I had a thought occur to me and I wanted to check it out…so here is the March USMNT roster with ages. I’ll explain why this is here in a second.
March Roster w/ ages
| Sean Johnson | 29 |
| Jesse Gonzalez | 22 |
| Ethan Horvath | 23 |
| John Brooks | 26 |
| Aaron Long | 26 |
| Matt Miazga | 23 |
| Omar Gonzalez | 29 |
| Nick Lima | 24 |
| Daniel Lovitz | 27 |
| Cristian Roldan | 23 |
| Will Trapp | 26 |
| Michael Bradley | 31 |
| Sebastian Lletget | 26 |
| Weston McKennie | 20 |
| Christian Pulisic | 20 |
| Tyler Adams | 20 |
| Cory Baird | 23 |
| Jonathan Lewis | 21 |
| DeAndre Yedlin | 25 |
| Gyasi Zardes | 27 |
| Paul Arriola | 24 |
| Christian Ramirez | 27 |
| Jordan Morris | 23 |
The players in bold are the only players on the March roster that will be eligible for the 2020 Olympics. Pulisic, Adams, and McKennie are CLEARLY among the best 23 players the US has…they really can’t be left out of any roster approaching full strength. Lewis is the only outlier.
The US has three camps going right now and from what I’ve been able to surmise, at least the U23 camp is running the same system as the senior team.
It would make sense if the U20 team is doing this too, but maybe Tab Ramos is still running his system until the end of this cycle.
What does this tell us?
Let’s say for a second that you are a new coach trying to develop a player pool. Let’s also say you don’t have a ton of time to do this and it’d be great if you could train two groups of players in the new system at the same time. Wouldn’t it make sense for Berhalter to take all the non-Olympic eligible guys in the pool (or close) and for another set of coaches to take the young players in the pool (or might be soon)?
That way you could train 40+ players during the international window instead of just 23. I may be over analyzing here (in fairness though that’s quite #onbrand for this site), but that would make a ton of sense. Gregg doesn’t know what players are going to pop in the next 3 months. Maybe Amon gets a run of starts and scores 10 goals. Maybe Sargent breaks through at Bremen, Araujo with the Galaxy, etc. This way Gregg gets to hedge his bets and pretty much anyone that could feasibly be called up for the Gold Cup will have some experience in his system.
It’s really early and who knows what I’ll think in 6 months, but I think Berhalter is a clever coach. I think he is intelligent and has gotten together with his staff to plan out many details that most of us have never even considered. The last 6 years have been rough.
Prioritizing the Olympics?
Looking over the U23 roster I see four players that I could reasonably see being on the full team right now (CCV, Weah, Mihailovic, Sargent). Weah and Sargent are the only two that I’d project for sure to be on the Gold Cup roster, but as people like to say, development is not linear. So who knows?
Part of the reason I started this site is because no one I know is as into this stuff as I am. I have all these thoughts/ideas bouncing around in my head and this gives me somewhere to put them down. It’s cathartic in a weird way. What’s my point here?
Joe American couldn’t care less (If you say, “I could care less” please close this tab immediately. We don’t want your kind here.) if the US wins the Olympics or the World Cup. The American sports public wouldn’t know the difference and would go wild if the US made a run at a medal in 2020. I’ve seen a quote or two that makes me think the USSF might be thinking about sending a full strength team to the Olympics. Look at this quote from Jonathan Lewis in Brian Sciaretta’s recent article:
If you’re reading this, you are a soccer nerd. You are my people and I love you, but we don’t represent the general American sports fan. If we get invited to the 2020 Copa America, we should send the strongest possible team to the Olympics, not Copa America. The soccer nerd in me wants to protest that it’s a youth tournament, that the “soccer world” doesn’t care about it, etc. But it would move the needle in the USA and that would be a good thing. Especially after missing out on the bump the sport usually gets from the World Cup.
At the very least, it’d be nice to have a team to watch at the Olympics, right? The bar is pretty low. Let’s hope we clear it by a wide margin this time.
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