Who in MLS might be able to help the national team
Not including the ones who already do play for the national team.
Welcome to the Scuffed Newsletter, a weekly email guide to the U.S. men's national soccer team. Sign up free to get it in your inbox every Friday. This week we talk about who to pay attention to in MLS, Matthew Hoppe’s dad, the spate of USMNT injuries, and more.
It comes down to Williamson, Jones and Pomykal
The watchlist in MLS this season, with a World Cup now less than nine months away, turns out to be pretty short. At least that’s how I’m thinking about it right now.
Several players in the league are meaningfully involved with the men’s national team, and will continue to be. But it doesn’t feel like most of those players need to be watched. There are exceptions. Keep an eye on Jordan Morris, to see if he can regain his pre-injury form for Seattle. Jesus Ferreira is putting on a show for Dallas but still has plenty to prove to national team fans. The rest of the MLS guys on the national team? They mostly are who they are. That’s not necessarily a knock, and applies to big USMNT contributors like Kellyn Acosta and Walker Zimmerman, who both played well last weekend.
When it comes to uncapped or not-recently-capped players coming up in MLS, there are a lot. We talked about many of them in our podcast episode yesterday. But if we’re looking for players who could realistically bring a new contribution to the team before November, and help elevate how we play heading toward Qatar, the list gets really, really short. With all due respect to the youngsters in Philly and Seattle and elsewhere, it’s basically just Eryk Williamson, DeJuan Jones and Paxton Pomykal.
Williamson played in the Gold Cup, including in the 1-0 win in the final over Mexico. He’s a legit national team player, who just happened to tear his ACL at the wrong time (late August) and has missed all of qualifying since. But he’s nearly back from injury and he will be one to watch when he returns for Portland, perhaps before the end of the month. He didn’t look last summer as if he would challenge Yunus Musah for a starting spot in the midfield, but he is still young and developing, and he can certainly challenge to be a backup No. 8. He’s gunning for it, as he explained in our interview with him a couple weeks ago.
DeJuan Jones just fills a need. Berhalter didn’t call up a backup left back last window. Jones, a New England Revolution left back who is a solid defender with good speed and alertness, can serviceably get into the attack and play a ball across, like he did for an assist on a Sebastian Lletget goal in Portland last weekend. He’s not going to elevate the way we play on his own, but he could get the job done if Antonee Robinson and Sergino Dest are both unavailable. We might need that! If Jones has a good season in New England he has a chance to go to the World Cup ahead of Sam Vines and George Bello, both promising but flawed fullbacks playing in Belgium and Germany, respectively. Turn on the Revs and you might catch some Jozy Altidore too, though he still seems a ways off from the national team picture.
This is all pretty subjective, of course, but Paxton Pomykal is the one who’s most intriguing. His last cap was in September 2019, when he came on as a winger for 5 minutes at the end of a 1-1 friendly draw with Uruguay. That was his best year as an FC Dallas player, but by the end of that season his core muscle problems had become crippling to his play. He then missed most of 2020 and returned in 2021 to play winger for a grindingly drab Dallas side under Luchi Gonzalez. He didn’t look fully fit or good out wide, Dallas didn’t look good in general, and Luchi got fired. But under new coach Nico Estevez, Pomykal is back in the midfield, and on the evidence of his opening day outing against Toronto, seems like he could force his way into the national team picture. He was everywhere, tough in the tackle, eager to push the game, and, crucially, he went 90 minutes. I was hyped about him in 2019 because he seemed like he could be a player with Tyler Adams’ defensive range but with more class in possession and more attacking bite. That remains to be seen, of course, but the dream kindled by his performance in that 3-2 win over France at the U20 World Cup has been revived. Estevez, a former Berhalter assistant, seems to be playing a system similar to the one he helped implement with the national team, so Pomykal should be as prepared as one can be for a camp with Berhalter, and you’d think Estevez has Berhalter’s ear.
So that’s what I’m thinking about MLS.
- Belz
Weekend Playbill
Midweek Minutes / Discord Download
Relatively slow midweek for the USMNT abroad.
