Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - Episode 142: The copy-paste USMNT cohort and Savior Committee concepts, revisited

Episode Date: October 1, 2020

You didn’t need more reason to be hyped, but we will give it to you anyway. This unprecedented movement of U.S. players to bigger and better clubs — it appears repeatable. The Savior Committee is deepening in number at an accelerated pace, we believe thanks to the now-defunct Development Academy.0:30 copy-paste USMNT cohorts are coming faster than we thought two years ago22:40 Savior Committee revisitation 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 Scufft podcast. I'm Adam Bells in Minneapolis. With me is Greg Velasquez in Des Moines. We talk about U.S. men's soccer. Thanks for downloading this episode of Scuffed. And thanks especially to our patrons who have risen up in the past month to really help us out. Thanks, guys. Hey, Greg.

Pels, how we doing, man? Can we be expecting your Serginio Desk interview sequel anytime soon? No. No. You still able to get him on the phone? I have no. with the big clubs, let alone the one in that large northeastern city of Spain. Yeah, I'm not, honestly, I'm not optimistic about that.

I can get the U-20s on the phone occasionally. There we go. There we go. We know our dish. Quick correction. I'm no longer in Minneapolis. We say that at the top, and I'm not going to change it for a few weeks, but the Bells have moved to Georgia since we last recorded,

and I will explain more of that move in some format before too long, but the scuff soccer podcast is alive and well, and you're not here for my personal news. The big news today, Sergenio Dest, is a Barcelona player officially as of this morning. Yeah, that's big news. I thought you were going to say Anthony Robinson is starting for Folham in the Carabaut Cup, but no. That's also noteworthy.

Also no way. line. Yeah, all due respect to Conrad de la Fuente, who still seems to be in the picture, for today's game, at least. This is a $27 million American transfer to Barcelona. It is a bit of a different story. Yeah, it's on a level with McKinney to Juventus, basically the same level, and kind of makes more sense from a, you know, playing style quality perspective than Juventus wanting McKenney. I mean, Desk seems like he fits at Barcelona pretty well.

It says the noted Barcelona expert, Adam Bell. I think it's an easy shortcut to just say anyone who fits Iax well is just sort of a natural fit for Barcelona given their intertwined histories. There you go. Johan Krofe, the

open your history books, folks. It's all there. Speaking of history. Yeah. What time to be alive. So speaking of which, we're going to go back in time and revisit a couple of concepts that we first visited back in 2018, Greg's copy-paste theorem. Famous copy-paste theorem. So famous copy-paste theorem. And the idea of a savior committee, which I think is also your idea, too. That comes from the idea. Like, people would say,

well, the USM&T needs a savior, or somebody would say they don't need a savior. There is no savior. And then we said, well, we need a committee of saviors. And we did a whole episode on that back in 2018. First thing I'm going to do is play a clip where Greg, you explain the copy-paste theorem. This is September 2018. Here we go. I think there's still some like worry about our ability to compete at a high level come like 2022, come the World Cup, the next World Cup cycle. And I despite all the pessimism I usually traffic in, I actually feel pretty good about it and had this idea of like a copy paste for the future where you can say unless we're in the early stages of golden generation, then four years from now like the youth prospects or the youth pool, let's call it, of like 16 to 19 year olds, of current 15 to 19 year olds will say, is going to resemble today. is 19 to 23 year olds. They'll progress roughly the same rate and it'll look about the same as what our 19 to 23 year old pool looks like right now. That is unless the current 19 to 23 year olds are a

historical aberration, right? Right, unless we're dealing with outliers. But as we've talked about before, there's a reason to believe that there is a reason our 19 to 23 year olds are better than previous generations because we've evolved the DA system. We're actually manufacturing players in a more professionalized system. Yep. Yeah. So, If you want to sort of project what we're going to look like in 2022, you can just highlight a current 19 to 23-year-olds. Do a quick control C, scroll ahead, four years to November 2022, and then Control V, and you have that pool. Which is control V is paste for those of you don't use a computer. We've just done it copy-paste, four years into the future.

But then what you still have is you have like all the guys we have now, just age four years. So Anthony Robinson's 25. We have all of those guys still. And even if they haven't gotten better at all, you at least have two Anthony Robinson's. You have him at 25 and you have them at 21. Yeah. And you just have that all over the place.

