Propose changing thread title to "US Men's National Soccer Team Thread: no worse than Italy".

eh, except they're worse than Italy. Swap the US and Italy in the qualifiers and this US squad wouldn't have had a chance qualifying in Europe and Italy surely would have qualified in CONCACAF

eh, looking at Italy's group maybe it's not true that the US couldn't have qualified in Europe. Spain is better than Mexico but Costa Rica is better than Albania, Panama is better than Israel, Honduras is better than Macedonia, and T&T is better than Liechtenstein. So the US could easily have finished second in that group. Now obviously that band of gutless losers is a yuge dog to Sweden, but it's within the realm of possibility.

But Italy obviously finishes at least fourth in the hexagon. There's really no great shame in not qualifying for the world cup out of Europe. It is very tough to beat Spain to win that group and beating a team like Sweden is not easy either.

You realize USA finished 5th in essentially an equally mediocre group that Italy finished 2nd in right?

Jokes are fun

So um, anybody else watching?

Apparently America have someone good enough to start for the fourth placed Bundesliga team.

Why had this guy never played for USMNT before today?

Robert Green is our new keeper huh?

michaelpirlo.jpg

http://soccer.nbcsports.com/2017/11/...rld-cup-teams/

Cool idea in theory, not sure you could convince Italy to send a particularly strong line up? The time difference is big enough that the matches wouldn't detract much from the World Cup?

Could have a nice line up.

USA.........................................Italy
Netherlands..............................Chile
Jamaica...................................Honduras/Canada
Ireland.....................................Ghana

2 groups of 4, semis, final, start a week before the world cup & end halfway through it.

Rough guess is that most countries could be persuaded to send some decent youngsters who aren't suffering from fixture burnout. Getting the clubs to agree would probably be harder.

The whole thing is silly and will never happen with anything resembling a real team, but for the sake of discussion I'm taking Wales, Austria, Australia, and Ivory Coast/Morocco instead of those LOL CONCACAF teams

Australia will probably make the World Cup.

Seems kind of interesting but unfortunately we could call it the losers tournament and that would be accurate. If this tournament has a champion that seems kind of silly. This also puts more attention on those teams for being failures. And what about the teams that do poorly? It just makes them look even worse. It means they choked in qualifying, entered the losers tournament, and got beat by losers.

It only might seem kind of interesting to US fans used to seeing our team play Concacaf. Would be nice to face tougher competition but countries from Europe and South America won’t care about that.

I’d rather just participate in Copa America tournaments more often. Next one is in 2019. Wish we could participate in that more often and take it seriously, and take the Gold Cup less seriously.

Sorry we're unavailable, would you take another LOL CONCACAF team instead?

Probably they ought to spend the summer practicing.

Our MLS guys would be best served playing in their domestic league and getting better against the outstanding competition they'd face week in and week out instead of an international tournament

offtopic:

finally pulled the trigger and deposited on draftkings. signed up for a H2H and somehow my first opponent is gonna end up being wazzu. what a small world lol

gg ge Gulati

They allow pesos on draft kings?

apparently jonathan gonzalez might switch to mexico from the US. he was previously offered to join mexico, and declined, but obv now the WC is being dangled.

https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/20...y-january-camp

usmnt profile of him:

https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/201...smnt-monterrey

Adiós

I wish US Soccer wasn't so incompetent. Maybe come February things will start to change.

I mean how hard is it to pick up a ****ing phone and call someone?

the hits just keep coming

what an embarrassment

I’m on to Qatar

at least with rossi, he grew up playing for the italian youth teams

for someone who grew up in the US and playing for the US to switch to mexico right at the last second....smh

definitely a two way street here, it was an organizational failure that he left, but the kid has now turned his tail on his country

hopefully he has the same international career as rossi