Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #599: Leander Schaerlaeckens on the state of the modern USMNT

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Schaerlaeckens, who writes for the Guardian and will soon publish a book titled "The Long Game" on the modern USMNT, joins Watke and Belz. We talk about what's happening with the USMNT these days, his access to Berhalter while he was working on his book, the ways the current generation is different from previous national team generations, and much, much more. Really good, lively conversation.There will be no official Monday Review this week, and for several of the weeks ahead, since there will be so little club soccer and so much international soccer to cover directly. Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Scuff Podcast where we talk about U.S. soccer. Our guest today is writing a book about the U.S. Men's National Team. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, writing mostly about soccer, and he's a journalism professor at Marist University in Poughkeepsie, New York. Leander Shirelockins. Welcome to Scuffed. Very pleased to have you here. Hey, guys, I'm really glad to be on.

I'm a long-time listener. What an honor for us. Thanks for coming on. I'm very excited to talk to you. You do a lot of the thinking for me whenever a roster drops or a game has happened. I can sort of suspend some of my own thoughts until I've listened to you guys and have a good feel for what I should have noticed myself, but maybe didn't have the wherewithal to realize. I do not know people are doing that. Because we read, that's what we do with people are writing.

We might just have a feedback loop going here. Yeah, a bad one. So how much harder has Burrhalter's firing made writing your book? Well, a book was done, and you can rest assured that I brought this complaint to people at the Federation saying, guys, if you're going to do this, do it before a book deadline, not afterwards. So there was some rewriting and re-reporting and some additional work that had to be done. and some restructuring and all the rest. I'd like to think that the book is better for it.

But it's certainly complicated that whole process, especially because I'd gotten really great access to Greg Burrhalter. It took a long time to negotiate all that, but he let me sit in on a player meeting and a coach's meeting and a tactical session that he had. And so I had great material. And of course, selfishly, as a reporter, you want sort of your material to be as relevant as possible.

But Pochitino is most certainly an interesting guy. So that added another layer of color, I think, to the book as a whole. What is the scope of it? Is it like a history of the USMNT or is it pick up in the current era? Yeah, so that's a good question. It's kind of about the modern era, which I define as kind of 1983. onwards when they field Team America as

an entrant in the North American Soccer League, sort of doubling as the national team, except it's not really the national team because most of the key players refused to join up with Team America and they came last. And the whole thing sort of went down in flames.

That was Ford's many flaws, kind of the first spasm of ambition that the Federation and the national team program had really had in decades. So that for me, me is where the modern arc starts. So I'm certainly covering the history before that. But so in depth, the book covers sort of 1983 to the presence. And it intersperses that with these long profiles of the current players and particularly the ones who say something about the larger sort

of soccer landscape and the development mechanism and the various ways that I think the national team reflects, you know, 21st century America and the way we live now. Is there a lot of good Burrhalter stuff in there? That's kind of, I'll admit, that's what I'm most excited about. There is a great deal of Burrhalter stuff in there. There's a lot of Yergen-Klinzman stuff in there. There were guys who were waiting for me to call. Not that they knew I was going to call, but, you know, when somebody reached out,

texted or emailed or whatever, and was like, hey, I'm writing this history of the national team. I want to talk about the Klinsman era. there was an eagerness there that did not take much to to tap into things were said it's striking the things people just volunteer onto you know YouTube shows or interviews so I imagine once you really start digging you get some stuff why did the you probably got a sense of this from talking to people why did the Klinzman revolution not materialize as promised um the the simple answer is that Klinsman is a really good salesman of himself of a larger project.

He's very charismatic. We had a long conversation when I'd sort of finished covering the chapter of his era. You know, and as you have to, as a reporter, sir, I said, hi, here is what people were saying about you. What do you have to say in response? And he had what I'm sure were perfectly coherent and defensible answers to him. I kind of came away thinking how nice it must be to live in a world where nothing is ever your fault. And there is a very valid explanation for the various things that have gone wrong that absolve you of those. But I think that while he had good ideas and while he had a lot of broad kind of, he did in a lot of ways upgrade the program.

Everybody will say that, right? the conditions that the players played in, sort of the facilities that they got, the resources that they got, the coaching, more like the breadth of the coaching staff, was markedly improved in his time in the national team. And then that's partly because he had the clout

to make that stuff happen. And that's partly because he pushed for it. Where I think things fell down is that he didn't have to focus or sort of the kind of logistical skill to either stick through, to stick with his plans, or to kind of put others in a position where they could do it for him, right? Where the whole thing was just kind of chaotic.

Like a good example from the book is Stu Holden was telling me about how they had, at one point they had this blood draw program where, you know, players would have their blood drawn at every camp, and there were all sorts of tests that were run on those, and they were going to help the players, you know, better understand their bodies. and you know they were like it was a little bit of hesitancy there but they're like okay if it's for the greater good and if it's going to benefit us in the long run great cool and then two camps later holden comes back to camp and those guys aren't there anymore and that whole program has been

abandoned and there is you know whatever happened in that oh well we're doing something else now right and so there there was a whole lot of that going around where it was just this new idea and it seemed good on paper, but then they didn't stick with it or for whatever reason they zagged after they zigged. Maurice Seidu talked about how a dietitian that was on the payroll for a little while found a gluten intolerance in him. And it really helped him to know that. And it really helped him change his diet.

And he was probably a better footballer for it. But then again, after a little while, those people were gone. And so there was no continuity really in anything that they did. And you saw that on the field, I think, in tactics. And we could record three separate podcasts just on those. But that was sort of the overarching trend of the Klinsman era, where there were interesting ideas and there was a sort of fixation on innovation for innovation's own sake. And it just never really stuck and nothing was ever kind of seen through to its natural conclusion.

And so that I think started more and more to manifest itself on the field and in the locker room and the dynamics in there as well. So I'm sensing that the stories that he completely lost the locker room were mostly true. Is that correct? I think so. There are still some guys who really appreciate Klinsman for what he did for them. And, you know, there were plenty of guys who owe their national team career to him. And so with any coach who has gone, there's the players to whom that coach's era had been in net benefit are sorry to see him go. And they're the ones who were sort of sidelined when they probably shouldn't have been who are very happy for it.

Right. So at the end of any coaching tenure, you're going to find sort of a gamut of people and what they think of them. But yeah, I think on the whole, the things were very much kind of running into a wall towards the end of, well, the start of his second cycle, really. And so I don't, I think you're right in that there wasn't enough locker room support anymore for it to sort of be sustainable. Did Clinton Dempsey tell Clemsman not to speak to him after Clemsman called Clint out in the press for coming back to Seattle? those two had a really complicated dynamic. Clint says in the book that Klinsman made him captain, even though he very specifically didn't want to be the national team captain.

He was very clear about that. He said, I don't want to do that. I don't want to have to do all the press stuff. I don't want to have to put myself out there even more. I do not want this job. And Klinsman thought he was pushing him and his whole thing about putting people, taking people out of their comfort zones. you know, everybody should be always reaching for more.

