Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #689: Leander's back to talk WC run-up, roster cuts

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Leander Schaerlaeckens, the author of the new book The Long Game, about the history and present of the USMNT, rejoins the pod to talk about Landon's omission in 2014, how the World Cup tends to arrive like a thief in the night, and much more. The book comes out Tuesday. Here's a link: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722130/the-long-game-by-leander-schaerlaeckens/ 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 when we talk about U.S. soccer. Hey, everybody. We're getting a repeat visit today from Leander Sherlockens, a soccer journalist, journalism prof, and the author of The Long Game, U.S. men's soccer, and its savage four-decade journey to the top or thereabouts. The book will be available for purchase on Tuesday, and you can pre-purchase now. I'll put the link in the show notes. Leander, welcome back.

I'm so pleased to be back. The World Cup kicks off in just over a month. Does it feel, you know, as a reporter, as a journalist, as a journalism professor, does it feel like a hot story right now? The World Cup always tends to do this thing where it feels like it's not happening and like there's no buzz and there's no excitement because the club season in Europe hasn't really finished yet, right? And because in a country like the U.S. when there's so much on the calendar and there's so many other sports, you know, you got hockey playoffs and basketball. playoffs and all this other stuff cooking that it always kind of does this and there's always a little bit of hand ringing over this and then the World Cup's not here it's not here it's not here and then boom it's everywhere right and it's this whole thing so it on the one hand you would like

people to be talking about it a little bit but on the other hands that will come I think in a lot of ways this country doesn't entirely understand by and large I think what's about to hit it I think they will soon enough. For reporters, you look at it slightly differently because it's already crunch time for us, right? We're already planning and working out logistics. I'm going to be covering the tournament for a good amount of it for The Guardian. I'm doing a few other things. So, you know, you're already trying to figure out hotels and flights and all that stuff.

So if you're actually involved in it, it's very much here already. But I can see how for everybody else, it's not something they're thinking about. until maybe after the Champions League final. What is your rough, like what's your coverage plan roughly for The Guardian? Are you, which games are you focused on? Where are you going to be? Can you give us a window to that? Yeah, I'm going to be doing some games in the Northeast for the Guardian.

I know I have Brazil, Morocco, I have France, Senegal that I'm excited about. Germany, Cote d'Ivoire, I think possibly Germany, Ecuador. I think I've got Ghana, Croatia. there's a few and that's the group stage. I think the rest of it, they're still fleshing out. I'm really excited to get to these games. I'm really cognizant of how lucky I am to get to go to these games because, you know, obviously the barriers to entry are significant for fans.

So this is going to be my fourth World Cup. It's the first one where I can just drive to games. So that's something to look forward to. Because every World Cup up until Qatar that I'd been to, it would take several days to get from one town to the next. So it's going to be very different in that sense. I can sleep in my own bed between games. Yeah, that's cool.

And it sounds like you got some good games on tap, too. Yeah. What's your... Yeah, I got lucky. You've been right, you've written about this recently, but tell us what your philosophy of World Cup, pre-World Cup results is as a predictor of success at the World Cup. Yes.

Go ahead. So after the USM&T had those non-positive, shall we say, March window results against Belgium and Portugal, like everybody else, I was like, oh, what does this mean? What's the sort of impact here? So I actually went back and looked and found there is virtually no correlation between how teams do in their last World Cup window or their last, sorry, international window before the World Cup and how they actually do at the World Cup. in fact for the U.S., it's often borne out that a good run-up will then result in an overwhelming World Cup. And just as in Qatar, where an overwhelming run-up, you may recall that against Saudi Arabia and I think it was Japan, they didn't look great at all. And then they had a really solid World Cup.

So there seems to almost be an inverse relationship for the U.S. team. So, you know, if that sets anyone at ease, you're welcome. it's really much more down to the vibes of camp, I think. And that's something that I really learned from reporting my book is that there is a very, very strong connection between how these players feel about each other, what the mood is in camp, and how they wind up doing. You know, all of the modern World Cups, 1990, that team was wound really tight when they went to Italy.