So as long as we have roughly the same group four years from now in this age bracket that we have now, this cohort, I mean, that's a, that's a solid, you'd build a solid roster out of that. You'd have two Western McKenny's, two Tyler Adams, two Christian Pullsics. And when you say two of each of those, when you say two of each of those, you don't mean two of the exact same player, but just two people like kind of on that level. On that level, yeah. So, I mean, like, basically in the two years now since we recorded that, my pessimism has all but dissolved. And the reason is because I think we are well ahead of schedule on our copy paste progression.

Yeah, it does seem that way. You have the receipts here in the document to prove it. But why don't you lay out who you had in that original, like the original group that was to be copied in September 2018? I know, and this is interesting because we're kind of working. You got to think in parallel timelines here. We're talking about September 2018 versions of these guys, right? but we had Christian Pulisik who was already, you know, a bona fide star player. And that's not, that wasn't necessarily just within the U.S. context.

He was, you know, playing Champions League campaigns for Bruchardman coming off a 2,000-minute season with them. We had Weston McKinney, who was sort of just emerging. I think he'd just finished his first season with Shalka. They'd finished in the second place in the Bundesliga. He was a rotational player. By the time we were recording in September 2018, he was in. the Champions League starter. We all know Shalka continued to maintain that level of high-quality play

and is taking over the world. Tyler Adams had just finished a second full MLS season at this point. This is how wild it is. Tim Wea was at this point MIA at PSG after a couple of early appearances in that 2018-19 season. He'd later go on to Lone at Celtic in January. Right. Josh Sargent was still three months from his Bundesliga debut. Anthony Robinson had just finished his debut season in the championship and was beginning his second season. Had moved from Bolton to Wiggin.

Let's see, we had Cameron Carter Vickers, who had just come off of a 3,000-minute season in the championship. We had Eric Palmer Brown, who just finished half a season in Belgium. Shaq Moore had six appearances in La Liga. at that point, and Jonathan Eamon, our favorite, like one of the original scuffed favorites. Yeah. Jonathan Eamon, along with Marky Delgado, Amon had played 10 games in Denmark at this point. So those, what is that? Like, 10 guys, like those 10 players, like I at that point felt comfortable with,

like if we could just essentially have the same quality of 10 players in that sort of age cohort, that 18 to 21 age cohort come 22 to pair up with the existing guys that we just sort of read or players at that level that we would be fine. So even if these guys didn't improve at all just four years later we'd have them plus we'd have the younger versions of them that were coming up behind. That that would basically be enough for us to be at or above even like our 2014 U.S. men's national team level. And like you said in the clip, there's reason to be confident that this would happen because that this original cohort that you just described was, at least some of it was a result of the Development Academy, the majority of it, I guess. Yeah, the big sort of my big sort of guiding principle there was that Poole-Sign McKinney and Adams and Way, if you wanted to count on that, were essentially too good, too young for it to just be like flukes. If that kind of thing could happen as a fluke, then we would have had more of it happen in the last 10 or 15 years. So for me, the fact that we had so much obvious quality at such a young age, all in such a sort of short or a tight grouping meant that something different must have been, something must have changed about how we were developing players.

And it did. Something had changed over the last, the previous decade or so. Brian Strauss doesn't get more mainstream than that, Sports Illustrated, has an article of, about this today. He uses the news of deaths to Barcelona to sort of leverage an interview with Tony Lepore, one of the heads of, I forget his exact title, but heads of youth development at U.S. soccer. And they talk about this very issue.

So once again, we were right. Everybody else is late. It turns out we may have been incredibly conservative. Yeah. Because let's talk about. We might have, yeah, we might have hit our copy. We might have gotten our paste cohort within two years instead of within four years. Because now we're September 2020, two years later.

Again, it's worth reminding everybody, think of those players where they were at that time. So Adams was still an MLS. McKenney had just completed his first season at Shalka. Wea wasn't really a first team player. I think he got a couple minutes right at the beginning of the season for PSG. Yeah, and it was because PSG's real first team players were just getting back from winning the World Cup in Russia. Right. One Killian Mbapé.

So think of it in those terms, and then now let's talk about the next cohort, the Paste cohort. So we have the Pace cohort, and I think right away you say, we've been talking about them all morning. Serginio Dest is now playing at Barcelona, or he's now signing with Barcelona, and there's no way he's not going to play for $27 million. I know Barcelona, you know, has $27 million players making their food after games, but they're also going to play at some point. They didn't buy him just to not play him. So we have a Barcelona player.

Giorina is a Dortmund regular, whether he maintains the starting role or whether he is in the rotation, he's a Dortmund player. And again, 2018, Christian Pulcic was on his way to being a rotational player for Dortmund as Jaden Sanchez emerged. So Raina is essentially, Raina and Dest are basically at September 2018 Christian Pulisic levels. If we can keep going back and forth in these parallel timelines without confusing everyone. Yeah, I think people can handle it. So those two, yeah, those two are kind of at least on Pulisick's level back then. maybe not in terms of like buzz and everything but if you just look at their club situation

and there's a ton of other there's a ton of other names here i mean again we're talking about people who are still pros some of them are still prospects some of them are you know playing in mLS but you think like chris richards chris richards just played in the super cup yesterday for bairn munich uh which for me puts him sort of in that same tim waya category of playing for a super club we don't really know if he's going to have a huge part to play for Munich. But, you know, we don't have in our history a lot of guys who even got to where Chris Richards is now. Right. By the way, side note on Chris Richards, Dmitry Dub, a guy on Twitter that I message with sometimes, he made the point that Richards does have a decent

chance of playing minutes at right back for Bayern Munich. I'm not saying this is true. I'm just saying it's plausible because they got, Benjamin Pavard got beat for pace a bunch, a couple of times against Hoffenheim and that kind of embarrassing loss for Bayern Munich, their first loss in like 60 years. And so that means that whole lineup's washed. Whoever was on the field for that loss is done. He's let everyone down. Dimitri, Dimitri is a FC Dallas, Homer, for sure, and always has been a big Chris Richards fan. But I think that's a plausible thing that, you know, there could be an opportunity at right back.

And centerbacks who play right back as young players, there's a well-weigh- worn path in global soccer on that front. Sergio Ramos, Gerard Piquet, Jerome Boatang, a lot of world-class centerbacks have started their careers at right back with the first team, you know. So anyway, side note, complete. All right, but we're definitely in territory of like Chris Richards being in this, in this sort of paste cohort where he wasn't even in the picture in September 2018. So like none of these guys we're going to talk about. Raina wasn't in the picture. We knew we knew he was because he was like the, you know, the mark.

Did we know who he was in 2018? Yeah, we did. And we knew who Richards was, but they weren't legit enough to be in that cohort. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying is that they had no, they had no real buzz for even getting like national team call-ups. Their buzz was that like, oh, something interesting might be happening with a guy named Chris Richards. But yeah, so it's just wild how many more guys there are. You want to, like, throw some other names out there? I mean, Reggie Cannon hadn't been capped yet in September 2018.

Yeah. I mean, there's tons of names that are exciting even to meet. We got Johnny Cardoso, the kid at Internacional in Brazil, James Sands, a very good MLS destroying defensive midfielder. Julian Arouho, right back at LA Galaxy. Miles Robinson, MLS Defender of the Year. Yeah. There you go. Some kids getting a lot of buzz in MLS are Brendan Aronson on his way to R.B. Salisberg.

Is that official official or is it? It's not Fabrizio official, but it sure seems it, right? Yeah. Cole Bassett having a nice season at Colorado Rapids. He's also very young. Axton Pomacol, if he gets back to full health, is, you know, I'm still really high on him. I hope he doesn't turn into sort of our Jonathan Amon. like white whale who just vanishes from soccer unfortunately but and we're going to have again we're

going to have some of those but they're all going to be some guys who we can always say what would have been that the key here is we just have so many other guys that we don't have to dwell on them for too long right as cold as that might sound right I mean it is it does turn out to be cold because we only have so much brain power to keep track of people uh uh ulliana is definitely a favorite of this podcast he's he's now at here in vene maybe he makes an appearance this week for them. He's supposedly in the squad today, I thought I saw. The aforementioned Conrad Dalla Fuente.

Also making the bench for Barcelona. FC Barcelona. Jonathan Lewis keeps scoring goals for Colorado. Efra Alvarez plays for Mexico, but he could still switch, and boy, is he fun to watch. A left-footed playmaker coming in off the right side of the field. and then we got a bunch of like decent

to okay strikers. You got some irons in the fire, right? Yeah. Jesus Ferreira, Ricardo Pepe, Jeremy Abobesei, Darryl Dikey, and Nico Giochini. Oh, and I forgot one of my favorites,

Mark McKenzie at Saturday. I was waiting for you. I figured you were saving him for last. I guess I was. And then some left backs, Chris Gloucester, Chase Gaspur, Sam Bines and Kobe Hernandez Foster.

