At some point during the U.S. men’s national team’s loss to Canada in the Nations League third-place game, members of the American Outlaws, the official USMNT supporters group, began pleading with Clint Dempsey.
Dempsey, to some the greatest player in the history of American men’s soccer, was at the game as an analyst for CBS Sports, stationed at a desk just in front of the supporters end. After the broadcast, Dempsey recalled the exchange during the network’s wrap-up show.
“You had some of them saying, ‘Hey, (Clint), get ‘em right. Say something,’” Dempsey said. “And I’m like ‘Hey! Y’all let them know. Let them know what’s going on. They need to fight for y’all.’”
Nobody ever needed to teach Dempsey how to fight. Born and raised in tiny Nacogdoches, Texas, Dempsey was entirely different than most American players. He grew up poor, living in a trailer in his grandparents’ backyard and playing streetball with kids twice his age. He idolized players like Diego Maradona and Cuauhtémoc Blanco and cut his teeth in the largely Mexican men’s leagues in the area, playing against opponents twice his age.
Dempsey made a habit throughout his career of showing up in big games, scoring consequential goals with club and country. He largely disappeared after his retirement in 2018 and can sometimes come across as softspoken even as a pundit. But his USMNT pedigree — along with Landon Donovan, he is the program’s all-time leading goalscorer — gives his words weight. And after the USMNT’s Nations League semifinal loss against Panama, Dempsey teed off.
“During my career, the biggest blow that there was was not qualifying for the World Cup in 2018,” Dempsey said. “And you think — sometimes you have to take a step back to take two steps forward. And people talked about this team being the ‘golden generation.’ … You look at the step back. Copa América, not getting out of the group there on home soil. Here tonight, in an important game as we get closer to the World Cup, another failure. It doesn’t give you a lot of hope. You have more fans here for Mexico right now than the U.S.”
Dempsey continued, pointing out that some key USMNT players will miss this summer’s Gold Cup as they compete in the FIFA Club World Cup and that the U.S. might struggle to find competitive matches as the year wears on, with other countries still in the thick of World Cup qualification.
“I’m a little nervous,” said Dempsey. “And I’m worried about the future of this U.S. men’s national team.”
Dempsey is not the only one. In the hours that followed the U.S.’s loss to Canada, former players and coaches all sounded off. To some, it may feel like an old man yelling at a cloud. With a World Cup rapidly approaching, though, the chorus of voices seems certain to grow louder if the USMNT doesn’t manage to right the ship.
Like Dempsey, Donovan can more or less let his national team career do the talking.
Nobody scored more goals for the USMNT than Donovan, and nobody’s goals were more consequential. Some of the most important strikes in U.S. history came off his feet — a goal against Mexico in the last 16 of the 2002 World Cup; and a trio of goals in the 2010 World Cup that included a last-gasp group-winner against Algeria, which galvanized an entire nation.
Like Dempsey, Donovan disappeared from view a bit after retirement but eventually found his legs as a coach, first in USL and then NWSL. He remains a foundational figure in the history of U.S. soccer, called upon frequently to analyze the current state of affairs.
On Sunday, Donovan’s analysis made Dempsey’s look timid.
“I’m so sick of hearing how ‘talented’ this group of players is and all of the amazing clubs they play for,” Donovan wrote on X. “If you aren’t going to show up and actually give a s!%* about playing for your national team, decline the invite. Talent is great, pride is better.”
A couple days later, Donovan calmed down a bit, but not much.
“You’re probably more objective about stuff like this,” Donovan told The Athletic, “but I was just so viscerally upset after that game. I’m just getting tired of watching all of this s**t.”
Donovan was quick to let a pair of USMNT players off the hook for their performance against Canada. Real Salt Lake midfielder Diego Luna showed well, Donovan thought, and Christian Pulisic — invisible for long stretches of both the Panama and Canada matches — was “really hurt by these performances.”
“Those are the only ones that stick out to me,” continued Donovan. “There were just too many guys out there who were just going through the motions. When I watch games, sometimes it’s difficult to accurately judge someone’s ‘desire.’ But you also just see what your eyes tell you. It was obvious in these games who cared.”
Donovan, like any former player, is wary of being perceived as being some sort of grumpy old man. Undoubtedly, he is representative of the prototypical American player of his era. For years, the common perception of the American player, fairly or unfairly, was that they were a little short on skill and tactical acumen but excelled at the intangibles. They were often exceptionally fit, fearless and possessed a laundry list of other nebulous descriptors: grit, determination, hustle, edge.
Landon Donovan sees the USMNT getting further away from its identity. (Photo by Rob Kinnan/Imagn Images)
USMNT teams of Donovan’s era were sometimes not the prettiest to watch, but they wore opponents down. They were led by a series of American coaches raised in the pits of this country’s college and professional soccer ecosystems, most of whom possessed a deep understanding of the American game, none more so than Bruce Arena.
“People used to hate playing against us,” Donovan said. “Even when we lost. We’d get beat 2-0 and you could tell the other team was still like ‘f***, this game is going to be a f***ing nightmare.’ Occasionally, though, we’d have a poor effort. And Bruce would say ‘Guys, a coach shouldn’t have to coach effort. That’s not my job.’
“Back then I thought that was ridiculous,” Donovan continued. “But now I think about it and realize he was spot on. The last thing Mauricio Pochettino should have to worry about is whether these guys are going to leave it all on the field or not. Leaving it all on the field — that’s been a hallmark of the American player since the mid-80s. If we lose that, we are in big, big trouble.”