It was their first World Cup in 40 years. they were shunted off into these. The players said they felt like military barracks, but they were actually, it was this Olympic training facility in Tuscany, where they were really isolated, and it was kind of Spartan, and they said they basically found the only place in Italy

that served terrible food, because they were originally supposed to be headquartered at Kofirchano, which is on the outskirts of Florence, it's sort of the gloriously appointed headquarters of the Italian Federation, or it's their training headquarters at any rate. But then the draw comes out, and it turns out that the U.S. and Italy are going to be in the same group. And so the Italian said, no, you got to go.

You can't stay in the same training center as we are. And so the players felt really isolated there, and they felt like they were really deprived of having the World Cup experience. And there were several fights during practices because, you know, you had this young, inexperienced team at a World Cup for the first time. They were frustrated. They missed their families. They felt like they were, you know, not being given the freedom that as adults they should have that Bob Gansler was too strict. And so, you know, that campaign was a really unhappy one. And the results on the field weren't a whole lot better.

Yeah, they totally would have won that World Cup if they were in a better hotel. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. That was the issue. It wasn't talent or experience or any of the other things. And then in 94, you had a team that did get along quite well that, you know, had been together for pretty much 18 months, almost full time, aside from a handful of players who came in from Europe. And they had a better tournament. There was better chemistry in that team. And then in 98, famously, this, you know, there were these factions and it was quarrelsome. And, you know, you had kind of the new guard versus the old guard.

and you had the players who either already played in Germany or were trying to get to Germany versus everybody else. And everybody was unhappy with Steve Sampson, the head coach. And so they were actually isolated in a beautiful chateau outside of Lyon. And all that isolation really accomplished was to drive kind of a crowbar deeper into the cracks that were already forming in the foundation of the team. And they all had a terrible time. And even though they were in this beautiful vineyard and like they could drink wine all the time, you know, that showed on the field as well.

And then, you know, you look forward to 2002 where, you know, they're a much happier camp. Even though they're isolated, people forget now, but that 2002 World Cup wasn't that long after 9-11. So there were security concerns around the U.S. team. So they were pretty much sequestered in their hotel in South Korea for the entire tournament. But Bruce Arena was smart about these things. He let them house their families in the same hotel. They were on a different floor. But so, you know, the players didn't feel like they were just sort of this little island away from the World Cup.

And, you know, the fathers got to parent their children when they weren't on the practice field or a way to play games. And it was a much happier vibe. And then, of course, they make that run to the quarterfinals. And then in 2006, that same team, everybody says now, things had gotten a little bit loose, discipline kind of got away from them. You know, there was a little bit of resentment. And again, you see that play out on the field and they have a bad World Cup.

It's going to start to sound a little bit repetitive. But again, in 2010, the chemistry was good, even though they were isolated on some kind of gaming reserve. outside of Johannesburg. And so there really is a very, very tight connection between chemistry on a World Cup team and how they perform. And that may sound obvious, but that's not always been the case for every other program, right? You've got the Dutch who are basically at each other's throats at every single World Cup,

and it doesn't seem to have any bearing on how they actually do there. But for the U.S., the vibes are super, super important. And so you hope that all of the work that they've done over the last, you know, four to eight years in becoming sort of this unified collective will pay off in that sense, regardless of the March results. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Potch has been sort of a vibesologist over the past few months, the past couple years.

The chemistry that you're talking about for each of these camps, it's my perception that it's something that this is something that is difficult to predict before the camp actually convenes is that right i mean it's just like a this is something that we i mean we won't know what the vibes are like inside camp but the vibes that matter for the games they're not they're not the vibes right now right they're the vibes in a month when they actually get together yeah exactly and that's why it's so important i think to you know people talk about how does it really matter who's the 24th, 25th, 26th guy in your roster? Well, no, actually it does, right? Because that's where you can bring in guys who maybe aren't going to play, but who are really good glue guys and who are

really good locker room guys. And that stuff matters, right? Is your third goalkeeper just frothing in his own resentments or is it somebody who's supportive, right? Is the guy who's the fifth central defender, someone that's going to, you know, spend every practice charging into his rivals to try to injure somebody, or is he someone who kind of, you know, makes merrimands in the, in the lunchroom, right, and kind of helps keep things loose? There's an interesting kind of circularity there between managers as well, where Potch, on the one hand, he, you know, when he came in, he talked a lot about, we want to make sure that national team camps are a pleasant environment where you can enjoy being with each other. But then pretty quickly, he decided that things were too loose, right? After that

