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The Young USMNT, Captained by Tyler Adams, Starts World Cup Qualifying with a Scoreless Tie at El Salvador
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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — The Estadio Cuscatlán, a 46-year-old concrete jewel box, is a proper Central American fútbol building. The gates open eight-and-a-half hours before kickoff of a national team game. The blue-clad Salvadoran fans, many of them lubricated by a few Supremas, fill the old-school terraces—this is no modern all-seater stadium—that provide more than half of the 40,000 capacity. The smell of grilled meat wafts from the walkways through the stands. Vendors carrying giant stacks of popcorn sacks somehow scale the fences dividing fan sections and just keep on moving and selling as if their climb was no big deal.
The visuals are cool, too: They shoot fireworks above the stadium not just before the game but during the opening minutes as well.
And the sound? My god. The sound of the Salvadorans singing their national anthem on Thursday—an aural assault that bounced off the partial roof and reverberated in your eardrums—was unlike anything you’d hear in the United States. Nothing prepares you for it. The music just starts, and the fans hold up the lights on their cellphones like it’s a Skynyrd concert, but then the sound they create is a primal force that exerts a sudden pressure jolt on your shoulders like the kick of a shotgun.
You learn new things as a first-time visitor here.
That applies to first-time visitors who are soccer players, too. The U.S. men’s national team brought 25 players to the Cuscatlán for Thursday’s Octagonal-opening World Cup qualifier. Only five of them had participated in qualifying before, and none of those five had been at an eliminatoria in El Salvador. When 18-year-old U.S. winger Gio Reyna of Borussia Dortmund went to take a corner in the second half, the locals baptized him with water bottles from above, rendering useless the phalanx of armed police protecting him with riot shields.
“He’s not getting hit with water bottles in the Bundesliga,” teammate Tyler Adams noted after the 0-0 tie, which left the home fans satisfied and the U.S. players mostly in straight-face-emoji mode. That reaction made sense after more than one player—including Adams, who captained the team on Thursday—had talked about having a goal of winning all three World Cup qualifiers this week.
Over the years, the accepted U.S. orthodoxy has been that you will qualify for the World Cup if you win your home games and tie your road games. Kasey Keller may have said this 500 times in his career. The simple mathematical fact is that he’s right. Still is, in 2021. But the change with the new generation of USMNT players is they say their objective is to win the away games, too. That’s just as much a statement about process and performance—i.e., how they prepare for road qualifiers—as it is about results.
“I don't think we would approach the match again and say, we’re going to El Salvador to get a point,” U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter said afterward. “That’s not the mindset of this group. You saw the intention the whole game was to win the game. We weren’t sitting back. We were trying to be aggressive, trying to create goal-scoring opportunities, playing most of the game in their half. And unfortunately we didn’t get the goal. But in terms of the group’s mentality, it’s going to be to win games.”
While the result Thursday was hardly a disaster for the U.S.—the team will be on track if it can win at home on Sunday against Canada—the performance was discouraging in a few areas. The connection between players in the attack wasn’t fully formed. The U.S.’s fullbacks, Sergiño Dest and DeAndre Yedlin, added little moving forward, and front-liners Josh Sargent and Konrad de la Fuente rarely seemed on the same page. Reyna had a couple dangerous moments, but the U.S. clearly missed the unbalancing skills of Christian Pulisic, who stayed back in Nashville in hopes of being fit for Sunday now that he has recovered from his COVID positive two weeks ago.
“The first reaction is disappointed,” said defender Tim Ream, who was one of the better U.S. players on the night. “We kept a clean sheet away from home and created a few half-chances that I think guys would probably have back if they could. So, yeah, just disappointed.”
Adams, for his part, reminded everyone that games like this one depend less on the U.S.’s quality than on its mentality. “I’m not too dissatisfied, to be honest,” he said. “We knew coming into this it was going to be a learning process. For a lot of us, it’s going to be our first experience getting this CONCACAF feel. Yeah, we’ve had Nations League. Yeah, we’ve had the Gold Cup, but that was not traveling here after playing on a Sunday or Saturday, a quick turnaround and having to fly down to El Salvador and battle it out. So for us it’s going to be a learning process.”
From an individual perspective, Adams had a solid performance on a night when his central midfield partner Weston McKennie wasn’t at his best. Even when the U.S. was busy winning two trophies this summer, beating Mexico in the finals of the Nations League and the Gold Cup, the main missing ingredient was Adams—who wasn’t called in for the Gold Cup (none of the U.S.’s top European-based players were) and was coming off an injury and played only a few minutes at the end of the Nations League final.
Adams gives the U.S. a dimension that no other defensive midfielder can right now. He reads the game with a tactician’s eye. He covers acres of space and wins balls with abandon. He transitions smoothly from defense to attack, picks the right passes and keeps the midfield ticking at a rapid clip. Nor is he afraid to tell his teammates where they should be on the field. If Adams isn’t exactly a pinpoint finisher, well, what do you expect? He’s a defensive midfielder.
How good could Adams eventually be for the national team? Well, he’s just 22; he has already established himself as a starter at Leipzig, which he sent to the Champions League semifinals two seasons ago with his goal to beat Atlético Madrid; and he keeps improving every season. His club coach—Jesse Marsch, the American who met Adams seven years ago when they were with the New York Red Bulls—thinks Adams’s future has no ceiling. “Tyler’s potential to be the best six [defensive midfielder] to ever play for the U.S. is so massive, he just needs to stay healthy and keep himself going,” Marsch, himself a former d-mid, said during a recent interview in Leipzig. “And if he can have a big season here [in Leipzig], then I think there are possibilities for him in a lot of places. There’s a lot of interest in Ty. I’m sure every team in England is keeping track. We want to keep him, but it’s always tricky.”
The biggest challenge for Adams with the USMNT has been staying healthy at the right times. Thursday’s game was the first time Adams had played 90 minutes for the national team in two-and-a-half years, going all the way back to a friendly on March 21, 2019, against Ecuador. “That’s because Gregg always subs me out, though, it’s so annoying!” Adams said with a laugh during a recent one-on-one interview in Leipzig. But he also acknowledged his frustrations with his health record in 2019 and the first part of ’20. “Right now I’m fit, I’m fresh, I’m ready to go. I’ve been consistent for the past year, year and a half. The body’s feeling good. I’m really becoming a robust player, which I think is important for your career. And I’m someone people can rely on, which I think is even more important.”
“We don’t want to talk about what’s five years away. We want to talk about what’s happening next … We can make a deep run in 2022 if we have the right opportunities.” — Tyler Adams
Adams can still remember all the details from that dreadful night in November 2017 when he watched on TV as the U.S. lost to Trinidad and Tobago and failed to qualify for World Cup 2018. It was the worst moment in U.S. soccer history. Adams was just 18 and still living at home in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., where he saw the game with his stepfather, Darryl Sullivan. The son of Scottish parents and a huge Rangers fan, Sullivan knows his soccer, and even before the opening whistle he told Adams that he didn’t like the vibe of the U.S. team, based on pregame interviews and the way the players were warming up.
“I have a bad feeling about this game,” Sullivan told Adams.
“What do you mean?” Adams replied. “This won’t be a problem.”
“I’m thinking in my head, Christian [Pulisic] will score two goals, easy, no problem,” Adams says. “And I remember [the U.S.] going down in that game from that ridiculous goal from Trinidad and thinking to myself, Wow, this is not looking great. That was a terrible night.”
Adams was just emerging as a national team prospect in those days, and he thought he might have had a chance of making the 2018 World Cup team. That was gone now. But even then, he began looking forward to the chance to be a part of qualifying for World Cup 2022, to the games that mattered starting Thursday night.
Adams wears his confidence like a custom Italian suit, and sometimes he seems like he’s 22 going on 46. He’s certainly the only 19-year-old who has ever welcomed me to his apartment for an interview with a nice cheese plate (as he did in December 2018)—not as an Eddie Haskell-like bribe, but just because he was a thoughtful host. (The only similar experience I’ve had with an interview subject was when Hérculez Gómez picked me up at the airport in Torreón, Mexico, when I visited for a story.) The thing is, though, Adams really has had a lot of life experiences for someone his age.
Take visiting El Salvador for important soccer games. Though Adams’s first World Cup qualifier was Thursday, he had indeed been to El Salvador for soccer before—for a CONCACAF Champions League game in 2016 with the Red Bulls against Alianza. New York got a 1-1 tie in that game and eventually advanced to the quarterfinals.
“We do have a lot of guys that have that CONCACAF Champions League experience,” Adams said. “I remember being 16 and having to play in El Salvador with New York. And the pitch was flooded, the ball wasn’t moving, you couldn’t pass the ball five feet. But for 90 minutes you battle and you figure out a way.”
Soccer is different from most of the other pro sports. You would never expect players from the New York Yankees to have been teammates since the age of 14 or 15. But that happens in soccer. Barcelona’s Gérard Piqué was a teammate of Lionel Messi (until very recently) since Messi was 13 years old. Something similar happened with Adams and U.S. teammates Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie. Adams was just 15 when he joined those two at U.S. Soccer’s residency program in Bradenton, Fla., in 2014. He was playing up a year from his age group, and the three hit it off early. Now they’re the core of the USMNT.