And so at the same time, Klinsman is out there criticizing Clint for not staying in Europe longer, for leaving Tottenham when the Sounders come in with this massive offer. And that really struck a chord with Clint where he was, I think he felt pretty betrayed by that because he played hard for him always and because Clint grew up and he talks about this all the time. He grew up in a trailer, right? Somebody comes along and gives him tens of millions of dollars and secures his family's future. He's going to take it. And he was upset that Clintzman didn't understand that about him and didn't sort of appreciate that, you know, this is still a job and it's still a career. And you have to understand at a certain level that not all of these American guys,

played for Monaco and Inter Milan and Tottenham Hotspur and were able to kind of pretty much secure their futures really on in their careers the way Klinsman himself could. So there was a there was a tension there for sure. Who was the player who told Donovan that he didn't care, that this other player didn't care about the team and was only there to go to the World Cup? He didn't say. But he, Lenin did reiterate that. he played with a lot of guys during the Clemsman era who once their national team careers were over, just never went to the U.S. again, maybe once or twice for a holiday.

So he kind of doubled down on this feeling that there were guys on that team who were on the U.S. team, but maybe emotionally and sort of kind of just in their day-to-day lives didn't necessarily identify or really think of themselves as America. And that stuck in his crawf for sure. What's your take on that? You're a dual national of sorts, right? And I think it's been tricky over the years if you wanted to criticize Timmy Chandler or I'm just throwing that name out there. Timmy Chandler for not caring about the national team or not performing as well as he did. It was like, you know, it could be dangerous to criticize because then you're saying, people will say, no, we're a nation of immigrants.

Like, why are you, you know, if he's there, he's there? How do you sort of think about all that? You know what I mean? Yeah. No, it's, I am a dual national. I've Dutch and U.S. passports and I'm eligible for two or three more, I believe. As is my son who has no interest in soccer, so I'm not sure that a recruiting war is going to be breaking out anytime soon. How old is your son?

He's about to be nine. Okay. That's probably too late. He needs to be playing probably. He has both his passports. I have a nine-year-old son, also not interested in stock. He's still not that good, to be honest, when I've seen of him. It's not.

Our sons will be their own men. That's right. And I think they're better for it. So that conversation is tricky. I've got interesting stuff from Greg Burhalter in the book on that about how. he wasn't that bothered about how American these guys really were before their recruitment, before they sort of committed to the U.S. national team and before they said, this is going to be the team that I play for at the international level.

He felt that a kind of pride in the country and pride in the program was something that could be developed afterwards. So you had some guys who, you know, Serginio Dest's, or his English was not that good when he joined the team. There were some of the German-Americans didn't really speak very good English. These guys were not sort of culturally American, right? And I don't want to diminish by any means their eligibility or their belonging on the national team. But like these were not guys who had spent very much of their lives living either in the U.S. or sort of in an American bubble, for lack of a better word, right? I remember distinctly, I was asked to go talk to Sergenio at his first camp in Dutch

to kind of set them at ease with talking to the press, because, of course, that was the other thing with these European guys. They came over, and they hadn't done anywhere near as much press as they were expected to do in the United States, right? And so that's a big adjustment for them. I think with a guy like Timmy Chandler, the logistics of it are just different. I think we have to be honest about that.

If you play in the Bundesliga, if you, let's say you have a marginal chance of playing for Germany or some other team, that, you know, the extra strain on your workload as a player is just going to be much less than if you go play with the US

and you have to fly over to go to Honduras and you have to fly over to go to Panama every few months. I wonder if some of those guys, estimated the toll that it would take on their just overall fitness to have those transatlantic flights just constantly. And if maybe their commitment softened a little bit along the way. There's something I've been wondering for a long time and I'm realizing you, if anyone can answer it, it would be you. How good is Burr-Halter's Dutch? We sort of tested it out. He understood me when I spoke to

him in Dutch. I translate, in our conversation, I brought up this Dutch concept. And I said it in Dutch, and he pretty much followed it. I don't know how comfortable he would be talking it or speaking it. But it was interesting that some of the stuff he talked about, just his kind of tactical education in the Netherlands as a young pro. One of the things I found out, I don't know if that was out there. already, but the reason he got a work permit to play in the Netherlands coming out of the

University of North Carolina was because Genus Michels himself had written a letter of recommendation and the way specifically for Greg. And the way that had happened is Greg was on an under 21 team, I want to say, and because he had a training stint in Germany, he was meeting the team in Amsterdam and the rest of the U.S. under 21 team. And at that time, Micheus Michels was under contract with the Federation, with U.S. soccer, because they had sort of given him a consulting gig where they basically said, here's a pot of money, go travel the country, take your wife, you know, make a holiday out of it, go up and down the country and just watch our soccer scene and just come back and tell us what you see. And he came back and said, you know, which, which is sort of received wisdom now,

which he said, you don't have a country, you have a continent, right? You have this whole big country. And the soccer in Miami is completely different than the soccer in New England and the soccer in the southwest or in the northwest and what have you. And you have no unifying kind of philosophy or identity. And then that kind of became the basis for Carlos Kiroche to kind of come up with his project 2010 and come up with his larger plan for regional and national development centers. But so anyway, so Michels goes to meet, goes to sort of welcome the U.S. team at the airport in the Netherlands, and Greg just so happens to land a few hours before everybody else. And so what does he do?

He spots Michels, knows exactly who he is, and just spends that entire time just picking his brain and just talking to him and just, you know, soaking up all the knowledge that he can. And then Michels is impressed with him and actually writes a letter of recommendation so that Greg can get his work permit and play in the Netherlands. And so Greg talks about he shows up in the Netherlands and he thought he was sort of a, he thought he knew things, right? He thought he knew the sport and he understood stuff. And he said he, you know, within, it didn't take very long and he realizes he knows nothing

at all. And he said, what he loved about playing in the Netherlands is that the coach was not this authoritarian figure, but it was sort of part of this larger discourse. And that after practice, they would sit around and talk about what had worked and what hadn't worked. And he says he just got his entire tactical education and his education as a pro sort of showing up. He said, I was totally unprepared. But when I left there, he'd really develop more than probably at any other stage in his career. Did you ever find out what psychometrics Crocker used to rehire Burrhalter? And did he use those same ones with Potch?

I asked him and the answer was vague. I don't know exactly what they were asked to do in the cycle when Burrhalter was rehired, when Jesse Marsh supposedly was in that process as a serious candidate as well. and I couldn't get a specific answer on whether Potch was put through that same battery of tests. They said it was rigorous and they said the process was similar, but I wasn't able to pin that down. Going back to something you said earlier about the heavier demands for talking to the press in America compared to Europe,

how much do you think that is the reason that our player pool is so boring. And here's what I mean. You've written about this recently. Tim Wea, West McKinney, Christian Pulisic, Giorayna, even Josh Sargent, who's not obviously in this camp. They all came of age in Europe, right? Yeah.

And they all came of, before they went to Europe, they were playing for academy teams in the U.S. And they wouldn't have had any press responsibilities then. So they went straight into this European context where there isn't much talking to the press. How much is that sort of creating this environment where we don't have a very interesting player pool, at least in a personal way in this moment?

It's funny you should ask that because a really noticeable trend was going through the generations of national teamers and the way they thought about what the press meant to their careers and to their jobs. I went back and talked to guys who played the 80s. They are stoked that anybody remembered that they played for the national team at all and wants to talk to them about it.

Those guys, if I'd wanted to stay in their guest room for a week, they would have very happily put me up. They were just delighted to talk. And then the guys in the 90s, even if they're busy and a lot of them have media careers now, they always saw doing media as part of the job of pushing the boulder up the hill, of growing the sport,

yada, yada, yada, like that was part of it for them. Like, you talk to the press, you don't turn down anything, you do everything. And they still have that mindset, right? And then you've got the guys from sort of

the early 2000s, early 2010s. They're not as excited. They'll do it. It may take a while to pin them down, but they'll talk to you. You know,

I got everybody I needed. You know, I spoke to Linden several times. I spoke to Clint. I got Freddie a dude, which surprised me honestly because he doesn't speak a whole lot anymore. But they saw the value in it, right? They understood that it was part of the job.

This generation now, they just grew up in a climate where that was not expected of them and where there was no need to really be interesting publicly and put yourself out there in order for the sport to be healthier and to ultimately kind of safeguard your career. right what i've heard from several people is that christian polisic is really funny privately that he has this cutting sense of humor and that he cracks up the whole room with like these you know unexpected little quips every now and again and we just don't see that part of him publicly um hardly ever at all maybe once or twice in katar he had a little quip um and these guys just calculate their

relationship with the public in a really different way because they did come up through that European pipeline where there is no media expectation to speak of. And they don't see a need to be doing that stuff. And so getting today's guys pinned down for interviews for the book was the hardest by far. Even one player who we don't have to name lives 10 minutes from my house. And it took many, many months to finally get him. And so that's their relationship with the media is just really different. And they came of age in a time where there wasn't that expectation, but also soccer media was plentiful, right?

And it wasn't like something that you rarely spotted in the wild, right, that soccer was written about or that they talked about soccer on TV and said, I think it's a healthy sign for the sport. But it makes the job harder for the media, which nobody cares about but us. but it also makes it harder to kind of position these guys, for lack of a better word, in the culture, right, when they just don't really spend a lot of time sharing their personalities with us. They also don't really do it.

You've pointed this out recently as well. They also don't really do it on social media that much either. No. Right? They're just not public performers, really, which I can appreciate on a personal level. I think that's another piece of it, is that these guys are just, you know, it's just a group and their dynamic is a little bit more

reticent and a little bit more private. And that's maybe that's unfortunate. I mean, maybe, you know, at Tyler Adams is just not inclined to do all press all the time and be in the picture. He just wants to keep his head down and, you know, he's got a wife and he's got a kid and he's got a career. And those are the things that are important to him, right? And he hangs out with his people. and aside from that, he doesn't really need to be out there. What was covering them in Qatar like? Covering a national team at a World Cup, I've been to three now, is difficult because more than ever they are focused on just performance.

They're not really trying to rock the boat at all. Of course, after Qatar, we learned just, how much sort of drama was happening behind the scenes. So that probably made them a little more gun-shy when the microphones were in front of them than they were already inclined to be. The World Cup is never really where you're going to get the best material just because, you know, it's really only the guy speaking that want to speak. I remember in Brazil in 2014, just day after day after day. we got Jermaine Jones and Alejandro Badoia to speak to us because they were the only guys that wanted to do it, right? For better or worse.

So it tends not to be where you get the better stuff, unfortunately. We need a Badoia. He was getting into it with Huala on social media and his time. That's what we need. We need some guys coming up doing that. Yeah. I mean, that's guys who have maybe ambitions or at least. opinions on things beyond soccer and feel strongly enough about them to share them.

Yeah, we could do with a bit more of that. In 2016, you wrote an article about five options to replace Cleansman. One of them was Jesse Marsh. Should we have just gone for it then with him? It's funny when people bring up pieces. You have no memory of whatsoever. There are a lot of them. I think that the job of national team coach,

and I don't know that this is maybe as well understood as it probably ought to be. It's a vibes job, right? It is very much a get them together, figure out which 23 guys get along, compliment each other, will be friendly enough that it doesn't get toxic, but where there is also a competitive tension within that team and then figure out a system that isn't too complicated that you're able to execute it with just a few days prep and that works for everybody, right?

I think Jesse clearly is good at the vibes part of it. He seems like he's able to get a team on a page. I think maybe at some points in his career, he might have been slightly dogmatic tactically, but I mean in his defense maybe those were scenarios where he just looked at the players we had and said yeah maybe we just need to attack all out all the time because it's the best shot that we have I don't honestly know how much difference it would have made having Greg versus Jesse I think they're both extremely professional and prepared coaches and maybe the reason that there seems to be a simmering tension and rivalry there is because they are so similar in lots of ways. So I don't know that the picture today would look substantially different if they'd gone with one over the other.

Let me see. Speaking of Jermaine Jones, is he right that he isn't appreciated enough? Probably. I mean, that goal against Portugal. That was a goal. But, I mean, that guy just had a motor. He covered so much ground and he did so much on the field. And for all the hand-wringing that I seemed to run,

recall over how easily he got a yellow card. I don't know that he ever got sent off for the U.S. He was very good at playing exactly on the edge and being intimidating to other players. So, I mean, he had a long national team career. He went to a World Cup. He played well at that World Cup. I think he's, to me, he doesn't fall into the underrated or overrated bucket. He's just kind of rated. I think we remember him about. about right. So I guess I disagree. Okay. We have a bunch of questions in this vein, but maybe I'll just try to do one of them.

There have been points when the ceiling for this generation, this generation being like birth years 98 to 05 or something like 04, seemed just unknowably high. And maybe it's, maybe it was a golden generation. Maybe it is a golden generation. That has obviously changed. How do you make sense of this generation? generation now, this reticent, sort of recently underperforming generation of U.S. players? I think that a few different things have stood in their way. I think there's been a lot of bad luck in this generation, right? Like, Tyler Adams has missed a lot of the last few years due to injuries.

Christian Policic, you know, really lost two or three good years to the chaos at Chelsea. Weston McKinney has been in limbo several times at Juventus and has kind of had to fight his way back. There have been a bunch of injuries. I think, you know, then the whole Raina Burhalter thing happens and that kind of really puts a kind of damper on the momentum that they seem to have coming out of Qatar. So in lots of ways, I think they've been a little bit unfortunate. I wonder to what extent these guys really were significantly better than any prospects we'd had before,

or whether we as kind of a soccer community saw what we wanted to see, and to what degree they were the beneficiaries of kind of globalization. and the fact that, you know, by the time they came around, European academies took American prospect seriously because enough of them had sort of come good, right? The, you know, Gio follows in the steps of Christian at Barusia Dortmund because there's a proof of concept there. And so I wonder if we maybe conflated slightly the fact that these guys were at major clubs with them, therefore, being much better than anybody we'd had before, right? Because the truth is that, you know, a lot of them haven't really kicked on the way we would expect them to and haven't really developed into

where a year out from 26 when most of these guys should be in their primes, where we sort of hope they would be by now. And, you know, talent development is a numbers game. You, I mean, that's why these European academies are so big, right? You've got lots and lots of guys and you hope that a few of them make it through every year. And so I think what was exciting about this generation isn't just the pedigree that they had in the clubs they played for, but just a sheer volume of them, right? Just how many of these guys were coming through all at once. And that's when you start to get a fix the golden generation label. And I think there's just been a little bit of bad luck in how few of them have panned out for various reasons, you know, going to the wrong club, getting the wrong coach,

et cetera, et cetera. I think there's still a lot of upside in this team. I do think that there's still the potential for a, you know, to win a knockout game, maybe two at a World Cup if everything comes together. You know, we spend a lot of time fretting about what kind of shape this team is in, a year out from the World Cup. And I thought a guest that you had on a few episodes ago made a good point, which is that World Cup standalone.

And what you tend to see is that not only does sort of what happens the year or two before World Cup tend not to matter that much once the actual thing kicks off. But it's also true that the team that's usually left holding the hardware at the end of a World Cup is very often not even the best team during the group stage. It's just such a singular beast. And two or three teams catch lightning in a bottle and everybody else doesn't. and I think for everyone's anxiety and for everyone's anticipation, we spend all this time thinking about it, but we just don't know, right? If all these guys are fit and all these guys have had a good second half of the 25, 26 club season, but not too good, right? Where they're completely worn out by the World Cup or where they have an injury from overuse at just the wrong time, I still think that there's real upside in this team. How does their World Cup performance compare to the 0-2, 2010, 14 ones?

Where do you place it? So Len and Donovan and Carlos Bocanagra made the same point independently unprompted. And they both said something along the lines of every World Cup I've been to hinged on a single bounce or a single call or a single play. and that's true right in o two those guys very nearly didn't make it out of the group stage 2010 famously same thing 2014 like it was it was never comfortable and in the and so some of those guys said our 2016 was a good team but you know in in the grand scheme of things but you know it just didn't break our way that time and so i wonder if in retrospect we we put a little bit I get that that's how soccer works and how the World Cup works.

But we put so much of how we kind of designate which World Cup was a success and which World Cup was better and where they all kind of fall in the global rankings. So much of that comes down to just these little fluke plays here and there that I find them really hard to compare. I thought in 2002, they had a team that had a really clear plan and that surprised people. Well, by 2006, they couldn't surprise people anymore. And from what I hear and what I reported in the book, like the vibes had really fallen off, where you had this team that policed itself in 2002, and by 2006, things had gotten a little bit messy, right?

And then in 2010, they had really, really good chemistry, and things came together. 2014, the cracks were already very much starting to show, but things went okay, right? And things sort of worked out. And so I find it hard to place it exactly. I will say that for being such a young team and for having one player on the roster who'd been to the World Cup before, I thought that their performance in Qatar was really, really credible, right? I think in that sense, given how new so many of those guys were to that scene, I think it was not quite up to 2002 standards, but certainly level would.

2010, 2014, maybe slightly ahead. They played some really good soccer in guitar for stretches. I've got a pet theory that if Pulisic had been able to celebrate his goal, the picture of the, we'd be living there a different world right now. That might have been a different cover from my book? Yeah. We'll have to see. He said he's just crumpled up on the ground at our big moment, not his fault,

clutching his private parts. Clutching his private parts. There's an all-time moment when Henry Bushnell of Yahoo Sports, who was my roomie in Qatar, asked Christian about what exactly a pelvic contusion was at the next press conference. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone cringe so hard in public about a question they were just asked. Of Christians' just broad discomfort of talking to the press, he absolutely hates nothing. more than to be asked about something like that where he has to kind of remotely go out there and talk about a part of his body he doesn't want to talk about. It's for the book. I had to ask

him a question about his girlfriend. He'd not publicly, anyway, and he says he'd never had a serious relationship until Alexa Melton, I think her name is, she's a golfer. And I don't I am 90% sure that he blushed when I asked him about it, just surrounded by a few other reporters. He just doesn't have that in him to talk publicly about anything that makes him remotely uncomfortable that he doesn't really want to talk about. But yeah, that might have been a nice moment to have that picture, sort of the Len and Donovan, Algeria style iconography of Christian. in that Algerian goal or sorry the Iranian goal. Who's the best candidate to be the one who gets into it with reporters and like really talks to the public on the current team? Wow. Here's the thing. So many of these guys are bright. It's not that they lack the thoughts or that they lack the verbal skills.

Tyler Adams, he always gives thoughtful answers. Kind of gives Chad GBT vibes a little bit, though. I think that's slightly unfair. Chad GPD's getting really good. Yeah, that's valid. And I suppose that Chad GPT would aggregate other things that Tyler Adams has said before and then spit them back out. Weston McKinney, when he wants to, you know, he can be,

really thoughtful about what he saw and what happened on the field. And, you know, there's a few guys who could probably be really good spokesman for that team. Did you ask Tyler about the World Cup? Yeah. About his, um, did you ask him about the goal, like the Netherlands scored? I did. Did he answer? Well, I mean, it's sort of his, his, feeling, I think, I didn't, on that goal specifically, I think there were a few different things that broke down, right?

But his sort of takeaway from that game was that the Netherlands, the Dutch weren't really that much better than them, but that there was a team that knew how to sort of exploit mistakes and finish chances in that they didn't have those, didn't have that developed quite yet, which is something that Greg Burrhalter talks about afterwards as well. But if you're asking if he owned up to the goal, no, he did not. Is he right that they weren't that much better than us?

Do you think? Yeah, I'm really curious about what you thought of that game. Do I think he was right? Yeah. Well, to me, being good is exploiting the mistakes of your opponent and finishing them. Right? So the things where he said, oh, well, they just did these two things better than we did. Well, those are the things, right?

Those are what wins soccer games. So, no, I do think the Dutch were a good bit better in that game. Is it us running into, yeah, just running into a much better team or bad luck or Burrhalter getting outcoached by a Louis von Hall master class? What percentage is it those three things? How annoying of a question was that? Well, I'm just trying to remember, first of all, what the three things were that you asked me to separate. So bad luck, the Dutch just being like having much, much more quality or Louis von Hall making Greg Burholter, his little brother for an afternoon? I think that the U.S. wasn't as sharp as they'd been in their group stage game.

games. I mean, and that's, you saw that in the mistakes. And I don't know if they were running on fumes or whether they just weren't as focused. I think there is an element also of the U.S. gets out of the group stage and it feels a little bit like they're playing with house money. And the Dutch get out of the group stage and they think, okay, the tournament has begun. Let's let us commence, right? So there's a different attitude there. I think that, let's just make it mathematically easy and say 33%, 33, 33. I think there was bad luck. I think the Dutch were just better at the things that you need to do in tournament soccer

in straight knockout games. And I think that Louis van Chal knew very well what was coming and sort of had a good plan for it. What's your confidence that Pachitino is going to make us slightly more likely to win one of those matchups where we have to do the right things at the right moment. I don't think Pachitino is going to make any players better necessarily.