Nations League debacle in March of 2025, he said, no, you can't just be coming in here and playing golf and having lunch with your friends or whatever it was. And so he decided there needed to be a bit bit less of a convivial kind of vibe within the team. Just as before that, Greg Burhalter worked really, really hard at forging unity out of the team. of a team of brand new players pretty much, right? Because Yergen Klinsman, his thing was always that players should be on edge. Everybody, not just players, staff, everyone should be fighting for their jobs all the time because he thought that's how you got the best, that's how you got the best out of people. And so Burrhalter really kind of had to rebuild the culture of the national team

and this idea that, you know, if the U.S. is going to punch above its weight, that's going to be in large part because these are guys that will run through brick wall for one another, right? Bob Bradley talked a lot about balancing those things when we spoke from my book, where he talked about, you know, you need there to be attention in the national team camp. You need these guys to be fighting to get on the field, but they also need to enjoy coming to the national team camp, right? They need to want to be there. They need to want to catch up with their friends that they haven't seen in two months. So every coach is working that out, is trying to figure out where that line is, where that balance is. And I think that's something that has occupied quite a lot of Pocitino's time

in his period in charge, is figuring out, okay, if these guys don't naturally have that kind of cutthroat element that you would have in an Argentina camp, as he always talks about, how do you implement that competitiveness while at the same time making sure that these guys don't all hate each other by the end of their practice session every day. Yeah. It's an interesting balance that you have to strike even in youth soccer, I think, you know, between. Yeah.

You want people to want to come to practice, but you also want them to be challenged and you want there to be like intensity out there. And it's a tricky, it's a tricky balance, I guess, at every level. So should we be rooting for the team to lose in the send-off games? Let me ask the question with a little more context, because I wonder, you know, if the dynamic here is that the U.S. is we're a marginal World Cup contender, you know, at best. And so the margins for us are very thin. and if you go into a tournament feeling like you're pretty good and things are going to go pretty well, maybe that's not the right mindset for the U.S., you know, going into a World Cup.

Maybe they need to go in just dripping with desperation. I sort of think that the results in the send-off games are immaterial in the sense that I feel like Potch still hasn't really put his best team together and his best starting 11 together. I mean, he's always missing guys, right? like even when he has most of his guys well now Tyler Adams isn't there or then he's got everybody else and whoever Weston McKinney isn't there so I think the more important thing is for him to finally assemble his best 11 players and have them playing 180 minutes together or however he divvies that up and then hopefully the results follow right and they're encouraging and all the rest but I think in in regards to the team success at the tournament I think getting those reps together and just kind of getting used to each other again matters more than how they do. You'd like to go into it with encouraging results that nevertheless don't like over inflate confidence in this team, right? I don't think you want to beat Germany and Senegal 5-0 going into a World Cup. Oh, that'd be a disaster.

Yeah. Worse thing that ever happened. But like it's those don't count for anything ultimately, right? And I don't think any good can come of that. Yeah. Okay. So there are going to be some cuts to this roster in the next month. The most famous roster cut of all time, of course, is Clint's been leaving Donovan off the 2014 World Cup roster, and you have pretty much a whole chapter about that in the book. What will people learn from your book about that episode? Take this question however you want.

What to you is the story of that episode, and, you know, what was what was a revelation to you and your reporting and writing? What's kind of amazing about that whole scene is, first, how it took everybody by surprise. And I do mean everybody, not just Lennon Donovan, not just the Federation staffers, not just the other players, just absolutely everyone. Like, nobody had any clue. Not even the other coaches knew that that was the day that Cleansman was going to make his cuts. because he wasn't supposed to make them for like another week, and he just kind of went off and started pulling guys aside and saying,

hey, you're cut. And Landon was actually the last one of those, you know, to the horror of the Federation staffers who knew what a big deal this was going to be and who realized what was going on as he sort of, you know, you can tell from a player's body language, right? So they'd had this training session at their camp in Stanford.

