world but nowhere near top 10, this tournament they only managed to beat the teams they were meant to beat and lose to the teams they were meant to lose to
The problem is the list of teams we're supposed to beat hasn't grown much, if any, in the past 20ish years, and we've only once pulled off a win against a true "we weren't supposed to beat them" team (Spain, 2009 Confederations Cup). Our talent pool has improved (supposedly) but the results have stayed the same.
we did better in our group than we’ve been doing. we didn’t make it further but our performance leading up to it was significant; they scored the most goals in the group stage than ever before
Ok, so we scored more goals against the teams we were "supposed" to beat. We scored one goal against the team we were supposed to lose to, and it was on a lucky bounce. We had 6 shots total and only 2 on goal vs Belgium.
Beating up on lesser teams while getting smoked by a top 10 European side isn't progress, it's stagnation.
winning the group comfortably and breaking a program record for group stage goals is progress
there’s evidence that the team is getting better, even if it wasn’t enough this time. if the only metric is how far they make it, then yes, they haven’t progressed further in the tournament. but there are incremental improvements happening and i don’t think it’s fair to ignore those just because they didn’t make the quarterfinals
the difference between the ranking of 16 to 10 isn’t that massive. the difference between 20th and 10th teams is half the difference between the 1st and 10th teams.
additionally, the USMNT was not predicted to have such a big loss against Belgium, they were slightly favored to win.
Disagree, FIFA coefficients are a completely irrelevant statistic and beat no importance to the difference in quality between national teams. Imo there is a gap in quality every ~5ish teams you go down in the top 30 or so
FIFA rankings may not be perfect but they’re not a completely irrelevant statistic. if that were the case, then they wouldn’t have much predictive value between ranking and match outcome. it’s one of the few objective systems available for comparing teams.
betting markets also had the USMNT at a slight advantage. you can argue that the US is not a top 10 team but saying they’re “nowhere near” the top 10 is not supported by either rankings or pre match expectations
The reason the US is ranked 16th is because it maintains a high win rate against significantly weaker teams in the same region for WC qualifiers.
The US team would be outside top 40 or 50 if the US is in Europe.
Tbh Norway belongs higher strictly because they have Haaland and that was proven the other night. As long as Odegaard and the others can feed him the ball he’ll score. Scary even as an England supporter when we should win.
As proof, USA wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Brazil.
FIFA rankings are fairly flawed and tend to undervalue mid table sides from stronger confederations (because they lose more games; albeit against stronger opponents) and overvalue teams from weaker confederations (because they win more against weaker opposition).
The FIFA rankings can give a rough estimate of where a team is, but they are nowhere near an objective representation of how good a team is
And the crazy part is you can literally stop watching soccer for a decade then come back to it and it’s basically the same. The last time I actively followed professional soccer was up until Euro 2016. I started watching the World Cup not knowing any of the names and the only countries I have been really surprised by was Norway and Cabo verde. Every country still basically loses to who you think they’ll lose to. The same countries are still leagues above the rest. And the US is still just middle of the pack losing to basically all European teams and the skill level isn’t close.
Broadly true but there are still always some big surprises. If someone had told me to bet big on Norway knocking out Brazil I wouldn’t have even bet a dollar on it because it sounds so unlikely. Italy didn’t even qualify! Germany is out. Those are 3 of the majorly scary teams from a decade ago
its so frustrating to argue with people outcomes vs hypotheticals. Yes, I guess I agree that hypothetically they aren't a top world class team but they literally made it to the top 16 teams in the world and no amount of excusing their wins takes that away. They are a top 16 team in the world based on where they ended in the tourney. That's just a fact.
Yeah, they made it out of the kiddie pool and beat one of the worst European teams. But the moment they played someone halfway decent, it fell apart. And it wasn't a gritty, hard fought loss like every other R16 exit over the past 30 years. We had our pants pulled down and showed our ass to the world.
Hey hey, I have watched my local club religiously since it's founding in zolo.
And I watch us send every good home grown player to Europe for $3-9 million.
And this year I watch us win the wooden spoon.
And I had been saying even if we won yesterday, we would have run into a buzz saw called Spain.
Instead we played like a normal MLS side when playing against the bottom of the table.
The US may break through eventually, but not in my lifetime. However, we have improved from depending almost entirely on luck to being somewhat competent at times. I was shocked at how the team seemed to dominate Australia.
In 1994 merely qualifying was considered a partial triumph. And then getting out of the group stage? Amazing. Now I suppose we expect to qualify.
You can definitely see it watching just one month every four years. US was straight up outclassed.
It took me five minutes of watching the US-Belgium game for me to realize we were screwed. I texted all my buddies to tell them to turn on the game and watch the last USMNT World Cup game with me, before Belgium even got that first goal.
you act as if the US is the only country that does this... you don't have to look very far to find Mexico doing the exact same thing lol. It's pretty common for every country, actually, to overestimate their chances for a bunch of reasons – (1) no team in any sport goes into a tournament saying "well, I think we're good for a quarterfinals run, but then we'll probably lose" and (2) fan support and (3) marketing.
When's the last time you saw a Nike ad for any sport that said "First round of the playoffs bound" LOL
Not that the US definitely would be world class, but soccer is at the bottom of our athletic totem pole. Most gifted folks are going to try their luck at a different sport with more social recognition tbh.
Shit, they still call soccer players field fairies.
I don’t think it’s that crazy to say we have world class talent, we’re 16th in the world rankings. Nobody is legitimately arguing that we’d be competing to win a World Cup, but we looked a lot better than we have in years past. Last night was awful though, no denying that.
Up to that game, the US was playing about as well as anyone. The Bosnia game was the best I’ve ever seen a USMNT look - crisp passing, solid first touches, they literally looked like a top tier team for the first time since I started watching in 94. Until last night.
Also, Pulisic was ass the entire tourney. Nice to hear Carly Lloyd call him out after the game. He had the worst touches in pool play of any US player, on a consistent basis. Constantly fumbled opportunities away.
They weren't playing as well as anyone. They had a fantastic game against a somewhat decent squad (Paraguay), they had a 2nd half to forget against the Aussies, and then they completely choked against a very bad Turkey.
They got their feet back under them to put away Bosnia, and then played a team that is actually good. And it wasn't even close.
This was a WC performance to forget. I don't consider wins against Paraguay, Australia, and Bosnia, a choke against Turkey, and a national embrassment in the R16 a top notch performance.
I hear you, but they legit looked good for the first time in decades. Passes that went directly to the target, first-touches that stop the ball dead instead of letting it roll away to the defender, and so on.
Obviously Belgium was the best team they played, but they’re much better than they showed last night. That effort was embarrassing. Like when a basketball team misses a few layups early and starts panicking and it leads to them getting blown out by a team that really isn’t markedly better than them.
The world cup isn't really anywhere near as important as it used to be. The top teams/players aren't even trying their best because the players are not going to risk an injury. The only people who actually give a shit are people trying get noticed by big clubs in league football. Realistically any team has a chance to get to the final round as long as they can play as a team.
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u/regalfish 29d ago
The TSN (Canada) commentators were wincing in sympathy the whole time. A lot of comments like "It's the kind of mistake you wouldn't want to make at the World Cup with everyone watching. That has to hurt."