He'll bring in different players. That's not the job of the national team coach. I think what he offers is a reset and a sense that they have this big time coach in their corner. And I think there's value in that, right? And it becomes sort of a

self-fulfilling prophecy where they're like, hey, Potch is with us. He's been there. He's done that. He's a big time coach and he's with us. I think there's a certain amount of confidence that sort of flows from that. And I do think that he maybe brings more of that mindset. Like, okay, the group stage is over. That was a past fail exercise. Now the real stuff begins because he's been there. And because he, although 2002 didn't go great for Argentina, I'll grant you, as when he was a player there. But I do think that he can sort of help offer

that sense where they're not quite so odd and realize that it's a knockout game and the record in those isn't great. The U.S. has only ever won one knockout game at a World Cup, but it's a game at a World Cup. You've done a bunch of those. I do think that he'll bring a little bit more calm and confidence to that situation, which is really what you need, I think. So you're not Pachino out? I'm not Pocitino out. No, again, I don't know. I'm not going to say it doesn't matter at all who's the national team coach,

but I think that so long as they can keep the peace and so long as they can work coherently and don't do anything crazy, having a guy that players can look up to has more value than maybe the things that we worry about around the edges, right? Like should this guy be our backup left back or should it be the other. guy. I think it's going to work out. I also take a great deal of comfort. Well, I take great comfort from what John Polis said about it being a standalone tournament. I've thought about that many times since that interview, which you brought up a few minutes ago. That was your dog. Go ahead, go ahead.

You get to the World Cup and it's a clean slate, right? And you play at home and what happened in 94 is I have got this scene in my book on how Alexi Lalas got on a commercial flight in the middle seat like a month before the World Cup and he got to talking to this lady in the seat next to him and she asked him what he did and he said I'm a soccer player I'm on the national team and she didn't believe him right like a month before that World Cup which I think by any metric was a great success for for the American soccer scene for the U.S. national team. Like a month before that tournament, people still had no clue and still weren't really plugged into it. There's going to be this ground swell of attention and excitement and

optimism that the reason World Cups are such a powerful sports washing tool is that once the games actually begin, people forget about everything else, right? Should they? That's another discussion. But I think you are going to see a certain energy and that the team will be able to feed off that because they're the sorts of players who seem to do much better. in an environment like we've seen in Nations League finals with Mexico where there's a real intensity and they can tap into that and it sort of wakes them up. So I am optimistic for that World Cup. And I think they had a terrible runner friendlies before that 94 World Cup too. So. Yeah. No, it's it's it's it's you see that a lot with home teams that host world

cups that go into it kind of disheveled. I mean you saw it with Klinsman's Germany going into 2006 like there was a national crisis over how badly. Germany was the German national team was doing going into that World Cup and given the talent they had, they were very, very pleased to come in third. And so it's, it really is a standalone thing. We heard your dog bark a little bit ago and we have to ask. So the dog's name is Eleanor Roosevelt. Yes. Does the dog have Eleanor Roosevelt qualities or do you just like Eleanor Roosevelt? And any dog you got was going to be named that. We live in the Hudson Valley, and she is very, very white and chuneless and possibly gay. And so we thought it was fitting. As it turns out, she is not such a defender of, well, animal rights in this case. Last summer in the span of a week, she's a terrier mix. Her lineage is much too muddled to call her any particular.

kind of breed. In the span of a single week, she killed a squirrel, a field mouse, and a chipmunk. So she's quite murderous. So, yeah. So when we adopted her, she seemed very sweet and placid, but she maybe doesn't quite espouse those values of dignity and decency. What's the proper Dutch pronunciation of Roosevelt? Roosevelt. You just got to R a little harder. What's the main difference between Dutch and Belgian people? Because you're both. Yeah, so I was born in Breda and we moved to Brussels when I was four, my mom and I. Belgians are much more introverted.

The Dutch are, what's the line from Ted Lassau? He's not rude. He's just Dutch. It's extremely true. We're very, very blunt people, which I prefer because then you know what people actually think, but whatever. The Belgians aren't like that at all. They're much more, they keep to themselves much more. They're much more reserved. They're much more cautious in the way that they speak. How did the Dutch become so blunt? Is it just something that is?

That's a really good question. I don't know that I can answer that. Maybe it's from being invaded so much where you kind of just have to be honest with each other all the time, but that's true for other countries, certainly true from Belgium. I don't know how to answer that. How much of us sometimes thinking Dest is a little bit of an interesting character is just him being Dutch and us not really understanding that? I think he's eccentric even or he's he's sort of outspoken even by Dutch standards because at the IAX Academy they had no idea what to do with him or what to make of him. He surprised a lot of people at IAX just by making the first team. They kind of of assumed that he would wash out. I know there are stories about how he would miss days on end

of school because he just forgot to go. I mean, he is, you know, he is very much out there. And, you know, what's funny is that soccer as a sport is very good at rooting out eccentrics. You know, you just don't see very many of them. It's not like baseball where you're like, oh, a relief pitcher has to kind to kind of be a weirdo. That's what makes them a relief pitcher, right? And, you know, you just don't see very many of them. In soccer, it just doesn't let a whole lot of atypical people through. And here's Serginio and his entire baguette before kickoff. Berlter seemed to have figured out how to do that. Yeah, it took him a while to warm up to the rest of the team and to sort of really fit into the locker room.

But he seems to work out well now, which I think is. good since he had sort of those two red cards at inopportune times. And he was still welcomed back to the team where I would have maybe wondered whether some conversations should be had over the reliability of someone who can be wound up so easily and reduce your team to 10. But yeah, he seems to very much be at the core of that team. He's been gone a while now, of course. On Dutch bluntness, I've, you know, I've read some of the, um, Dennis Bergkamp biography, stillness and speed. And I was just reading your piece on Dutch soccer weirdo, Wesley Schneider.

And it occurs to me that, you know, there's often conflict between Dutch national team players. Yeah. And, of course, obviously coaches as well. Why is that? Why is there so much, is that, is that just normal for national teams? Or is it, is it especially pronounced for the Netherlands? I think the next Dutch national team to go to a World Cup without significant internal conflict will be the first. There's something about, I mean, Simon Cooper, who grew up in the Netherlands, noted soccer scribe.

He says that Dutch soccer is a public discourse and that when players on the field consider players on the field consider themselves to be in sort of an extended conversation. right and and the coach makes the lineup but really everybody is in charge and everybody is in that and then you tend to have factions between the guys who came from the iax academy and the azette academy and the phaenort academy and so there's a bit of that as well but it's it's also cultural and i can't remember a dutch team that didn't have really big personalities that would sort of in one way or another just be had loggerheads with each other and sometimes it works

and sometimes it doesn't but it doesn't seem like the results of how they perform really has anything to do with that it's sort of like its own separate category what you know people talk about the Dutch approach throw terms like total football around

what would you how would you describe the Dutch approach to soccer and how it's distinct from, I don't know, the French or the Spanish or German approaches. I mean, I chuckle a little bit when people bring up total football now because the Dutch haven't played total football in many decades, right? This idea of, I mean, partly that's because much of soccer is now some version of total football with positional interchanges and everybody being able to do multiple things and kind of running around a lot. Dutch soccer's gotten a lot more pragmatic. What you tend to see now as an inversion of what the national team look like for generations, which would be that there would be attacking talent falling out of trees and that they'd have to cobble together a defense from whoever they could.

And whenever there would be a few decent defenders, like in the late 90s, early 2000s with Frank DeBur and Yappi, Stom in Central Defense, that would be a golden generation. And the difference between a golden and a non-golden generation would be whether we had any defenders, essentially, right? And so there's been a weird inversion there now where you see that now we're mass-producing world-class central defenders. And players in other positions, and it's maybe worth noting here that if Sergenio Dest had picked the Netherlands over the U.S., he would have been stuck behind Denzel Dumfries for

his entire career and probably wouldn't have played very much. but and now you tend to see that the Dutch aren't really producing as much attacking talent as they used to and don't really have those generational playmakers anymore and I don't know if that's because youth soccer has become so highly structured as it has elsewhere where individualism isn't really allowed to flourish anymore it's it's definitely odd but so as a consequence Dutch soccer has become more pragmatic I think than it used to be and a little bit more buttoned up. which is a shame because attacking soccer is the correct way of playing soccer. Yeah. I mean, it's still, you watch the Air Divisi, which I'll, you know, comes in for some criticism for not being that strong. I mean, it's just reality. It's not as strong as one of the big five leagues.

But it's flowing, you know. It's generally flowing possession-oriented soccer. I don't know. I guess it's still pragmatic, but anyway. You tend not to see those outliers anymore, right? Like the guys that score 30, 35 goals in the Netherlands and then go to the Premier League and get like seven or whatever. So in that sense, it's become a little less wild than he used to be, I think.

But yeah, it's not quite as goal-happy as it once was. I really enjoyed the kicker on your piece about Pulisic's, you know, Pulisic having the best American season ever. I don't really have a question about that. I just want to say I really loved it where you list off all the other players who've won the 11 at Milan. And then the last line is it fits him just fine, which is nice. Well, think about where the U.S. soccer program was, you know, just a few decades ago. In the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, they played one game a year, if that, because that's all that.

they could afford to do, right? I talked to those guys from the 80s and they were like, yeah, players were regularly turning down call-ups because it just wasn't worth their while. You know, for years, they had a $5 a day per die per diem to play for the national team. And more, on more than one occasion, they were actually asked to forfeit their $5 a day so that the Federation could afford to extend national team camp by a single day. I mean, that's the sort of shoestring budget we're talking about. They sometimes players showed up to a national team camp and nobody had remembered to bring balls. And like administrators would have to make a frantic run to Kmart to go buy some soccer balls.

At the end of the 1974 failed, of course, World Cup qualifying campaign, they didn't have enough players for one game and they had to pull someone out of the stands to play a U.S. national team World Cup qualifier. Wow. I did not know that. It's worth stopping every now and again and just sort of realizing that there is a player wearing the number 11 shirt for A.C. Milan. And he's one of the best players on that team and in Syria. And that's really one of the takeaways I had reporting this book is just how far this program has come. And it's easy to lose that in sort of the day to day. But where we are now where we're like, we've got. one of the world's most famous coaches, is he really good enough to get us to the quarterfinal or just around a 16 at the World Cup? And that's kind of the angst that we have.

I mean, when you kind of place that in the larger context, it's faintly ludicrous. It's weird how much of a dark age is in terms of how much we know about it, the 60, or most people know about the 60s and 70s are. Yeah, it means it's just an incredible time in American soccer, just a complete Wild West, where, you know, they had won, they went to several World Cup qualifiers without a coach.

They once, for a brief period, had a, they had two coaches, and nobody seemed to be able to agree who was actually the national team coach at the same time, right? Several times they lost a coach in the middle of a qualifying cycle. There was this German coach called Detmar Kramer, who was recruited to much fanfare, and he left after just a few games to take over at Bayern Munich, where he won two straight European championships. And the reason he was able to leave is because U.S. soccer forgot to make him sign a contract. I mean, that's the state of play that we came from just two generations ago.

I mean, it is a miracle what has happened with this program. Did they get it together just because of the World Cup, or did something change earlier in the 80s? there was an element of ambition I mean there was good fortune in making it to the 1990 World Cup a lot of things broke their way not just in that final game

in Trinidad and Tobago when they finally make it to the World Cup but there were a lot of close calls during that World Cup qualifying cycle but that was also a function of ambition you know in the in 8084 they decide to take the Olympics seriously and it doesn't work out great

and they've done the Team America project and put some effort into that. And then when it looked like they might actually make it to Italy in 1990, they put some real resources behind that. And they made a budget so that players could be full time or at least closer to full time with the national team. And something that the players from that time talk about is that once it was possible to make a living from being a national teamer, that created an intensity that hadn't really

existed before that. The national team had been pretty lackadaisical for much of the time before because you were playing for $5 a day and you weren't going to the World Cup anyway. And that created a professionalism and a competitiveness around the national team. So there's very much a design in making it in 1990 and then kind of getting the 1994 World Cup. There was a rumor that went around that because the U.S. was awarded the 1994 World Cup in 88. I believe. And there was a rumor that went around that if the U.S. wasn't going to make it to the 1990 World Cup, that they would lose the right to host 1994. Now, that turned out to be unfounded, but that sort of lit a fire under them as well to put more resources towards that. And also, they didn't want to be embarrassed in 94. And so they made sure that they had a team that at least had gone to a World Cup before some players. had gone to the World Cup. This is one of the things that I think Bob Gansler doesn't get enough credit for

is that when he took that team to the, when he made his roster for the 1990 World Cup, he very much passed over some more experienced players like Ricky Davis because he wanted to make sure that he was building a team, as he put it, not for 90, but for the 90s. And that he had a team that could sort of grow into that 1994 World Cup and probably sacrifice. some competitiveness in the short term and ultimately his own job because he thought he was going to be kept on for 1994 in order to kind of have that runway throughout the 90s. So there is definitely design at work there. Good for Bob. Thank you, Bob Gansler.

Here's a funny little cadence for you guys. So 1990, the U.S. goes to the World Cup with an American coach, a homegrown coach. a homegrown coach, Bob Gansler. They get wiped out 5-1 in the game against Czechoslovakia. Although if you go back and watch those World Cup games, and I went back and watched every single one of them, for large stretches of that game against Czechoslovakia, they weren't bad at all, the U.S.

But so then they kind of redeem themselves in the rest of the tournament. They only lose one-nothing to Italy. You know, they don't get crushed in those last two. games. So anyway, so the U.S. has been at a considering the conditions pretty successful World Cup in 1990. What does the Federation do next with their coaches? They hire a foreign coach. They hire the most high profile foreign coach they can find. Borah Militinovich, right? 94.98 doesn't go great. 2002, Bruce Arena, they have this big breakthrough, 2006. He gets to stick around. By 2010, Bob Bradley, they have another homegrown coach who has a really solid World

Cup. What does the U.S. do after that? They fire him and bring on Yurkin Cleansman. The most high-profile foreign coach they can find. Greg Burhalter leaves the second time around. What does the Federation do? They once again hire the most high-profile foreign coach they can find. It's really funny how much of national team history repeats itself. and how cyclical this stuff really is. So Jesse could be next. You could? I think it could be his time.