And they were split. Half the team was in the gym. Half of it was on the practice field. and as the guys were sort of ambling back to the locker room, Klinsman would sort of call after them and he'd have a little chat. And then everybody sort of pretty quickly knew what was going on. Moadu talked about how he got within steps of the locker room and he thought he was safe. And then he gets called after at the last moment.

So that part of it was surprising just, you know, how it didn't just take the American soccer fan scene and the, the punditocracy by surprise it took everyone by surprise only yurgan knew what was going to happen um what an impulsive german he is um and the the other thing that really kind of amazed me is that when you go back and you talk to players about coaches every coach will have their defenders every coach will have their detractors and these things tend to correlate more or less to how the coach treated that player like there are plenty of players who have good things to say about and cleansment, even though to a lot of fans, to a lot of former players, his tenure was at best

a mixed bag, right? He was controversial in all these different ways. I think there were lots of missed opportunities there. I think there was a lot of overmanagement in some ways and undermanagement in other ways, and we can get into that. But what's remarkable is that the one thing that everybody I spoke to agreed on, and I think I spoke to like 12 or 14 or 15. 15 members of that team, every last one of them felt that Lennon should have been on that team, right? They all acknowledged that, you know, he'd had the time off. He'd been injured. You know, that was part of the reason that he'd had this long layoff from the national team. It was partly blamed on him having taken this sabbatical, but he was only gone out from soccer for really,

like three months, right? The camps he missed. I think two of them were because he was injured, and two of them were because Yergen just didn't call him, right? And so then there, this whole explanation of, oh, well, he was out of the mix for a year. It's like, yes, but only a small part of that was by choice. And every last person said, you know, how could you leave Landon Donovan at home? He'd been their best player at the Gold Cup. You know, he was still very much able to contribute. And, you know, some of them didn't name names exactly, but they're like, really, we're bringing this guy to the World Cup over Lenin. We're bringing that guy to the World Cup. And, you know, that's their total unanimity over what a just unforced error that was.

I think you used the word, the phrase, the idea metastasized in Clemsman's head that Donovan was disposable. And you can, I can kind of see how he like might have galaxy brained himself to that point, you know? Right. But yeah. I mean, there's, there's, there's. there's so much backstory there, right? Like, they'd known each other for a very long time. Juergen had gone out on a limb to bring Len to Byron Munich for that loan stint

that turned out disastrously when it was already pretty clear that the deck was stacked against Klinsman at Byron and that it was never going to be a success. And then I think there was some lingering resentment over the fact that he'd put a lot of what political clout he had left into bringing donovan to Munich, you know, even though people in Germany were skeptical because he'd had these, I think it was three separate stints with Bayer Leverkusen, might have been two. Early on in his career, that it sort of turned into nothing. And so, you know, they had a lot of baggage, those two, but they were also, and this is something that I spoke to both of them about. They were very, very different and they were very alike in the

sense that, you know, they are both people who think a lot about their own happiness in unusual amounts for professional soccer players. Ergen Klinsman, at one point when he was 32, I want to say, and he just finished up his contract at Monaco, he said, I'm going to retire. I'm done with soccer. I don't have to passion anymore. I'm going to step away from the sport. And he changed his mind and he went back and played.

But he should have probably had some empathy for the situation that Linden was in, where he'd been a professional since he was 16. He was burned out. He needed to take some time away from the sport just to kind of find himself again. He'd gone through a divorce, all these other things. And he just had no understanding for that whatsoever. And that kind of speaks to the difference between them, that Juergen on the field was just an absolute killer. and his career was very, you know, not to get into national stereotypes, but it's very pragmatic, right? He went to whatever team he thought he could thrive at, wherever he thought he would be happiest as well, whereas Lennon, while obviously a ruthless competitor on the field, he really planned

his career more in the sense of, you know, what's going to keep me closest to California, where am I going to be with my people, where am I going to be happiest? So they were very similar in a lot of ways, and they were very different in that one way where Juergen, I guess, just found it unforgivable, ultimately, that Linden had acted on the very impulse that Juergen himself had had during his career when he was just tired of carrying the burden of being a superstar. One thing that strikes me about Klinsman that's fascinating is that, yes, he was serious and demanding about some stuff. like he wanted the Federation to pay for them to carry treadmills around with them around the world and stuff like that. But everybody said, I mean, so you maybe add some color to this, but it seems like everybody on the team said the practices were crisper and better organized and more intense under Bradley than they were under Klinsman.

