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The Football Notebook: Cowboys Botch Brazil, Iowa Does Iowa Things and the USMNT Looks Toward 2030
Welcome back to The Football Notebook, where I regret to inform you that the situation at Jason and Kylie Kelce’s imaginary NFL Sunday Ticket watch party has not improved.
Additional note: This article was written prior to the USMNT’s 4-2 victory over Chile, which was a fantastic time and shouldn’t be discounted.
Four years is an extraordinarily long time in international soccer, which is why one of my favorite things about the first game after a World Cup is the almost complete willingness to start imagining what the next version of a national team might become. Players who felt essential three months earlier suddenly become part of the past. Teenagers you’ve barely heard of are introduced as possible solutions to problems that don’t exist yet, and everyone collectively agrees to draw enormous conclusions from a friendly that will have almost no relevance by the time the next World Cup actually arrives. It is ridiculous, obviously, but waiting until 2029 to start caring doesn’t sound particularly fun either.
So, yes, I enjoyed the United States beating Peru 4-1. Eleven players made their senior national-team debuts, including eight teenagers, and every American goal involved a debutant in some capacity. Justin Ellis and Julian Hall scored in their debuts. Cavan Sullivan — still only 17, somehow — started after becoming one of the most fascinating prospects in American soccer over the last couple of years. Sullivan is already set to eventually move from Philadelphia to Manchester City, and every few weeks another highlight seems to arrive reminding everyone why people have been talking about him since an age when most of us were considerably more concerned about passing a driver’s test.
None of this guarantees anything, which is probably worth remembering before we begin assigning positions in the 2030 starting XI. Young players develop at wildly different speeds, and somebody none of us is currently discussing will almost certainly become indispensable over the next four years. The fact that Ellis and Hall became the first pair of American teenagers to score in the same national-team game in years is exciting, but history is littered with teenage milestones that eventually became interesting trivia rather than the opening chapter of superstardom. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy them when they happen.
The atmosphere in Orlando was the one part of the afternoon that left me wanting a little more. The announced crowd was actually a sellout, so this isn’t an attendance complaint as much as an atmosphere one. I understand the difficulty of asking people to manufacture World Cup-level intensity for a September friendly against Peru, particularly while college football is consuming an entire Saturday in Florida, but after the energy surrounding the national team this summer, I was curious whether some of that momentum would carry into the beginning of the next cycle.
That is not evidence that Americans suddenly stopped caring about soccer, nor do I think it requires another exhausting referendum about whether the sport has finally “made it” in this country. It was one friendly in Orlando competing against a packed sports calendar. Still, part of what the United States should spend the next four years building is the expectation that these games matter enough to create an occasion even when there isn’t a World Cup attached to them.
Either way, 4-1 wins are fun.
As a Mexico supporter, I suspect Saturday will solve the atmosphere problem fairly efficiently. I’d judge the young attackers partly by what they do when Mexico moves the ball across its back line. Chasing the center back can look wonderfully committed while leaving a pass straight into midfield. The interesting bit is whether the next player closes that route before the first one goes. Which of these new partnerships would you keep together against Mexico long enough to test that coordination?