Again, we see. Right, but like any of those guys are sort of on the same level of some of the guys that two years ago were like, all right, this kid could pan out, this kid could pan out for us. It may not be fair to put Kobe in there, right? No, a lot of these are speculative, right? Not a lot. Yeah, enough of them.

Well, a speculative for the U.S. men's national team, not get speculative in the sense that they might never really be pros. Like, these guys are all legitimate professionals at this point. And again, comparing them back to that two years ago time period where Jonathan Amon was, we were high on him after just a small sample. And who knows if he hadn't, if he didn't have these injuries, maybe he'd be in this same discussion. But, yeah, it just goes to show just how much,

how many of these guys have sort of come through. And the other piece of this is those original 10 from September 2018, like AIMAN is basically the only guy who's fallen off. Everyone else has either gotten like much, much better or improve their situation dramatically. Or at the very least they've held steady. Cameron Carter Vickers and even, and Eric Palmer Brown even, are maintaining a pretty high baseline level of professional soccer, racking up minutes in the championship,

racking up minutes in First Division, Austria and Bundesliga. So it's just, it's kind of, it again, it's crazy how at least proficient this young pool players is, because it wasn't a certainty that this would happen. You know, when we were turning over our whole roster, there was no guarantee that we would have enough quality emerged to keep us competitive. It could have turned into another lost, missing generation. And that would have been a terrible men's national team experience for the next four years. Right. Yeah. I should say there's one name here we haven't, a couple of names we haven't mentioned, but one that I want to mention is Brian Keo at the Wolfsburg U23s, notable that he's playing with the U23s, while Kobe Hernandez-Fauster is still playing with the U-19s. And Keo seems to be, if you go by the All-Touches videos, very, very influential in those, I think, third division games in Germany. So if there's somebody who's going to, one of these like speculative ones who's going to break through and get first team minutes in a top five league, it's, it sure seems like KO's the best shot right now. I don't, I think I just forgot to put Ledzman Mendez on here.

I think I just left out that, that, those young, PSV young Iax players. So yeah, so it's just, we can't necessarily count on outside of Dest and Raina and I guess you'd say Canon. and we can't necessarily count on any of these guys to definitely be national team contributors. Jackson Yule, I guess, but I don't know if we said Jackson Yule, he might be a national team starter. Wasn't even in the picture two years ago.

So, I mean, we're kind of just listing off a bunch of names, but that was the whole point of the exercise, right? Yeah, it's fine, it's fine. We are listening off a bunch of names, and it's definitely Dest Raina and Cannon, who are the only ones who are the only ones you're like definitely going to be in a camp soon. But Chris Richards and Mark McKenzie are, I want to count on them.

I want to believe in them so much because we do really need to, I've said this a million times if I've said it once, we really need to level up at centerback as a national team. And I think they're the ones who give us the best chance for that. And I'll just say real quick too because we haven't said his name yet, but John Brooks is obviously a locked on player for the national team. He wasn't included in any of these experiments because we were talking about who was going to emerge, who was going to like take over the roles that the other players were vacating.

John Brooks's spot obviously not being vacated. There's also reason to believe that this copy-paste theorem can be accelerated, at least for a little while. I mean, you know, we already have way more than we had two years ago in this category, this general category. Some of you are going to quibble with us on the specifics here, but the general category. But then in addition that we have tons of players, young players getting minutes in MLS, and we haven't even brought up some young guys who do still have a chance of being really good, like Gianluca Busio, Moses Nyman, Kevin Perides, Jose Gallegos in USL. So, I mean, there's a chance that two years from now, and I hope it is,

I hope it happens two years from now, September 2020, we have a whole new list of names. And so instead of a four-year copy-paste theorem, it's probably more like a two-year theorem. And that's like the beauty of what is becoming like a much healthier player pool is that the U-20 team can actually be a true U-20 team and doesn't have to be like instant transition into the full senior team. Like it kind of feels like we needed to happen now. let's get to the savior committee you ready to I love the savior committee idea I think it was your idea

and it was just a matter of I think you were just sick of everyone being like we need a savior or almost like the blowback against that like there's almost like a backlash to everyone talking about the savior and be like we're so desperate for one

and I think I think it was just you know a good framing from you to say like we just need to stop talking about it being a savior. And we need a bunch of people. We need dozens of players to be able to turn this thing around. Well, I think people bring it up, they bring up Freddie Adieu and they say, you know, everybody thought he was going to be a savior and then we sort of ran him into the ground.