So he was like demanding about all this sort of ancillary stuff, but when it came to like the bread and butter of training sessions, Yeah. It wasn't, he wasn't very well organized or like how would you characterize that? It's, it's something that a bunch of guys talked about that you're going to always seem to be focused on the wrong things. Like he'd be adding yoga or he'd be adding these blood draws or he'd be introducing early morning empty stomach runs to draw down body fats or he'd have some speaker to tell the players about how they should be managing their finances and how they'd be. should be dealing with agents or he'd have this motivational speaker who came and ripped up phone books and like rolled up frying pans.

And the players were like, yeah, this is all great. But like we could be having another practice session right now. We could actually be working on tactics. Right. Don't forget, Yergan was introduced. Yergan was hired at great cost because there is a kind of consensus that took hold that an American coach had taken this program as far as he could and that what we really needed was someone with that, you know, whiff of Europeanness and worldliness who could take the U.S. to the

next level. And that partly meant, you know, I think a lot of the fan base and a lot of observers were a little bit frustrated with Bob Bradley and his is very, very competent 442, that he was, you know, really adept at covering up the many holes that he had in his, in his roster. and making this just a really solid, hard team to play against, you know, the part of the impulse of bringing in Klinsman was to ascend to more proactive soccer, as he always liked to call it, right? But he hardly spent any time during practice on tactics. You know, basically before a game, he would just tell players to go out and compete, win your position. I spoke to

several players who said they went out on the field and had no idea what was at. expected of them. And that was such a change from Bob Bradley where like he would annoy players because he'd constantly be in their ear about like, okay, I need you in exactly this spot in this scenario. And then when this happens, I need you to shift to here. And then when the ball turns over, I need you to do this thing and this thing and this thing. Right. And he was so specific in his instructions that players came to feel that they were kind of micromanaged. And then Juergen is the opposite of that. And he's spending so much bandwidth fighting these sort of political fights within the Federation about whether they should be traveling with their own treadmills, even though

nobody used them. And a lot of these arguments that seem to boil down to whether or not his commands and his ideas were implemented, whether people agreed with them or not, and it seemed to always boiled down to who was really in charge and whether the people who are technically between him and Sunil Galati, the Federation president, in kind of the hierarchy, whether or not he could kind of outmaneuver them. And there was a lot of that stuff that went on that really had very little to do with the product that you saw out in the field. Did Sunil Gulati express any regret about hiring Cleansman given that he left Donovan off? Because Gulati didn't want that either, right? Like he, he's a businessman. Yeah.

No. And Sunil and his family were always very close to Len and Donovan. No, they were caught by surprise. In fact, I believe Sunil got on a flight after the cut, basically to tell Cleansman in person, like, hey, don't do this kind of thing, especially not without letting me know. I don't think Sunil regretted hiring Cleansman. I think it would be revisionist. history for all of us to go, you know, they never should have hired Cleansman in the first place. With the resume that he had and with the sort of profile that everyone around the national team felt that they needed to move forward, he was clearly the most qualified person, right? And I think two things can be true here. And I say this in the book as well. You could be the

most qualified person for a job and also be the wrong person for the job. And in retrospect, it turns out that he was both. Yeah. Okay. Well, Well, we ended up losing in the round of 16 that year without Donovan, just as we had lost in the round of 16 with Donovan, the previous World Cup. The next World Cup we played in, we lost in the round of 16. This seems to be like the destiny of U.S. men's national team World Cup performance. But I wonder, you know, if we do that this year, it'll be a little different because we will have won a knockout game to get there, but it will still be the essentially the same level. What, what's the right way for fans and pundits to process that if that is the result?

And I ask that because I think it's probably the most likely result, you know? It could, it could go worse. It could go better, but round of 16 sounds about right for what we have. So how should we think about it if that's what we do? Are we just stuck? Well, it's to go back for a second, what's interesting here is several people, I think Len and Donovan and Carlos Bokernigra both set the exact same thing, unprompted in the book where they said, every World Cup I've ever been to came down to one play. And so what you see is you see stagnation between 2010 and 2014, right, in the sense that they got knocked out in the round of 16 in extra time in both games. But if Lennon Donovan doesn't score that goal against Algeria in 2010 and the U.S. gets stuck in the group stage, we think about that cycle very differently.