Donovan, who has certainly worked with his share of young players over the years, is cautious to paint with too broad a brush when it comes to the source of the U.S.’s current perceived mentality issue. He cannot help but agree, though, that part of the issue is simply generational, and mirrored outside of the sports world.
“There is absolutely a generational piece to this,” Donovan said. “You see it all over society. People just do not take pride in what they do anymore. When I first went to Leverkusen, when I was 17, it blew my mind how much pride the server took in doing their job. That’s a server at a restaurant — not a player playing for their national team. There is a lack of sense of pride in what people do.
“When you are proud, you are not going to let two games like that just slip by without trying to do something about it,” he added. “I would’ve been embarrassed on the field after that game against Panama. I sure as hell wouldn’t have gone into the Canada game and played that poorly. I would have been too embarrassed.”
Donovan was never lacking in pride. He’s still not. When asked whether he thinks the USMNT of 2002 or 2010 could beat what some are referring to as a “golden generation” of players, he laughed.
“We would not have let Canada or Panama beat us without it being an absolute bloodbath,” Donovan said. “I used to hate going into training camps, because I got the shit kicked out of me. The competition was real. We had real players who cared about the result and were always, without exception, willing to put themselves on the line to get a result. I can’t talk about who was more skilled or talented, but we were always responsible for the result.
“Right now,” he concluded, “of course I’d take those teams over this current one.”
Tab Ramos hails from a different era than Dempsey or Donovan, one that feels almost alien to modern observers of the USMNT.
Ramos made his World Cup debut 35 years ago as part of the 1990 team that thrust the USMNT back into the global spotlight for the first time in 40 years. It’s impossible to overstate just how different the program looked in those days. Players in the mid-to-late 80s, when Ramos entered the picture, were underpaid and overworked, nearly invisible to the general public. The U.S. sometimes struggled to schedule matches against meaningful competition, and when it did, players sometimes flew in on the day of the game and back out just after the final whistle.
Born in Uruguay, Ramos spent his adolescence in Kearny, N.J., an American soccer holy site if there ever was one. From the beginning, his understanding of the game felt different than many other players of his era. So did his technical ability. Almost beyond argument, Ramos was the most technically gifted American player of his time. That talent took him abroad, earning him contracts with Real Betis and Figueres in Spain. He was a central figure at the 1994 World Cup, which the U.S. hosted. When MLS was founded 30 years ago, Ramos was the first player signed to a contract.
Ramos, who would go on to coach in MLS and USL after retirement and also serve as an assistant at the 2014 World Cup, has an intimate understanding of this current USMNT group. He worked with many of the squad’s players during his decade-long tenure as a coach and technical director in the U.S. youth program. Like Donovan and Dempsey, Ramos was shocked at what he saw in the Nations League.
“When I hear the players do interviews after the games, every single one of them says, ‘We need to have a stronger mentality. We need to work harder, tackle more,’” Ramos told The Athletic. “Here’s the thing: this isn’t the first time we’ve heard this. I think the fact that Pulisic, (Tyler) Adams, (Weston) McKennie, all of the important guys are saying ‘We need to get stuck in, we need to work harder.’ Well yeah, of course. But you need to stop talking about it. You need to start doing it.”
Tab Ramos doesn’t like what he sees from the current U.S. men’s national team players. (Photo by Mark Robinson/Getty Images)
In post-match interviews, Pochettino sometimes seemed almost shocked at the lack of effort from his squad and suggested, vaguely at least, that other players would be brought in to replace underperforming ones should the issue continue.
“If you were to ask any player in the world, people would say, ‘The American guys aren’t technical enough, this isn’t their game,’” Ramos said. “But at the end of the day they knew they had to play hard to beat you. Because they knew we’d fight to the end. I’m sure Pochettino was shocked. I’m sure he thought that with a full-strength squad, he probably took it for granted a little bit that his players would outwork the other team. He must have been shocked when he saw that wasn’t true.”
Like Donovan, Ramos chalks part of the current state of affairs surrounding the USMNT up to a generational shift, but his view includes some international perspective. Kids everywhere are changing, and the problem in the U.S. has more to do with soccer’s place in the cultural and sporting landscape, Ramos said.
“We don’t come from a soccer culture in this country,” he said. “All of the kids in other countries, they’re the same as our kids. They too are playing on their phone. It’s not like in Brazil or Argentina they’re not on their phone all day. But when they’re not on their phone? They are playing soccer. And they play like they mean it — they play to win. It just has to do more with our culture than some generational difference. Soccer in this country, it’s still not one of the biggest leagues, it’s fifth or sixth or seventh, however you want to look at it.”
Ramos bristles at the suggestion that this current generation of U.S. players accounts for a “golden generation” of sorts. Ramos himself hails from a foundational generation of players — the team that represented the U.S. at the 1994 World Cup, the first ever played on U.S. soil.
“A ‘golden generation?’” Ramos said. “Are you kidding me? At this point I feel like I came from the golden generation. After seeing all of this? My generation was probably the golden generation. We took the U.S. to a World Cup after hopping fences to play in playgrounds and getting paid $400 a game to play for the Brooklyn Italians to prepare for the national team. If that’s not golden, I don’t know what is. We have just lost the essence of who we are as a soccer country.”
That ