Should he stayor should hehe go now?
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dos a Cero examines the case for and against Gregg Berhalter
The talent
This is a critical piece of the case for or against Berhalter. There are two competing schools of thought. The pro-Berhalter case is that we aren’t necessarily more talented, our players just have more opportunities because of doors that guys like Alexi Lallas, Claudio Reyna, and Brian McBride opened for them. The anti-Berhalter case is that this a generation with unmatched talent from a historical perspective. Failure to achieve new heights with them is unacceptable.
To take an objective view, the Dos a Cero team reviewed World Cup rosters, when we put our best foot forward. We classified each player according to the strength of the league they play in. We have 5 tiers, with Tier 1 being the most competitive. Tier 3 is the lowest Tier that we consider a highly competitive league, and includes Portugal, the Eredivisie, Argentina, and Brazil. MLS and Liga MX are Tier 4. Whenever possible we relied on league strength coefficients calculated by governing bodies, such as UEFA, when determining the number of entrants a league will receive to regional club competitions, such as UEFA Champions League.
We then calculated the percentage of our starters (in the first match) and of our full roster whose teams are in UEFA Champions League (UCL), Tier 1 and Tiers 1-3 for each tournament. We track UCL separately because it is the highest level of club soccer in the world, and because playing for a UCL team in a Tier 4 league (such as Scotland, Turkey, or Belgium) still indicates a very high quality player.
Disclaimer: We know this isn’t perfect. For example, Landon Donovan is one of the best USMNT players of all time, and he doesn’t contribute to any of these stats because he decided he wanted to stay in MLS. We also know that plenty of times the best player on a Tier IV team will be better than a benchwarmer on a Tier I team. However, this is at least a very useful and objective exercise.
Note: In 2018 we failed to qualify for the World Cup. We ran the same analysis as for other tournaments but used the squad named for our final qualification game in Trinidad & Tobago.
conclusion
According to this analysis, this is the most talented generation of USMNT players ever. We will note, the 2006 – 2014 generation was surprisingly strong. And again, Landon Donovan isn’t contributing to their stats despite being a great USMNT player.
Still, We have twice as many starters and squad players in Champions League as that generation did, and our entire starting 11 is in very high level competitive soccer. Our bench depth is solid too. This is damning for Berhalter’s case.
It remains possible that this generation isn’t our most talented, but you have to assume the global market for soccer players in the mid-2000s to mid-2010s was highly inefficient, and consistently overlooked talented Americans. There is some truth in that argument, but we don’t believe it’s enough to overcome the significant disparity in this analysis.
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