And if Wondelowski scores against Belgium in Brazil in 2014 and the U.S. gets to the quarterfinal, we're probably talking about that Klinsman era in a very different way. And so there's these little moments are going to dictate how we sort of look back on four years of work. So I think that'll be true in 26 as well to even get to the. round of 16, you have to win a knockout game. The U.S. has been to 11 World Cups. They have won one knockout game. So that would double the number of knockout games that they've won in their entire program history if they do it. So that would be a feat. I think given that they're the home team, given how swollen this edition is, to me, it feels like quarterfinal is kind of the benchmark for a successful World Cup. I think anything after that,

is gravy on top. I think the round of 16 would feel, you know, for a supposedly golden generation that I think still is the most talented that this country has ever produced, that is fully in its prime. I mean, they're not going to be better in four years, I don't think,

unless some really serious talent comes through and totally changes the game. This kind of feels like the World Cup to do it at. So if they can't win a second knockout game here, I'm not so optimistic that things look better in 2030 or 2034. So win two knockout games, that's a really positive World Cup. Okay. And win just one knockout game, maybe we should be a little...

I mean, it's kind of like par for the course. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, let's talk about the player pool a little bit because things are happening as not as we talk, but as the days go by. Johnny Cardoso is out of the Champions League. They fell to Arsenal, who went on to the final, 1-0. He came in off the bench.

I'm curious what you think of Johnny as a national team player. Maybe we even talked about this the last time we talked, but he seems like such an enigma. Like he was about to be only the second American ever to play in a Champions League final. I think he has more minutes in the semifinals than maybe anybody ever because he started that first leg, which was a one-one draw. But he's never really played well in a U.S. shirt. So what is that, how does that bode for him heading into the World Cup?

They've got to figure out how to unlock this guy and how to kind of put him in a spot that makes sense. I don't know if that means that you play him next to Tyler Adams or you play him a little bit ahead of him. but I find it really hard to believe that a guy who's a regular at Atlatico Madrid, which is no longer the dour defensive machine that it was for so much of the last decade, that we can't figure out some way of implementing him into the team if he's fit and he's healthy, which he seems to be. I don't know whose place he takes exactly, but he does a lot of things really well. And like he helps with that sort of deep distribution in a way that I think he's,

he's cleaner at than than Tyler Adams is. So there's got to be a role for someone like that. I'm always confounded by players who seem like they can do it for their club and not their national team or vice versa, right? You see guys like that as well. But, you know, that's to me, if I'm Pochitino and his staff, that's the thing where I've got like the collage up on the wall with like the little red string. And I'm trying to figure out is how to integrate Johnny into that.

team and figure out how to get the best of them because, I mean, aside from maybe Weston McKinney is, is given the slump that Christian Policic is in, is there anybody operating at a higher level or playing sort of consistently on a higher plane than Johnny has been this season or at least the second half of the season? I'm not so sure. Yeah, not on paper, but yeah, yeah, definitely not on paper. I think speaking of Tyler, so he and Bormmouth are in line for a Europa League spot

if they can hold off Brentford, Brighton, and Chelsea. I think they've gone like, you know, more than a dozen games unbeaten. He's healthy. He starts at the World Cup, right? I think so. Yeah. I think he

has to. I mean, aside from providing that cover for the central defense that they very badly need and just kind of harrying guys and forcing turnovers and then linking up as sort of the trailing man in the midfield. I think he's just the emotional heart of this team. I think that he brings a degree of seriousness that maybe you shouldn't really have to think too much about around the national team, but I think there's an intensity that he introduces that we sometimes get from McKinney. That's really important because he's kind of that guy that you can look to when things aren't.

and going well and you just kind of need that injection of intensity. And he brings that. So I think he has to be on the field. What that looks like exactly, I'm not sure. But yeah, he's a lock for me. Okay. And then the only other roster question for me is, you know, striker. Who are your three strikers?