It was a national, you know, there's national guilt for Freddie Adieu's, the implosion of his career, kind of ended at Las Vegas lights. So that, you know, that always, that discussion always used to come up. But, you know, back in June 2018, we talked about having this committee of saviors and then we took the metaphor pretty far. We decided there would be an executive committee voting members, non-voting members, and leadership track interns. Also, everybody, everybody loved, keep in mind, this is 2018. and at that point, everybody loved parliamentary metaphor. Like that's, you might not remember it, thinking, but that was all the rage.

Everywhere you looked, Parliament, Parliament, like all kinds of different houses. And it was. Boris Johnson, he was big back then. Don't look it up, but that's for sure what was going on. And then we also had party elders, which, you know, breaks from the parliamentary mold a little bit. It gets more into, like, ancient traditions. but those were like Altador Brooks and Yedlin who were already well-established national team players

and most of the other ones we mentioned and we won't mention them again on this show are not in the picture anymore, I would say. So we're not going to go ahead, we're not going to make brand new committees but we are going to tell you the committees we had and then make some obvious corrections to them and then sort of move on.

Maybe we'll come back and do like a savior committee, you know, a certified, notarized savior committee episode at some point soon. So the executive committee, we had, why don't you read them, Greg? All right. At that point, this was June 2018. We had Weston McKenney, Christian Pulisick, Matt Miasga, Zach Steffin, and Tyler Adams, who again, I believe was a last minute addition that I convinced you to bump him up into the top committee.

This is true. Yeah. the notes even illustrated there's like a strike through and all kinds of stuff going on so yeah I think we're I think we're on the money there except for Mr. Miazga

he is not on the executive committee now maybe never maybe never was we never got the full rolls so me so Miazga yeah I think I think Miazga has been impeached if you want to put it that way he's

he's no he's he's a periphery peripheral player at this point, right? Yeah. Yeah, he's with Chelsea's lone army, but he's yet to be loaned. So that's a subtraction. Any additions to the executive committee? For me, it's Dest and Raina. And those, not coincidentally, are like the only players, in addition to John Brooks,

that I would consider to be absolute locks for our starting 11. So it would be McKinney Pulisick, Adams, Raina, Dest. and I'm resigned to Stefan being a lock and I don't hate that Stefan's a lock as our goalkeeper. I'm not convinced that he's necessarily the best way but we're not going to do with Zach Stephan bit right now. Yeah, you will get a lot of angry people on Twitter coming after you.

Yeah, I would say Desd definitely. I'm not sure Raina's in the executive committee yet. Is he for sure? I mean, then we're just parsing what we mean by the executive committee, but if Raina isn't starting by his, second game in a U.S. men's national team uniform. Like I could see easing him in, you know, in his first ever national team camp. But yes, the guy who starts regularly for Baruchia Dortmund should start for the U.S.

men's national team somewhere. And if you have to, if you have to play around with things because you desperately want to have either Jordan Morris or Tim Wea or whoever your preferred other starters are than Tinker, but Giorina needs to be on the field. Okay, okay So there's two additions I'm still I'm going to keep an asterisk

Next to Raina's name This is just going to be your asterisk Next to Tyler Adams name all over again I suppose I have to stay true to my heart Voting members This is the second tier Not the core of the future

But a few are close And others will get a chance I'm going to say Are voting members and non-voting members Portions of the committee were a total shambles in retrospect. So I'm just going to read the names real quick for the voting members of the committee.

Kenny Syf, Markey Delgado, O Marky, Josh Sargent, Cameron Carter Vickers, Eric Palmer Brown, Tim Wea, Anthony Robinson, Jonathan Amon, Kellen Acosta, Tim Parker, Will Trap, Alex Bono, Bill Hamid, Julian Green, Paul Ariola, and Keaton Parks.

So that's 16 names. I would say four of them are still in that spot. Still in that spot. That's probably true. But let's say this, Bels, which of those names you absolutely, would you absolutely like hate to see called up for a sort of random friendly window?

