USMNT Crash Out of World Cup, Round of 16 Wraps Up Today, and more: Tuesday Freedom Kick
Morning DC Footy Folk! We are finally cooling down from the brutal heat wave that hit the area last week. But the World Cup footy is only heating up. Let’s get to it.
USA crashes out of World Cup with Round of 16 loss to Belgium (SSFC)
The US looked like a shell of the team that inspired American hearts everywhere earlier in the tournament. It was particularly brutal to lose again to a Belgium team that included old heads De Bruyne, Lukaku, and Courtois. My personal take is this is just about where I expected the US team to finish. It would’ve been nice to get a second knockout win but that was a bridge too far.
The USMNT’s World Cup run changed everything — but the ending left a sour taste (Yahoo! Sports)
Steven Goff has his own take on the USMNT capitulation.
World Cup: Grades for every eliminated team as each exits the tournament (ESPN)
This is an interesting article rating each team as they exit. The US gets a ‘C’ which I think is fair. They impressed early on but couldn’t step up their game when it was needed most.
Ronaldo’s final bow? One of the worst: Ranking every match at the 2026 World Cup ($The Athletic)
Another ranking style article, but this time they rank every match. Let’s just say the less said about Spain vs Portugal the better. This article puts it as the 88th worse game out of 94 played so far and it is the lowest ranked knockout match yet.
‘They have Messi, but we have Salah’: Egypt prepare to take on Argentina (The Guardian)
The World Cup Round of 16 comes to an end today with two big games. At noon today, Mo Salah will face Messi for only the third time in his career.
Gotham FC makes it official and will be moving to the city in 2028. This comes right before their first ever game in Queens next week against the Washington Spirit. They will be leasing the stadium from (and sharing with) New York City Football Club.
Sandro Tonali seals £92.5m move to Tottenham on back of ‘magic’ sales pitch (The Guardian)
Let’s end on some club news that may have gone under the radar. After a terrible last two seasons, Tottenham are spending the big bucks to ensure they do not embarrass themselves again. Are there any other summer moves that have gone unnoticed? Sound off in the comments!
According to Tom Bogert, Pirani is on the move. Just to San Diego, though. Hopefully this isn’t a “Klich to Atlanta” situation.
https://x.com/tombogert/status/2074519746582925420
Even if Pirani kept his U-22 status at DC, there’s a good chance we weren’t filling them all this year. Although hopefully we go after another DP rather than another U-22. I feel pretty confident that we’ll be keeping a (pretty healthy) percentage of Pirani’s salary on our books, but some of it will be gone, and the open roster spot likely counts for more anyway.
I hope he enjoys playing with Christopher McVey again.
Yeah him taking up a U22 spot is much less impactful on the roster than taking up the DP spot that Klich did. And the cap hit is much lower, so its not as bad as the Klich situation if he continues to occupy that spot.
Although I guess I wonder that if we’re keeping more than $200,000 of his salary (which I’d assume we are), and he’s not designated as a U22 player for us, then he’d end up being a bigger cap hit when he’s off the team?
Yeah, that’s certainly a gray area. I would think if we hold onto any more than $200k salary, we’ll just keep his U22 designation. It appears that San Diego only has 1 U22 player at the moment, so they could certainly take him on as a U22. I do wonder if SD takes on more than $200k of his over $800k salary, and they end up designating him as a U22, if we could also have him as a U22, or how that would even work.
I’d assume it’s possible, but good lord this stuff is pretty inscrutable.
I want to see more news about incoming signings. Transfer window opens in 5 days.
I feel for NJ- based Gotham fans. They’ve loved and supported this team and are being unceremoniously kicked to the side. I saw someone compare this to the Spirit move from the Plex to Audi. That feels like it has only the shallowest similarities. The move to Queens poses a lot more logistical issues than the move to Audi.
Also I bet north Jersey could support an NWSL team if that team committed to being from Jersey rather than playing to both sides.
I really feel like the Red Bulls should lean into this more, too.
I’m not sure their energy drink overlords care enough to think of that.
On the US inability to perform against Belgium from the whistle:
At some point, we have to be honest.
There’s no real analog to the shit storm that the USMNT found themselves in since Sunday.
What we saw was a team emotionally exhausted, whose momentum evaporated, good will nuked when they didn’t even know the call happened till the public did. Trump didn’t consult, didn’t inform.
It’s also worth simply saying: US Soccer is not the US administration, and in fact has never been particularly attached in any meaningful way to any US president.
We had a very good team, their nerves were shot. It’s a game of inches, and Trump took a mile.
The emotional fuel tank was punctured, and allowed to drain.
I really don’t know how else to explain it. The US looked nothing like the confident team that had fought it’s way through the last month of soccer. Backline was a complete mess and the midfield couldn’t get anything going. So many guys were completely anonymous, or just liabilities. Ream and Freese played maybe their worst games in a US jersey after being excellent up until last night.
And everybody wanted us to lose including a lot of American fans.
He did manage to unify a ton of ideologically and culturally divergent groups to nuke us.
Internet age sucks for this.
That said, as bad as the radioactivity is currently, and as long as the climb back might be, the sport will continue.
It does require a lot of assumption busting and a thick skin to let people even know what happened here and who was actually hurt.
Many won’t care, but the narrative is the first place to start.
Narratives are incredibly hard to break and change in the current information overload age. Especially since I’ve noticed a lot of people tend to not look at multiple sources from across the spectrum. I try to do that and identify what the sources agree on as that tends to be more factual while everything else is more opinion.
That being said the comment sections on The Athletics coverage is very much in the negative on American soccer from Americans and other nationalities. Though you will also find that opinion on what should’ve happened with the red card is all over the place.
It’s an era of working over time to fix things that were damaged.
The difficult is now necessary.
Your last sentence is pretty much my opinion too.
We had an OK team. Getting to the Quarterfinals requires more. If not being in the top 8 clubs in the world — opponent draws matter — then at least legitimately in the top 16. The US is not there yet. We’re probably not even the best team in CONCACAF, and that means at least 4 clubs in South America are better, 2 or 3 clubs in Africa are better, and at least 10-12 Europeans team are better.
Over 90 or 120 minutes, talent usually wins out. For that, there’s no clearer example than the Egypt-Argentina match.
We’ve got at most 8-9 players (Balogun, Tillman, McKennie, Adams, Richards, Pulisic, and maybe in 4 years, Freeman, Berhalter and Reyna) who should even the see the pitch at this level. There’s no depth, and we don’t have the elite players that usually win these games. To compete against the top sides, we’ll need at least 18 who belong, if not a full 26.
Freeman is immense. Really excited to build around him.
Heck, Gio might come good, too
Belgium and Spain were both teams with some powerhouse players, but not output or cohesion.
We couldn’t get at their backline cuz they couldn’t have gotten at a cow herd without more time to process what happened.
The processing took too much energy for a knockout game the next day.
There’s never been anything like this, not that a national team wasn’t actually the culprit for; and therefore forewarned.
So I expected more of a battle from the US than what they showed. The US was not able to get into any rythm until too late. I think its true that this was the round that most people thought the US would be eliminated. Mexico fought well against England. I was hoping the US would have done the same.
They’re still athletes.
There’s never been a training process interrupted like this, especially one where there was the complete opposite of sympathy and good will for what was inflicted.
You can’t assess performance when neurologically they couldn’t reset.
Given a week, we see something different.
They were clearly mentally affected. This was yet another debacle from 1600 Penn Ave
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1968tZ46Nh/
The way the Belgium team mocked Trump by doing his signature dance told me what their motivation was to win.
Belgium can act aggrieved, let’s be real, they were overjoyed to see the home team vibes shift so hard.
Getting internet clout from ignoramuses even in the US was a gift
I am ashamed of US “fans” who cannot distinguish between our team and the President. The team was utterly victimized.