International football

With the return of the Nations League before the start of the 20/21 season (for most leagues), I wanted to touch upon the landscape of international football. I'll include about what it's like in the Americas, CONCACAF specifically, but mostly focus on Europe.

I don't want to bang on about USA soccer too much. What I will say is, like a few other prominent countries (Italy and the Netherlands, in particular), we didn't qualify for the 2018 World Cup. It's not a right, obviously, and I'm not sure why people were so shocked. I could go on for ages about soccer in this country... Anyways, there was the usual "what if the best athletes played soccer" debate, which is pretty dumb and lazy. Look, as arrogant as Americans are, this is one sport we didn't create. In fact, many domestic leagues were formed before 1900, or at the latest by 1930. Our league MLS, started in the 90's. There's also the incredibly silly comparison of women's soccer, where the US was one of, if not the main pioneer of that sport, which is in fact a different sport to men's football. The point here is expectations are irrationally high, plus our region is by far one of the weakest, so we SHOULD make it to the World Cup. To me, the obvious reason is we didn't have the talent at the right stage of their development to form a half decent side for qualifying. For those unfamiliar with the situation, there is a term "lost generation" in the US soccer community, and it refers to the guys my age, who'd be in or on the cusp of their prime years. Simply put, that group is not very good. Think of guys like Jordan Morris and DeAndre Yedlin. My take, and this is backed up by the current generation, is that going to college at all is a waste in terms of development. Those two are up there as the best in that age group, and frankly they shouldn't be playing significant minutes for a country aiming to make any kind of noise at a World Cup. The older generation at the time, guys like Beasley, Dempsey, Howard, etc. were all past it, and the young guys (Adams, McKennie, Pulisic) were all too young to realistically make a huge impact. Now, however, we have a core of guys playing in top European leagues (the best place to test yourself), as well as youngsters starting to make noise in MLS and various setups overseas.

Another CONCACAF nation full of promise is Canada. The two obvious ones are Alphonso Davies and Jonathan David. The former just won the Champions League at 19 for Bayern, while the latter signed for Lille for a sizable fee after a successful stint in Belgium. Another player I'm high on is Mark-Anthony Kaye, who's with LAFC. He's playing as a CM, which he feels is his best position, despite being athletic and versatile. Two other guys, both a bit older and playing in MLS, are Jonathan Osorio and Lucas Cavallini. A final youth player who's set to make an impact is Ayo Akinola. He's from Detroit, but plays for Toronto, and is eligible for both the US and Canada. He played for the US in his youth days, and as a center forward there's defintiely an opportunity to step up and play with our guys in his home nation. If not, he could form a partnership with David up front for Canada, with Davies dominating the left flank for years to come.

The situation that made me want to write this was how much talent various countries have, and how poor they play based on the standard of players available. @FTalentScout on Twitter makes cool squad graphics of top young players from top nations. He's got England, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, France and Spain. My point is all six of these countries have three or four promising young players at each position, plus guys in the slightly older bracket, as well as the guys currently at (or even past) their peak. In particular, I want to talk about England, France, and Portugal. For me, Italy and Spain have the weakest prospects, and I can't complain too much about how the Netherlands play. I could also talk about Germany and their incompetent manager, despite his WC win in 2014, but I legitimately don't think they're that amazing in terms of talent.

Now, I'll start with France. It's not an exaggeration to say they almost have too much talent. I like Giroud. I don't buy him being "underrated", partly because it's pointless to use words like that, as well as "legend", "overrated", and "world class". Actually, let me take a step back. What I've noticed is most teams, despite having great players, will play a "safe" game with a solid defense, and then let the quality attackers do their thing. I get that they don't have much time to train, but it's so boring watching these teams struggle to attack, when the ability is there. Also, a point I want to make about the Nations League, is it's not like a team with semi-pro footballers is playing against the top teams now, as that's the point of the competition. Fans (and players really) will be more up for even games. That's why I struggle even more with a team like France starting 5 defenders in a game they should win with relative ease. I mean, just look at Deschamps' squad at the last World Cup. Two guys at fullback who can (and IMO Lucas normally should) play CB, two destroyers (Kante and Matuidi), a target man (Giroud), two creators- one deep, one behind the striker (Pogba and Griezmann), and a wide forward to get in behind (Mbappe). Today, against a clearly weaker team in Sweden, he played 3 CB's, two fullbacks as wing backs, Rabiot instead of Matuidi, and the rest the same. No way you need that much protection in a game against inferior opposition. It's been like this for years, by the way.