Josh Sargent (45) was the headliner, assisting in the second half of a 2-1 loss at Liverpool in round five of the FA cup. Yes, assists are noisy, and yes, this was a Liverpool B squad. But Josh still turns well, creates space off the dribble against a highly rated centerback in Ibrahima Konaté, and slips a lovely throughball into his fellow attacker for a not-so-noisy assist. (Still a banger though.)
Christian Pulisic (29) came on with Chelsea down 2-1 to Championship side Luton, also in the FA cup, though he was not much involved in the eventual 3-2 comeback win.
Brenden Aaronson (90) had his one shot blocked, and had no key passes in a 0-0 draw away at LASK in the Austrian Bundesliga.
Yunus Musah (19) created one good chance in his substitute minutes for Valencia as they beat Athletic Club 2-1 on aggregate in the Cope Del Rey semi-final. They’ll face the winner of Real Betis & Rayo Vallecano in the final on April 23rd.
On the outskirts of the player pool, Cameron Carter Vickers (90) scored on a smashed left-footed volley into the side net when the ball fell to him off a free-kick in Celtic’s Scottish Premier League match with St. Mirren. Matthew Hoppe (22) also saw the field for Mallorca in La Liga with his parents in attendance and his dad in … an outfit:
Gregg Berhalter was spotted at the Norwich Liverpool match. Here are some definitely-accurate guesses on where he’s headed next:
Extremely young, and small, Quinn Sullivan (born 2007) scores a perfect hat-trick for the Philadelphia Union academy:
The front 3 in Mexico that also solves climate-change:
Gaga Slonina is getting shouts to start at Mexico with Turner and Steffen possibly out injured. Here he is showing some maturity and wisdom:
- Coach Beard
Mailbag: What Does A Body Good?Tekle in New York City writes:
“Is the USMNT unlucky with injuries or is this spate of injuries typical for a national team? Other teams don’t seem to be so regularly crippled by their best players getting injured. (Or maybe that’s just my perception.) So many of the injuries seem to be “soft tissue.” Do the club teams or national team do strength, stretching or yoga protocols for injury prevention? What gives? Thanks guys. Love the show!”
We feel the pain of this question. And for this March window particularly, it is easy for diehard fans to feel like the USMNT has been particularly snake-bit. Losing a player of Weston McKennie’s caliber alone would make any international squad’s life difficult. And there’s a non-zero chance we are going to be without our first and second choice goalkeepers too.
But the honest answer to this question is I don’t know, because getting to the truth of your question requires us to answer the most fundamental question of all: Compared to what?
Even as the entire world is settling in to a paradigm of endemic COVID and the appearance of “back to normal” that paradigm brings, the sports world is still catching up to the way things were. Three match international windows did not exist in the pre-COVID world, and God willing they will cease to exist after Qatar. The result has been that since roughly Christmas of 2020, the world’s elite footballers have been asked to play competitive matches for 10 month stretches roughly every 3-4 days, with the remaining two months of a season devoted to intense club training punctuated by even more international breaks. And soccer’s tactical evolutions in the past decade place unprecedented levels of physical demand on players each match.
At the club level, our 26-30 players with the best chance of getting that World Cup callup all surely receive gold standard recovery and injury prevention care, and have access to the best human and technological infrastructure to heal from injury and get back to playing at an elite level. And for the USMNT’s part, we can be confident that US Soccer has invested resources into a medical and physio department that the world’s elite clubs would feel comfortable placing their players into. And yet the injuries still keep happening at the most inopportune times.
So getting back to that ‘compared to what?’ question. All this is to say that there is one piece of solace that we can take in all of this. And that is that the USMNT will not be alone in its injury woes. It’s a virtual certainty that Germany will be missing at least one key player in Qatar this winter. Ditto for France, England, Brazil and the rest of the global football powers whose pantheon we hope to enter someday. In fact, those elite national teams would probably say off the record that they’re not only fully expecting that but have contingency plans drafted well in advance. Maybe we’ll feel more pain from our losses because we don’t have the depth of those powers to just slot someone in for a Weston or a Pulisic or a Gio. Maybe we feel it more because we just love these boys as much as we do. But for me, I try to center this issue around that reality that our team isn’t alone in this conundrum. And perhaps that can bring other fans a little bit of sports peace that passes understanding.
- MJM-borne69 (Matt)
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