I wouldn't hate to see anybody. to be honest, but Will Trap, maybe. Alex Bono, right? I was going to be like that. I think that's it. Tim, I mean, I wouldn't be super excited for most of these guys,

but like none of them I don't think would be just as a one-off would be super out of place in a national team camp. They're all still making some positive contributions somewhere for some team other than Jonathan Damon who has vanished. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're unlikely to see most of them

I know your heart bleeds for Kenny Syaf but I don't know I don't think we're going to see most of them the one who has a decent chance of breaking back through is probably Paul Ariola of the ones that were not just to be clear the ones I think are definitely still voting members are Josh Sergeant Tim Wea

Anthony Robinson and Eric Palmer Brown probably right in there, right in that conversation. Others would say Cameron Carter Vickers is in the same category as Eric Palmer Brown. I've watched a lot of them. I like the way Eric Palmer Brown plays better than I like the way Cameron Carter Vickers plays. But I suppose that's neither here nor there. Carter Vickers is in there, too, to some extent. And then Areola. Go ahead, sorry.

No, so you just listed off what, six dudes? Anthony Robinson? Did you say Anthony Roberts, Robert Robinson? Okay. So yeah, so that's six guys. That's not terrible for guys who are very much still, I think, in the picture on the cusp of being in the picture. Yeah, it's a batting average that would get you put down to AAA, not AA. You'd go to Louisville. Any additions? So I think there should be a lot of subtractions here. Parks, Green, Hamid, Bono, Trap, Parker's not going to play for the national team again.

No, he's not. Why Parks? Why isn't Keaton Parks considered like a worthwhile shot? He's like you, he's Olympic eligible. He's playing consistently for a usually pretty good New York City team, a very good New York City team last year. I'm not going to do this for everybody, but give me why Keaton Parks just shouldn't be, in the picture. He just doesn't light my fire.

That's all. All right. Okay. I mean, why should he be in the picture? Like who, what position is he going to play? Who's he better? He's probably not, I mean, it'd be, could he be one of those eights that can really progress the ball forward?

If we're kind of getting into the roles that we talk about a lot now for the national team. He probably wouldn't be, right? He's not like a high pressing super, you don't think of him as. a high-pressing defensive player. I mean, he can go through the motions, but... Could he be the Jackson-Ewell deep-lying distributor? Maybe, yeah. I don't know.

Anyway, I'm just saying, like, out of all those guys, Keaton Parks, I feel like, is one who just seems to fade out of the conversation when he never really, I don't think, got a chance that he may be warranted to enter the conversation to begin with. Yeah, it would have been nice, not to be sour grapes, but it would have been nice for him to get some of the chance that was given to Christian Roldon in the first year of the Burrhalter era. Yeah, when we were trying to run Duke like eight slash tens, I feel like that would have been

the Keaton Park's role. Okay, all right. I don't think you go, you go. Well, additions to this group would be maybe Chris Richards, Miles Robinson, Lillianez. because whether Richards plays for Byron this season or not, he's going to end up playing first-team soccer somewhere good. And I think he's in this category now. What are you going to say?

I was going to say, does Jordan Morris fit in this category? Should Jordan Morris have been included in the executive committee? And will we be hated no matter what we say? I'd say definitely Jordan Morris gets added here. Yeah, definitely a voting member. Anybody else come to mind? I'm afraid people are going to listen to this and be super bored. This is a pretty self-indulgent episode.

Yeah. I'll be honest. We're going to quote ourselves. Being like, did we know anything? So let's go to non-voting members unless you have more to say on the voting members. The additions are basically just at the pool as it stands that we are all kind of familiar with at this moment. Yeah. Reggie Cannon should be a voting member as well.

and he was one of the non-voting members. This would be bubble players. Some have been called up, others who haven't. Remember this from June 2018. We have number one, Justin Glad, to Jacori Hayes, Shackmore, Reggie Cannon, Matt Olissunday, Walker Zimmerman, Andrea Novakovich, Austin trustee, Rubio Rubin,

San Diego Loyal Legend, Rubio Rubin, Danny Acosta, where art thou, Danny? Nick Lima, Brandon Vincent, Ethan Horvath, Emerson Heineman, Alejandro Guido. Alejandro Guido. Yeah, I was picking up some big subtleties from his performances with Tijuana, Sholos. Lyndon Gouche and Christian Roll-on, Roundout the Group of 17. That was our committee right there? the non-voting committee.