Next, I'll address Portugal. Today's lineup wasn't too bad, actually, though I think that was due to Cristiano being out. Often, you see Fernando Santos start both Neves and Danilo, no matter the opposition. Neither of those is known for creativity. Add to that the fact the usually the fullbacks are Rui and Semedo, again, two guys not great going forward. Today, however, against a weakened Croatia, you see how well Cancelo and Guerreiro got forward. Also, having Bruno, Bernardo, Jota, and Felix up front is a more fluid attack than usual. This may be controversial, but it's clear not having Cristiano frees up other players to do their thing. It's the same with Messi, to be fair. Players are either instructed to just pass the ball to them when possible, or they're scared to mess up if they try to do something on their own. This is what I'm saying about the structure of attacking play in international football. If your tactics are get the ball to the best player and let him score, then obviously it'll be boring.

The final team I want to talk about is England. I back myself to accurately rate these players because I watch the league every week, as opposed to Ligue 1 and Liga NOS, which I rarely have the chance to watch, due to them not being televised. Anyways, I take issue with the way Gareth Southgate has run the national team, pretty much since he's been there. This may be unfair, but I look at how Spain played under del Bosque as the holy grail. He pretty much combined Barcelona and Real Madrid players and had them play like Barcelona, as they had the midfield to do so. Personally, I look at the England set up and see the personnel to at least try and emulate the way Liverpool play/have played under Klopp. You have a number of guys at the club; Gomez, Henderson, Trent. Sterling played there, and either he or Sancho could emulate Mane, with Greenwood acting as the Salah type of inside forward. Harry Kane could play a similar role to Firmino, though that role is incredibly hard to mimic. Chilwell or even Saka could play the bombing forward left back role that Robertson does. The only obvious positions missing are keeper and dominating CB, which is an issue. You could even play like City, with a number of their guys involved with England. The point here is there's so much quality, but the direction seems to be lacking. I also am not a fan of how the players are picked. I mean, what's the basis? This go around, a guy who's never played in the top flight was called up, yet Grealish is yet to feature. I guess my issue with the whole thing is most players in the pool, aside from the rare ones playing abroad (Sancho and Trippier, currently), are based in England, and it should be simple to assess who to bring in. There should be a system and style of play tailored to the top players. The squad, as it were, meaning the guys not automatically selected unless injured, should be picked upon merit, not what club they play for. If a guy isn't featuring, he shouldn't be picked. Simple as. It's not Wales where they call up Bale and Ramsey despite injuries and not playing regularly.

Another issue is finding first team opportunities for young players. There aren't b teams like they have in the Netherlands and Spain. It's invaluable experience to play against grown men during the formative years, not guys your own age that you dominate against. I'm not sure what the solution is, personally. I was thinking about it the other day and it seems like aside from Norwich, the main youth players come from the top clubs. Part of that is guys getting poached, like Harvey Elliot going from Fulham to Liverpool at 16. I guess what I'm saying is it seems like a cycle; teams struggling to stay up won't rely on young players, for the most part, so they either don't play or migrate elsewhere. 11 of the top 50 U-23 English players were playing on bottom half teams, not including Everton. The rest were either on top teams or abroad. I'm even counting guys that moved from "top clubs" like KWP and Lamptey, and players that moved from the Championship in the past year (Eze and Bowen). I also noticed a number of these lads were from Bournemouth, who were relegated with Norwich. In particular, I'm thinking of Ramsdale (now with Blades), Kelly, Cook, and Solanke. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the U-21 manager, who's even worse.

At the end of the day, the main takeaway here is international football would be better if the managers would try set teams up more like club teams. There's no excuse for the best national teams in world football to play such turgid football, given the stacked teams at the top level. It's like the Champions League. Aside from Atleti and Juve, you don't see successful teams in that competition playing defensive football, but you regularly see it in the international setting. The top countries all have hordes of young talent, but they often struggle to get opportunities to play, specifically in England and Italy, and that needs to change as well.