Are you bringing three strikers to the World Cup if you're a potch? Who are they? Because I'll just refresh everyone. Big Pat is hurt. Pat Ajumong is hurt now. So it's kind of like, and Josh Sargent kind of languishing in Toronto. I think he's kind of out of the project. So we're looking at Flo Balegan, Ricardo Pepey, Hajie Wright, are the, I guess, the front runners.

Maybe the better question is, who comes in off the bench to... if Balagan starts, who comes in off the bench, right, or Pepe? I think Pepe, to me, he just has this preter natural sense of figuring out where the ball's going to be, where the chances are going to be. He doesn't always take them, although in the U.S. Jersey, he takes them a lot of the time. At PSV, he certainly does. But he just seems to be a magnet for chances. I think Balagan is the starter.

I think he gives you more off the ball than Pepe does. I think he gives you more in the buildup play than Pepe does because Pepe's really just a pure poacher, right? And Balagan is someone that you can play through and someone that you can connect with. I don't see a reason why you can't have Haji right and Pepe come off the bench in a scenario where you need it because they offer different things. And they're sort of complementary in a sense in that, you know, Haji's going to drift a little bit wider and he's going to probably be on the ball a little bit more. So I think they've got some nice options there. I think they're in trouble if one more striker gets hurt, right? Because Big Pat, you know, was somebody who gave you a different look.

And that's what you want in your strikers. You don't want three strikers who do the same thing and who are just like for like replacements for each other. You want to be able to throw different looks at the other defense and to be able to mix it up if you need to change a game. So they're going to run pretty threadbare in their toolkit if they lose. one more of those guys. Yeah. Okay. Well, I got to ask you this last thing.

I know we got to get, we got to be done here shortly, but we were just in the Netherlands in Germany, as you know, Vince and I and 11 listeners of the podcast. And we, you know, we always try to play pickup when we go places.

And we found some, we found a great place to play in Dusseldorf, a great place to play in Amsterdam. I will say, And this was noted by several people on the trip. There were not a lot of kids playing soccer outside, like the whole time we were there. We ran into some kids in Dusseldorf on a Saturday afternoon. There were like two kids at this really nice pitch in Amsterdam kind of south of the, like in the south part of the city.

But just two who played with us. I, you know, we have this idea that in America, nobody plays, nobody plays pickup soccer, but in everywhere else they do. and I didn't, I mean, we weren't in the right places, but what's going on there? The world is changing, you know, it's a generational thing. There's just less free, unstructured play for children, and that includes soccer, and that's everywhere in the world. I think that where you still do see a big difference between, at least Northern Europe and the United States, is that all of the organized soccer is accessible and is free and is close

by and is, you know, there's a place for everyone to play, right? It's not just travel robust environment. It's not, you don't usually have to go very far. You know, every village will have a soccer club with like a really well organized and fleshed out youth academy or, you know, it's just youth soccer basically, right? But I think it's a universal phenomenon that there is just less unstructured play going out in the wild, unfortunately, which makes it a little bit trickier when you're on a barnstorming tour and you're trying to just get a game. Yeah. It was surprising to me, but I guess it's not that.

It shouldn't be that surprising. All right, Leander, anything else burning a hole in your pocket right now? You got any insights that you've been thinking about a lot lately? No, I mostly spend my weekends watching U.S. national teamers and hoping that whenever one gets knocked down, that it's not serious. Yeah. I talked a lot about that with Greg Burhalter before the last World Cup for a story I was doing at the time and just the anxiety he feels watching his players. And he was like, basically those last three, four weekends before the World Cup, he was just an emotional wreck. And just, you know, every time a player got touched, he'd just be praying that it wasn't.

isn't anything serious. So I imagine that's how most of the USM&T community feels right about now. So, you know, let's all form an emotional support group and hope that nobody really crucial goes down in these last, what is it, two, three weekends of the season in Europe. Yeah, that would be a tragedy. I think Vince called it, he said everybody's doing the quarterback Neil right now, you know, where you're trying to run out the clock.

There is a little bit of that vibe when you watch the club games going on right now. All right. Well, congrats on the book. I know that I know not from experience, but from word of mouth, that that is a extremely long process. And congratulations to you on getting that over the finish line. I hope you sell a lot of copies. Thanks, everybody for listening. We'll see you.