And after that, you know, it's if the cadence sticks, maybe it's finally pep time or merino time, who knows. You know, you also have written recently about how the rest of the world sort, you didn't use this word, this is my word, but the rest of the word sort of colonizes America, the rest of the world soccer sort of colonizes America. Like the Club World Cup is going to be here. There's all these like tours by big clubs.

And maybe that's not actually in the best interests of growing the game in this country. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like it's not, it's definitely not in the best interest of MLS to have, you know, A.C. Milan playing Inter Milan next door or whatever. Yeah. I think that to. soccer world had the rest of the soccer world has come to treat the United States and Canada to an extent as an ATM, right? I mean, there is a reason within a single decade, there will have been two Copa Americas, a club world cup and a world cup here. Right. We are the richest market,

but we're also a market that will reliably spend its disposable income on soccer. And that has proven over a long period of time now that it almost doesn't matter what the quality of that soccer so long as the teams involved are high profile. Excuse me, high profile. Like some of these preseason tour games between Barsa and Mance City or whoever, they are unwatchable. You know, their reserves and kids and maybe the stars play for 20 minutes, but. 75,000 people in the stadium.

Right. And they'll pay $300 on average, right? And so global soccer has taken the lesson from that, that's something that you can do repeatedly. and they have not yet found where kind of the outer bounds is of how often you can do that and how much you can charge, which I'm working on a piece for the ringer that will come out in a few weeks about sort of FIFA's working assumption that the demand for elite soccer is basically infinite, right? And again, that's the club world cup is sort of a manifestation. of that. And now that you have this ruling that domestic leagues can play their games abroad,

and La Liga can put a competitive game here, and Siri I can put a competitive game here, I do think that's the detriment of the domestic soccer scene. Because what MLS had going for it is that it was close by and that they were actual competitive games that mattered, right? That I had the fan culture and they weren't just friendlies, they were real games. And so that was sort of a differentiator between those preseason friendlies and all those international tournaments. And if that starts to go away, and if you start to regularly have competitive league matches from high-profile leagues that come here, I don't see how that doesn't eventually damage MLS in some way.

Could it end up being, you know, I'm, I don't know your feelings on MLS exactly, but I'm sort of ambivalent about it to some extent. Could it be that it would be good for, it could be good for American soccer, even if it's not good for MLS? You know what I'm saying? Like, could it grow the game to have La Liga games, serial games here, meaning more kids get mesmerized by the game, more kids get good at the game? Yeah. We have a better national team 30 years from now.

I think the game is grown, right? There's a lot of talk about growing the game and everything. I don't know how much more upside there really is there. I don't know that we're, as a soccer community, that we're ever going to be the NFL or the NBA. I mean, there's plenty of polling that shows that among young people, soccer is more popular than baseball, right, as a sport, as a consumer. So I don't know how much more benefit there is in that.

I don't think that there are very many kids who are going to discover soccer because these teams are playing here who otherwise wouldn't have, right? But I do think that it could, if it damages the domestic league here, then it could also damage the player development apparatus that those teams have developed, which by and large, I think, has been pretty successful in raising the standard of the national team and of the player pool writ large. So in that sense, that makes me nervous about these other leagues being able to play here regularly because that's not money that stays here and that's not money that stays in the game here, right? That's the entire point of it, is that they can make their

whatever $10 million, I don't know, I'm just speculating for that one game and take a back. And take it back to Spain and take it back to Italy. So it doesn't really, I mean, that's not to be jingoistic about it, but it doesn't really benefit the game here. Yeah, that makes sense. You teach journalism in college. Do you teach any introductory classes? Yeah, I teach intro to journalism and I teach some sports writing classes and some sort of long form feature writing classes. What do you do the first day?

of intro to journalism. Like, what are you trying to get across? What I try to get across is that journalism by and large isn't done by just sitting in a room by yourself, not engaging with anyone. So the very first class, I have them go out and commit an act of journalism. And I tell them to leave the classroom, leave the building, and come back having reported something, to have found out something, some event that's going to happen, or some, I don't know, some new hire at the college or just anything that's that's new information to go out and

gather that. Hmm. Do they take to that? Do they enjoy that? Oh, students like nothing more than being told to leave the classroom. Yeah. They very happily engage with little exercises like that. What's your approach to AI and with your students?

I basically make it a zero tolerance blanket ban. We've got pretty good AI sort of checkers and scanners, I think. I mean, there's literature that suggests, there are studies that suggest that they're actually biases that creep into those. But what I keep telling them is what we're. doing here isn't just producing words. Somebody had a great analogy, I think it was on Blue Sky, where they talked about using AI to learn the right. And they said, would you bring a forklift to the gym? Right. And so what I try to explain to them is that AI can't report. It can't

produce anything new. It can't go out and find something out and speak to someone. And the writing that we do here, the point isn't to produce the words. It's to get you. good at synthesizing the information that you gather and then relaying it to your readership, right? And so you're doing yourself a disservice and you're certainly undercutting all the money you're spending being in college by outsourcing the work to a machine. And what I try to sort of drive home is like I know that the higher education culture makes it feel like this is all one big transaction, right, that you pay a certain amount of money and that you show up a certain amount of time

and that you do a certain amount of labor and then someone gives you a degree. But there's going to come a time when you leave here when you will be most likely expected to execute some of the stuff that you have supposedly learned here, right? And when you're going to be sitting down somewhere and chat GPT is not there to save you,

what are you going to do? Right? And so I think that resonates. I hope it resonates. But yeah, I'm very much anti the entire thing. Yeah. I'm worried that there's never going to be a case where a Jet GPD isn't there to save them. I think some form of it will continue to exist.

I suspect that it'll be a lot like the way in the 2000s, you couldn't have imagined that these days there would be almost no online news source that was any good. That would be free. The Guardian still is. The ringer still is. plug plug. But, you know, everything else you have to pay for now. So I imagine it'll become a kind of luxury good where you can really only use that kind of technology if you pay a fairly hefty subscription fee for it. And that'll kind of bring us back to, I think what's really different, college students have always cheated. They've always tried to find an edge, right? I don't think that's

unusual. I think what's unusual about this particular period is that it's become cheaper and easier to cheat than ever before. And that we've even gotten to a point where it takes less time significantly to do the cheating than to actually do the work. It used to be that cheating was a lot of work, right? And that like a lot of effort would have to go into it or you paid someone and do it for you and so it cost money. And so because that sort of equation has been inverted that we're having a period of, I think it's fair to say crisis. But there's plenty of other podcast that we'll talk to you about whether or not the AI bubble and the LLM bubble more specifically is sustainable.