So I think it's pretty clear like this was a very much just like a snapshot of, honestly it was like a snapshot of who was on Dave Serrican's Rolodex because that's the only reason Alejandro Guido is listed here is because we're like well he has to be in the picture since he's

quite literally in the picture at the moment. He's on the roster. We can see him right there on our screen in the picture. So I think that's basically what this is. The other thing I think this points to is that the options back then were so sparse that you could literally just like list,

put them all in one 17 player list. Like, yeah, there is no one else playing who's young and who could take over a spot. Justin Glad is the only young centerback who's actually playing soccer professionally. So he's instantly a candidate to be a national team player. Yeah.

And Glad has had his chance in January camp twice to try to sort of break into the picture more full. and he hasn't been able to. So I would probably strike everyone from this list except Reggie Cannon and Jack Moore. And Moore is, you know, I know you're kind of a more officianto, but he's a little bit unknown too.

But Reggie Cannon's as a national team regular. He should be a voting member of the Savior Committee. Christian Rodon has like 1,000 minutes for Greg Burhalter for the national team. So I feel like he's got to be considered. I mean, we don't rate him particularly highly, I don't think. But clearly he has had a big role to play for Burrhalter so far. And then Nick Lima, I think, probably goes in that category to some extent.

Yeah. I saw Matt Doyle was talking about having Nick Lima on the Nations League roster. He had that in a column today. And I thought, well, Nick Lima. You buying it? You buying it? I'm not going to criticize that without. like rereading the column because there are a lot of moving parts.

It's that, it's a column where he puts out a roster for all of the tournaments next summer. So Aaron Long, I guess he's probably up in the voting member category. Yeah. Morrison Long, I think, are the prime age players who have, who have taken the most, done the most with sort of the last two years to put themselves right in the starting 11 picture. Yeah. Now, let's look at, this is a fun one.

the leadership track interns. We said back then all of these kids has a chance to jump to being a voting member by 2022 and hopefully at least a couple will attain the status of officer. Number one, Andrew Carlton. He's making waves. He's doing things again.

Yeah, he had a really nice goal yesterday, was it? Yeah, yesterday for Indy 11. But, you know, he's playing in USL. I still have a little bit of hope for him. but he's definitely not a voting member right now. Chris Durkin, I think, has improved a little bit since his poor showing at the U-20 World Cup quarterfinal loss. He's at St. Truden in Belgium, and I think he's playing okay. Mark McKenzie, I'd make him a voting member.

Richie Ledesma, still an intern. Alex Mendez, still an intern. George Bello, still an intern. Ullianez, voting member, non-voting member? I don't know, man. I feel like we're losing what the distinctions are between the two. I'm going to have to check my rules of order pocketbook. Sebastian Soto, brace in his debut for Telstar.

We've seen this movie before. Jalen Lindsey. We haven't seen Sebastian Soto movies since the New 21st. I'm saying that I'm saying scoring goals for Telstar. Okay. All right. I mean, Novakovich, I gave him short shrift a moment ago. He's a, he's definitely a non-boating member.

He's a credible professional striker in Europe. Jalen, Lindsay, Damien Loss, and Giovanni Raina, round out our list. I think Gio Rina alone bolts the, leadership track interns into the strongest group of any of the non-executive committee members. Wow, you love you love you some Giovanni Raina. Yes, I very much do. I hope we have four more of him in the next couple of years. No, we weren't, I think we had quite a few hits from this intern group and still more could

come good. George Bello is playing regularly now and has a real shot at being on one of the rosters in the summer. I think Doyle had him on the plane for the U-20s, which totally makes sense. You know what this has taught me is that I don't want to do a savior committee episode. I don't think we need to anymore. I think we, again, I think we have been saved. I think when we're seeing on Twitter all the different people putting out the U.S. 11s with the club badges, that's it.

Like that team's going to the World Cup, barring like a complete. I would say almost like coaching fiasco. Yeah. We're qualifying for the World Cup. We're saved. Saved. Job done. I do want to read a comment from somebody on Patreon.

Brian Jacobs asked us to do, he had some suggestions for other subcommittees, a leadership committee, basically candidates for captain or just dudes who will be emotional leaders on the field regardless of who's got the armband. You know what I wouldn't mind seeing would be the women did it in the World Cup in France, essentially putting three leaders together and having the arm band rotate between the three of them, because we have that, right? We have McKenny, we have Adams. Poulsig still doesn't strike me as a guy who you have as a captain, but if you have three, you can kind of get away with that because it's like, all right, now here's the guy who's the captain who is our best player for a game.

