Will the US Men's Soccer team have to wait longer than the Cubs to win?

If you know me, I eat, drink and breathe soccer.  Nothing gives me greater joy than the prospect of a 0-0 tie between Man U and Liverpool being decided on penalty kicks.

In case you an't detect sarcasm, that last paragraph is the final proof that we live in a “post-truth” world, as The Oxford English Dictionary determined this month.

I don’t know much about soccer, but I do know that an industrialized colossus with a population of 320 million people should not lose to a tiny third world nation with a population of 4.5 million by a score of 4-0.  With a 71.1 to 1 ration in population, the US should be able to field a pick-up team at a mid-sized college that would be up by three goals handily by half time against the likes of Costa Rica. So, I was not taken aback when US Men’s’ Soccer decided to fire Coach Jurgen Klinsmann after five years.

According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Klinsmann took over a US team ranked 34th in the world and drove them to a ranking of 33rd in the world. Way to go, Jurgen.   Few things annoy me more than delusional sports figures claiming they will win the Super Bowl or World Series when they will be lucky to make the playoffs, but I still thought Klinsmann was an idiot for announcing before the 2014 World Cup that the US had no chance to win.  If you are planning on losing, why play the game?  You don’t have to predict victory, but say they team is coming together nicely, you think they’ll surprise some people, and determining who the better team is is why we play the game.  Telling your team they are doomed before the tournament starts will not earn you comparisons to Vince Lombardi (note to Jurgen—he’s was a coach of American football who, unlike you, was successful).

So, why does America suck at soccer?  That’s easy—we don’t have any good players.  It is really hard to win when all your players are less good than all of the other teams’ players.  And why are our players less good?  As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.”

According to a comparative analysis of pro sport salaries, the median MLS player makes $117,000, less than one-tenth of the median salary in baseball ($1.5 million), basketball ($2.85 million) or even hockey ($1.48 million).  It is necessary to look at median salaries, not averages, as salaries in the MLS are highly skewed towards massively rewarding big name, over-the-hill foreign players like David Beckham, which makes the average look higher than what a mid-level player actually makes.

So, you are a young man with athletic skill—are you going to gravitate to baseball (minimum salary $500,000) or soccer (minimum $51,492)?  Let’s ask the same question of a young woman—her choices are soccer or tennis, unless she wants to go for Olympic medals in ice skating or gymnastics.  This partly explains why the US Women’s soccer team is one of the dominant programs in the world and the US Men’s program, well, isn’t.

I can’t say it is terribly encouraging that the US Men’s team rushed in to re-hiring Bruce Arena, whose main qualification for leading the Men’s Soccer team is that he did it before and failed.  Well, failed is kind of harsh; he took the team to its best World Cup finish in 2002.  But he isn’t exactly new blood or a fresh perspective.

There was no need to rush into this hire.  The next match won’t be until March, so the USMST could have taken some time, a week or two at least, and seen if there was another younger, more innovative candidate.  But after the tenure of Jurgen Klinsmann, maybe they wanted comfort food after a serving of that heavy German cooking.  Arena’s meat and potatoes won’t get the US to the World Cup finals in 2018, or 2022, or . . . well, it’s a long century. 

But if the Cubs can wait 108 years until winning a championship, then by gum so can the USMST!