The USMNT is a disgrace

Americans get dismantled by superior Swiss

Whatever precious few positives there were after the 2-1 loss to Turkey on Saturday afternoon in Connecticut took just twelve minutes to vanish on Tuesday night in Nashville. All the questions about how much this team and these players care were brought right back to the forefront of the conversation as the Swiss carved the US up like turkeys on Thanksgiving. That the US only lost by four goals is something of a miracle. In fact, per the TNT broadcast, Tuesday’ night’s halftime deficit of 4-0 was the largest the USMNT has faced in the last 40 years (a World Cup Qualifier against Mexico at Azteca in 1980). It’s a humorous contrast to the USMNT’s last appearance at Geodis Park when, in October of 2023, the US was up 4-0 at the half against Ghana. To add insult to injury, this game against the US was the first time in their history that Switzerland has ever had a 4-0 halftime lead in an away fixture. At no point was the US ever competitive and the group of mostly MLS players was completely and totally outclassed in every aspect by a first-choice Swiss side.

Tuesday night’s loss is the first time the USMNT has lost four consecutive games since 2007 when Bob Bradley lost five straight between June and September (three of those losses were the “B squad” getting grouped at the Copa America in Venezuela after the “A squad” won the Gold Cup earlier in the month). That these losses are coming under a manager who has managed at some of the biggest clubs in the world and is being paid accordingly ($6 million a year) is even more disheartening. And it’s worth mentioning here that, if this were Gregg Berhalter coaching the team, the fans would have wanted him put into a Saturn V rocket and launched to the Moon. To his credit, Pochettino attempted to fall on the sword for him team, saying, “We blame ourselves. Criticize us. It was my decision and that decision didn’t work and when that doesn’t work you need to criticize yourself.”

While the buck ultimately stops with Mauricio Pochettino as the head coach, the world wonders when the players will either begin to play with something approaching effort or hold themselves accountable when they turn in utterly shambolic performances like they did against Switzerland. There wasn’t a single US player who looked like they belonged on the field with the Swiss. Not one of them. They were lustily booed out of the stadium at halftime and the only reason they weren’t booed out of the stadium at the end of the game was because there weren’t any fans left to do the booing.

Worse still was the crowd for the game. It’s June, so the school night excuse can be thrown out the window, yet the attendance was so bad that none of several US Soccer employees could locate the figure when asked after the game (though it’s worth noting that a good crowd in Hartford on Saturday was announced over the PA system in the stadium). US Soccer CEO JT Batson said that they wanted to make every USMNT home game a “huge event” leading up to the World Cup. This writer leaves it up to the reader to determine if this game felt like a “huge event” but as the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

For support and enthusiasm to be this poor would be cause for concern in any year, but especially so in the year before a World Cup. But next year isn’t just any World Cup. Next year’s World Cup is on home soil and was supposed to be the catalyst for launching the game of soccer into the stratosphere in this country. If the US continues to play this way, that will most definitely not happen.

It’s quite an alarming place that the USMNT finds itself in at the moment. One year away from the World Cup and there is a litany of problems that don’t appear to have any immediate remedy. The best players don’t care about playing for the national team (which has escalated into a Twitter beef featuring Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, and Christian Pulisic’s dad) and the players that do care about playing for the national team are not remotely good enough to be put on the field against anything resembling a quality opponent. Fan interest and morale has never been lower, despite US Soccer’s efforts to make every home game a “huge event” (though what steps have been taken to do this remain a mystery to most American soccer fans).

Things are now so ugly that, not only are the fantastical thoughts of a quarterfinal run at next year’s World Cup a long-distant memory, but now questions abound about whether this team can even make it to the semifinals at the Gold Cup. They can’t beat Panama (having lost four of the last six), Canada owns them (Les Rouges have won three of the last four), and for all their faults, Mexico is better (reigning Gold Cup and Nations League champions). And if this team fails to make it to the Gold Cup semifinals (a stage of the tournament they have made every year 2002, or twelve straight editions of the tournament) then whatever faint glimmer of hope there still was for next year will be truly dead.