Premium: On the Doorstep to Doha
Premium: On the Doorstep to Doha
The USMNT Earns an Important Point By Outplaying Mexico in a Scoreless Tie at the Defanged Estadio Azteca
MEXICO CITY — Fortress Azteca used to be a thing. Visiting teams, including the United States, came to the cauldron in fear. Altitude, pollution, midday heat and a buzzing wall of humanity, to say nothing of the Mexican national team, conspired to beat opponents before the whistle had even blown.
That’s gone now.
On Thursday night, the USMNT tied Mexico 0-0 to come within one game of potentially clinching a World Cup berth, and the truth is the visitors had the two best scoring chances (from Christian Pulisic and Jordan Pefok) and should have won their first World Cup qualifier ever here. The performance was especially impressive considering the U.S. was missing injured starters Weston McKennie, Sergiño Dest and Brenden Aaronson.
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But the biggest surprise was that the notorious Estadio Azteca mystique had disappeared. The nighttime crowd, limited to 40,000 by Covid regulations and the threat of homophobic chant punishments, was strangely muted from the start. During the middle of play, a desperate stadium PA announcer repeatedly tried starting MAY-HEE-CO chants and The Wave, but almost nobody joined in. On the one occasion when El Tri fans began their trademark O-LÉ chant on every pass, Mexico comically lost possession on an unpressured misfire out of play.
At times, the 1,000 U.S. fans in an upper stadium corner drowned out the Mexico supporters, except when they were whistling and booing their own coach, Tata Martino.
You kind of felt embarrassed for the hosts.
A longtime fan writes: “I’ve been following the [USMNT] since 1994, I’ve been deep in BigSoccer forums for decades, and from everything I see, the fans are demonstrably less fun and more awful than they have ever been. Win or lose, it’s just generally much more unpleasant than in years past. Are these my fellow travelers now? Miserable, angry people who have absolutely zero sense of proportion or enjoyment?”
But the U.S. will take it. A victory against Panama in Orlando on Sunday could clinch a World Cup berth or bring the Americans tantalizingly close to it ahead of the Octagonal finale in Costa Rica on Wednesday.
“We’ve put ourselves in a position to play on Sunday and win and go to the World Cup,” Pulisic said afterward. “So if you’d told us that before, I think we wouldn’t be too angry about that. But of course, I’m disappointed. I missed a chance, and I would love to have won the game. But this is the situation now, and we’re happy with it.”
“Positive disappointment, that’s how I’d categorize it,” U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said. “The group is jazzed up, they’re psyched. It was a good performance. We wanted to be the first team to beat Mexico in Azteca [among U.S. teams in World Cup qualifiers], and we fell a little bit short. But the mood’s not down, not at all. It’s the opposite.”
Berhalter had acknowledged the day before the game that he and his staff had evaluated the possibility of starting a B-team against Mexico, the better to have a fresh A-team for the home game with Panama, which is more important because it can prevent the Panamanians from catching the U.S. in the standings. But ultimately they came to the conclusion to go with their best possible lineup.
“We sat down as a staff and just went through it and said, ‘Okay, what does this look like? Let’s play this out,’” Berhalter explained. “And in the end it was: This team has high aspirations for its performance, and we wanted to put a team on the field that we felt could win the game in Azteca. And that was the most important thing. We’ll recover. There’s plenty of time to recover.”
It’s still a risk, of course. Players like Pulisic went the entire 90 minutes at 7,200 feet of altitude and now play again on just two days’ rest. What’s more, the second games of windows have been bugbears for the USMNT during this qualifying campaign, with zero wins, two ties and two losses. Tim Weah and DeAndre Yedlin will serve yellow card suspensions and be unavailable, but capable replacements include Gio Reyna and Shaq Moore (a late call-up with Reggie Cannon having tested positive for Covid).
Reyna was one of the brightest spots of the Mexico game, coming on as a 60th minute sub after a five-month injury layoff for his first appearance since Matchday 1 at El Salvador. Late in the game he even made a stunning run, evading more than a half-dozen Mexican tacklers before finally losing the ball before he could unleash a shot. Even the Mexican fans applauded Reyna’s audacious gambeta.
“Everyone’s pretty pleased with the way tonight went,” said the 19-year-old Reyna. “Three points would have been amazing here, but we can’t get too greedy. They’re a great team in a difficult place to play. So one point and also taking some points from them is a big result for us. Sunday we’re going to be ready to go.”
Another positive: Centerbacks Walker Zimmerman and Miles Robinson once again led a concerted defensive effort that produced a clean sheet and stymied Mexico’s best attackers, Chucky Lozano, Tecatito Corona and Raúl Jiménez. The Zimmerman-Robinson partnership has grown with reps and increased chemistry, and it’s hard to imagine Berhalter breaking it up unless he has to.
All these developments should leave U.S. fans optimistic with two games left in the Octagonal, right? Well, that’s a separate story.
A few years ago when I was at Sports Illustrated, we did a fun chart for our World Cup preview issue that we called the World Cup Angst Meter. In it, we ranked countries by the amount of diabolical angst that consumes their fanbases around the performances of their national teams. It was a fun exercise: England was right at the top, while Germany was far down the list.
And while the United States is not yet a top-tier men’s soccer nation, it might be now when it comes to the World Cup Angst Meter. Entering this likely decisive three-game World Cup qualifying window, the U.S. fanbase remained deeply scarred by the loss at Trinidad and Tobago on October 10, 2017, that prevented the U.S. from qualifying for Russia 2018—the biggest failure in the history of U.S. Soccer.
The PTSD is real. You hear it talking to USMNT fans, and you certainly see it on social media. It’s human. It’s understandable. It’s part of becoming a genuine soccer country. And yet plenty of longtime fans have remarked to me in recent months that they’re put off by an increasingly toxic fan culture around the USMNT.
One fan wrote to me: “I’ve been following the [USMNT] since 1994, I’ve been deep in BigSoccer forums for decades, and from everything I see, the fans are demonstrably less fun and more awful than they have ever been. Win or lose, it’s just generally much more unpleasant than in years past. From the bizarre expectations that these 22-year-olds should beat every CONCACAF team 4-0, to the endless drumbeat of ‘FIRE GREGG’ rage no matter what happens in the game, to the endless trashing of particular players (Gyasi Zardes), I’m truly baffled who constitutes the U.S. fan base in this era.”
The fan continued: “Are these my fellow travelers now? Miserable, angry people who have absolutely zero sense of proportion or enjoyment? People who reliably lose their shit over every single call-up and lineup that comes out, before a game has even started? It’s like these fans are adopting the most toxic aspects of English football fandom (minus the hooliganism), as if they think that’s what they are supposed to be. And then combining it with some kind of weird, nationalistic expectation that defies the history of soccer. I feel like it’s the era of the rise of the casual but very angry U.S. men’s fan. It did not used to be like that.”
Plenty of reasons can help explain what has happened. The failure to qualify for World Cup 2018. The multitudes of new USMNT fans that have been created in the last decade. The toxic nature of social media, circa 2022, after a two-year global pandemic. And even the structure of the sport in the U.S., where fans often view MLS and anything associated with it as inherently inferior to anything in European club soccer.
There’s a difference, obviously, between fan criticism—this is sports, after all!—and online abuse and harassment. But as the U.S. faced a decisive World Cup qualifying week that brought back memories of the fiasco four-and-a-half years ago, the negativity was enough to bring responses from people inside the U.S. team and the American soccer community.
“I know the scrutiny in America and the expectations for the national team are so high, but come on, man,” Leeds United’s American coach, Jesse Marsch, told SiriusXM. “If the fans really want the team to do well, then the negativity is counterproductive. Support the coach. Support the team. Believe in them. Also talk about how brave they are that they’ve played with so many young players and how that will set us up for the future to be incredibly successful for years to come … So stop with the anxiety and only think about positive support. And this group will get us where we want them to be.”
For their part, the U.S. players have said little that’s critical about their fan culture during the entirety of the World Cup qualifying campaign. But Zimmerman did let one thing slip during a recent interview with The Athletic: “We know what we have to do. We don’t care about what some fan in Nebraska thinks about us not playing well and getting a 1-0 win and qualifying. We want to go out, we want to qualify for the World Cup. That’s our objective. And so whatever we need to do to get that done is what we’re going to be doing.”
My take: Marsch was going out of his way, perhaps excessively, to show support for Berhalter, whom he might eventually replace as the U.S. coach. But Marsch is clearly aware of what’s happening in some segments of the fanbase.
As for Zimmerman? Look, players have always known what’s going on in the discourse, and his play during qualifying has been unimpeachable. I would agree that Zimmerman has as good a chance as any U.S. player to become the team’s breakout mainstream media star in Qatar. But man, what did Nebraska ever do to him lol?
Yet if there’s one person who has been the primary target of toxic fan anger, it’s Berhalter. They don’t like that he came to the U.S. job from an MLS gig. They don’t like that his brother, Jay, was a federation executive when Gregg was hired, even if Jay wasn’t part of the hiring process. They don’t like that Berhalter picks as many MLS players for his rosters as he does.
Some of the criticism is fair: When Berhalter was hired, I wrote a column arguing he might well be the right person for the job, but U.S. Soccer’s hiring process, which made him basically the only candidate (and shut out worthy contenders like Tata Martino, Marsch, Julen Lopetegui and others), didn’t do Berhalter any favors, either.
History will ultimately judge Berhalter on whether he qualifies the U.S. for the World Cup and how the U.S. does in Qatar. And while his USMNT has had some low moments—two losses away to Canada and a World Cup qualifying defeat at Panama—Berhalter enjoyed three consecutive meaningful wins against Mexico before Thursday’s tie and still has the U.S. in position to qualify for Qatar.
He also isn’t just results-based but focuses on his process, which is a good thing. In his pregame press conference in Mexico, Berhalter could have lied and said he didn’t view this week’s games as being any different from the previous ones. But he didn’t, and showed some welcome vulnerability in doing so.
“One thing I told the staff in our meeting as we started camp was this is probably the biggest week of our lives as professional coaches,” Berhalter said. “And that’s just honest, you know. I’ve coached in Columbus, and I coached in an MLS final, but this is bigger than that. And what I reassured the group is we’ve all coached in [three-game windows] before, we’ve been through qualifying already. We have a process, and just stick to the process. And I think that’s what's making it easy, both for the staff and the group, is we just stick to the way we work. It’s been successful so far, and that's what we continue to do.”
“Trust the process” isn’t the most original or exciting catchphrase. But it has the USMNT where it wants to be with two games left in CONCACAF World Cup qualifying. Berhalter has a hobby of collecting Starbucks mugs from every city he visits. That Doha coffee mug is within reach now.
You cannot imagine how Reyna's run delighted me. As somebody who has followed and witnessed soccer in the United States -- as well as U.S. soccer -- since my arrival here in 1967, I cannot put into words the immense development and improvement that we have come to witness -- and MUST acknowledge -- that soccer has experienced here. BRAVO to all, and yes, that includes MLS. The US -- as Grant rightly says -- is still not a first-class soccer country but in some ways it will always be different from those that are by dint of lots of reasons but none more important that in no country in which soccer provides the hegemonic sports culture are there four major team sports that crowd that country's sports space. England has cricket and the two rugby codes -- though regionally separated with Union in the south and League in the north. Basketball is a solid number two in the Mediterranean countries plus Brazil and Argentina; hockey has cultural presence in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and, of course, the Scandinavian countries. But in NO COUNTRY other than in the United States are there four such items. And this is fine! Soccer should -- and has already -- developed in the United States with its own accent so to speak, literally! And there is no shame in that. Alas, our cultural closeness and linguistic overlap with England means that there will always be a battle for authenticity in American soccer that will measure itself by English everything -- play on the pitch (do you see my authenticity here?), fan behavior, terminology, language, all of it! Soccer is not the only cultural item in which I see English, the common language that divides us from England and Britain, as a real curse! Onward to clinching a spot for the World Cup this Sunday!!!
Very much agree about the recent pervasiveness of negativity. The insane anti-MLS contingent is particularly annoying. Acosta has one bad game vs Panama and that crowd ignores his previous good games vs MX, his 3 assist/hockey assists vs Honduras, and even his fantastic chip to Reyna that should have resulted in a Pefok goal. I think at some point, we just have to try and ignore the negativity crowd and enjoy the fact that this is a young promising team with players in leagues around the globe that just went toe-to-toe with MX in the Azteca. Eight or twelve years ago any of us following the USMNT would have been overjoyed to hear what was in our future. Clearly T&T still has a hold of many of us, but hopefully the team can put that to rest on Sunday.