“They’re like my brothers,” Adams says. “They’re people I talk to on the regular about just daily things, things that don’t even involve football. When you want to laugh, you can FaceTime each other. When you want to play video games, you can play with each other. They’re truly people I can rely on for things. When you have this real type of relationship off the field, it just makes playing together on the field more enjoyable. And I think you feel more free when you’re on the pitch. You don’t feel reluctant to try something, because they’re going to have your back. That’s what makes this national team and this young core group of players very special. We just have each other’s backs. We’ve grown up with each other. And I think that will take us a long way.”
The three may all be in their early 20s, but they drive the U.S. team and the interactions within it. Adams says a new chat group is created for all the players in each national team camp. The most vocal member of the chat might be McKennie, he says, but the funniest one? “This guy Sergiño is hilarious,” Adams says. “He’s a little bit clueless at times, but that’s Sergiño. That’s what makes him special.”
Dest plays for Barcelona; Adams for Leipzig; McKennie for Juventus; Pulisic for Chelsea. They’re some of the elite clubs in world soccer. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that Adams casts a side-eye when he hears people saying that the USMNT could be a threat to go deep in World Cup 2026 when the U.S. co-hosts the tournament in five years. Unsaid is the assumption that it wouldn’t be possible in the World Cup that’s happening next year in Qatar.
“Like, why?” Adams says. “It’s amazing that the World Cup is going to be in the U.S., but we don’t want to talk about what’s five years away. We want to talk about what’s happening next. And of course, we have to get through qualifying, but we can make a good wave coming into the 2022 World Cup. We want to play against teams like France, because that’s what challenges you, and we can make a deep run in 2022 if we have the right opportunities.”
It has become increasingly clear that while Pulisic is (so far) the best U.S. player of his generation, Adams stands out as the leader who’s set to be the captain for the next decade. The only question is when he earns the armband for good. Adams hadn’t played enough for the national team over the last two years to have been captain during that time, and Berhalter has also rotated the armband among the half-dozen elected members of the team’s leadership council. Berhalter told SI’s Brian Straus earlier this year that he planned to announce a single captain for the World Cup if the U.S. qualifies, but Adams’s obvious leadership skills may cause Berhalter to name a regular captain sooner, even while keeping the leadership council intact.
The simple fact is, Adams wants to be the captain. “It’s a role that of course I would want to take, one that I’ve always felt natural for,” he says. “I think we’ll see what happens right now in the national team. We have a leadership council, but I think every good team has a core leader.”
“I think there’s an importance to having that connection between the women’s team and the men’s team … even wearing each other’s jerseys and showing that mutual respect for one another. Because what they do and have done is something special. And a lot of those people that play for the women’s national team are legends.” — Tyler Adams
While we’re talking about leadership, it’s worth noting that Adams doesn’t hesitate to mention his hope that the U.S. men’s team builds a closer relationship to the U.S. women’s team. That in itself separates him from most of his USMNT teammates. It’s strange: In formal court filings written by lawyers, the USMNT players have said they fully support equal pay for the USWNT. But we have seen precious few examples of actual USMNT players voicing their backing for their women’s team counterparts. The USWNT players have noticed; at one point goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris said the men’s support only in legal filings came off as hollow.
Adams wants to see the relationship grow. “I think there’s an importance to having that connection between the women’s team and the men’s team, and having friendships created,” he says. “From the U.S. men’s national team perspective, maybe in the past that relationship hasn’t always been there because of things that go on behind the scenes with player unions and money differences. But it’s so important to support one another in our goals, even wearing each other’s jerseys and showing that mutual respect for one another. Because what they do and have done is something special. And a lot of those people that play for the women’s national team are legends.”
As for Adams, he made a bit of history himself on Thursday, becoming the youngest player to serve as the captain for the USMNT in a World Cup qualifier in the modern era (at 22 years, 200 days old). He found out he’d be wearing the armband from Berhalter in the morning. “It’s exciting to be captain and be able to lead this very young group,” Adams said after the game. I’m ready to lead the group moving forward. I take that challenge on the chest, and I’m ready to fight and battle for it.”
Fight and battle are the operative words for CONCACAF World Cup qualifying. If anyone thought this cycle would be different in that regard for the USMNT, they were disabused of that notion on Thursday night here in San Salvador. Chapter 1 of qualifying is over. Chapter 2 awaits on Sunday against Canada in Nashville. And when the schedule is so compressed, this book can only be a page-turner.
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