You've got great reviews on Rate My Professor, but one of these reviews, you do. One of these reviewers said, you know, great lectures, everything, big fan. I don't like that he doesn't like some things that are good like VAR. Do you want to lecture your students about VAR? And is this technology thing related to the AI thing at all? This might be the dutchness in me, but my classes tend to be very loose and blunts on whatever is annoying me that day. So yes, we have gotten into the VAR discussion. My feeling about VAR is that it hasn't solved the problem of it was supposed to make soccer fairer, right?

But I don't think by making it fairer, you necessarily make it better. better and we haven't made it fairer because now there are just problems in the execution of VAR rather than there being problems in just straight up officiating before, right? And so all you've really done is you've moved the problem from the field to a booth where it is still a problem a lot of the time because VAR doesn't get used properly or the rules are too vague and that's a separate discussion. And you've slowed down the sport and you've taken some of its most joyous moments out of So I think in that same sense, if you insist on connecting these things, I find it kind of similar to AI in that I'm not sure it has solved any problem.

It's just created a new set of problems and just kind of shifted our anxieties elsewhere. What's the title of your book? Is that a closely guarded trade secret right now? It is not the working title, has not been finalized yet, is the long game. Okay. So we're still not sure about that yet. We still have some time. It's slated to come out spring of 2026, time ahead of a certain event.

We're all very aware of. I wasn't old enough to know how much buzz there was before 1994. Does it feel, and, you know, in talking to other people, does it feel like there's not much buzz ahead of this 2020s, World Cup, perhaps related to the saturation of the market with elite soccer, for which there may be an infinite demand? I think it's not just that, right? I think it's a few different things. I mean, there isn't much buzz yet.

I think we can be honest about that. I think that tends to build really quickly after the club season ends ahead of the World Cup when it's the next thing, because there's so much going on. I think there is that saturation of all this soccer that's available to. to us in all these different leagues. I think a part of it is also that we're not a monoculture, the way most countries that sporting wise, the way that most countries that host a World Cup tend to be, where we're going to be distracted by the NBA playoffs and by the NHL playoffs and the end of the Premier

League season and whatever other European League until sort of mid-May, and then we'll be like, oh, the World Cup's coming up, right? And so that's very similar to 1994, where it seemed like almost overnight. The story was that in Mission Viejo, where the U.S. was locked up for 18 months when they weren't on the road practicing for that World Cup, like there'd be three, four, five reporters out every day. And then suddenly overnight, a month before the World Cup, there'd be like 50 or 60. And so I think you're going to see that where the World Cup isn't there, isn't there, isn't there. And then it very much is there. Okay.

It's a moment in time. I hope. Any good Frankie Haydick stories from your reporting? Frankie Hayduck had thoughts about the rest of the 1998 team and the entitlement that they felt. And, you know, he and Brad Friedel were both saying, you know, the famous Chateau that the U.S. stayed in in France, Chateau de Pise, I believe. it was called. In 1990, they were supposed to stay at Coferchano, the famous Italian soccer headquarters in Florence, until it turned out that Italy was going to be in the same group, and then they got booted to this sort of, it was called an Olympic training center out by the

coast, still in Tuscany, but that was very Spartan, and there were basically military barracks, and the players were very unhappy there. And so 94, obviously, they're at home. And so, 98, U.S. soccer and Steve Samson in particular thought, let's really lay it on for these players and we'll get this really fancy chateau and England had stayed there

and Brazil had stayed there and like all these great national teams had been there and I'd really loved it. And the players, of course, because there was such a toxic mix of players, you know, the fault lines that were already running through that team just cracked open further and further.

But so Frankie, you know, talked a lot about how spoiled those guys were and how little he cared as a newcomer about their long-time grievances. He also, I believe, his very first call-up, I don't remember the exact details. It might have been still for a youth national team. He was supposed to go to China, and he went out partying with his college buddies the night before he was supposed to get on a flight and missed his flight and wound up missing a trip. And Brian McBride, his good friend, his good friend, on the national team because their suitcases had already been packed by the national team. So they just had to show up to the flight.

Their luggage was sort of already ahead. And so Brian McGride wound up having to carry Frankie Hayduck's suitcase all through China, even though Frankie wasn't on the trip because he'd missed a flight because somebody had to make sure that his luggage got home. Oh, brother. Who was surprisingly helpful to you? in your reporting. Huh.

I have to think about that. Well, let me ask this. Did you ever talk to John Harks? He's pretty private, too, right? I did. Yeah. Okay. John Harks was good.

Didn't have a whole lot to say about 98. Didn't want to talk about that piece in particular. Isn't it remarkable that the guy whose wife cheated on him is way more likely to talk about it than the guy who's... Who? Yeah. That's, I think, a personality difference between the two of them, because that guy will talk about anything.

And, no, there were people I didn't really think would talk to me at much length or with much depth. Like, I spoke to Michael Bradley for a long time. He was really good. Clint Dempsey was, I happened to catch him on a day during the Nations League when he was broadcasting for CBS in Vegas, and he had like eight hours to kill in his hotel room. So he was very happy to talk at length. I spoke to Glenn and Donovan several times, you know, guys who are not always the most eager to talk about their careers for various reasons.

There were a lot of people who helped me out in much more extensively than I'd hope to, who hopefully, understood that what this book is trying to do is to sort of create a kind of document of the history of the modern national team in a way that it hasn't been captured before. There have been a few books on the national team, but I don't think, I mean, in the end, I did more than 150 interviews for it. You know, I've been to the last three World Cups. You know, it was the research that went into this was really, really extensive. So I hope. what I've created is a, I don't want to say an artifact or anything pretentious like that, but like a clear and accurate and fair record of the modern national team in a way that it

didn't exist yet. And I think a lot of the people I spoke to understood that and got that were trying to sort of capture what is really an amazing story. Again, like I talked about just the arc that this team has had in the span of a few generations to the point where now we're wondering and we're agonizing over how close they really are to the international elite. That's an incredible place to be given where they came from. All right. The book comes out spring 2026 right now. Working title is the long game. Check it out. Get a copy. When that comes out and it's successful, can you do one about the 60s and 70s?

I'm going to work your way all the way back to 19. To 1930? 1930. Yeah. I don't know that there would be much market for that. So maybe don't, but that would be great. We'll put it on the ideas pile. Good. Good. Yeah, you know, speaking of ideal ideas piles,

when you were talking about at the beginning, Cleansman, you know, going after some idea and then like giving it up after a couple of weeks, you know. I was sitting here searching my own soul, you know. Like, how do you avoid being like that? You you you you've figured out an idea and you went for it and you're stuck it through. I mean, but if you do that with taking people's blood, that's really high level jumping ideas. I suppose.

That would be weird if you like someone comes and takes your blood. Yeah. Did it disappear? Yeah. And there was there was yoga for a while and then there wasn't. And then they were doing these empty stomach morning runs to draw down body fats for a few camps. And then they weren't. It was just this sort of constant churn of slightly crunchy ideas that, you know, that had some scientific basis, I'm sure, and they weren't there anymore.

All right. Well, Leander, thank you so much for doing this. What a pleasure. It was so much fun, guys. Thank you. Thanks, everybody for listening. We'll see you.