And not all of the leadership has to fall on him, you know what I mean? Yeah. So he gets the segment of leadership where he is just our very best player. Yeah, a figure-out. Yeah, so I actually like a leadership committee here. It's Adams and McKinney. I mean, they're the young guys with a lot of charisma and sort of who can go into an interview. We experience them through interviews with the media, and they're the best interviews

of any of the young guys McKinney and Adams are. They say the most with the most energy and humor. Timi Wea and don't, you know, don't sleep on him with this in this respect. There's a tri-shit subcommittee, game breakers, essentially, who's beating their guy 1v1 off the dribble to break down a defense or making the unexpected first touch, then the line breaking pass. This would have been Clint Dempsey. In this subcommittee, who do you put? this is this is tough because I feel like we don't have a lot of these guys straight away and I don't I don't think of Christian Pulisick as a tri-shit guy maybe counterintively I don't either because again he just he just runs at you really fast and gives you a little bit of like a shoulder faint and and you get your hips slightly off or your footwork slightly off and he's just past you so it doesn't feel like try shit in the same way it's not it's not an and one video you know it's not it's not that kind of thing uh So Genio's probably the most and one video player we got.

Absolutely. I would say, you know, Ullianas could be something like that, maybe a little bit more like that than Pulisic, but he's not, he's a little bit like Pulisic where his stuff is fairly straightforward. It's just tough to stop. Yeah, but you're asking who, like, Bells, who's the guy who's going to hit like a Robona for some, for no reason? It's dead.

On the sideline. Yeah, exactly. Dust is, I think, at this point, the sole member. Other people come out of the gallery and give us your takes on it. But I think Dest is holding it down for now. Yeah. He's a committee of one. You know, Alex Mendez and Efra Alvarez would be, you know, if they ever make it to this level,

or play for the United States of America, they would be in this category too. but can we is chase gasper close enough to the you know gasper does some stuff he does he does all right the conca calf rider dies subcommittee win every physical battle get in faces stick up for teammates this would have been jureen jones's per view i'm gonna say mckenny and adams again those are the two guys and i think adams is is uh absolutely ready for concaf he's a He's a bad word He's going to do it

Matt Miazga Would go in this list Matt Mioska is ready to draw some red cards In a Concaf Away match Yeah I saw I tweeted about this But I saw Mark McKenzie

Concaft Honda International Romal Kyoto The other day Concaft Concaft his elbow directly into his face Yes

He's got him sent off And then Ice Cold Penalty Taker subcommittee. Taking applications. I think it would be Aaron Johanson. I feel like he takes them for his club team. He's ice cold.

He's from Iceland. I don't think I need to keep going with these reasons. I think it's pretty clear. Yeah. I mean, how about somebody who might play for the men's national team? You don't think Johanson's coming back? I say his name differently every time. It's a running bit.

You don't think he's coming back to. play in the November friendlies. I don't. You do? I'd take him. I'd for sure take him. I know I was, I think, like, literally like two episodes ago, we were like, yeah, there's just no way, but he just continues to rack up goals, and he's, it's not just the

goals, like it's his movement. It just looks so much sharper than what it looked last year. I was watching Aaron Johansson clips last year. I don't know if I told you that, but he just looked like he was coasting last year. This year everything just looks really sharp, indecisive, and efficient. And he's always been a tidy player with his feet. So I very much think that's the kind of forward we need. We don't need a guy to stretch the lines.

We have those coming from underneath. So I think Johans would be a very good complimentary player within our pool. So I would take him in November, see what he's got. Okay, okay. Give him penalty duty. Make him take the penalties. I guess we are a little at a loss when it comes to penalty takers. outside of Mr. Johansen, Joe Hansen, Jha Hansen.

Zardaz takes him for Columbus, right? Or at least he did. I think he's missed twice this year. I don't know. Pulisic is no good at penalties. McKinney and Adams, obviously, are not much for the penalty taking. Do we know that, or are you just kind of assuming that's not in their wheelhouse? Yeah, I don't know.

How many defensive midfielers or, like, box-to-box-a-eights have been penalty takers? I don't know. We got Ulianas, buried. one his first. They're penalty. I'm not too worried about it. Tim Way, maybe Josie Altador, Josh Sargent.

That committee is still under construction. I think we're done. We're done. Let's be done. Maybe not our finest moment, but let's move on. We won't do it again for two years, we promise.

I mean, the excuse is I just moved to family of five across the country, folks. You know what I'm saying? So give me a break. All right. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see it. Thank you.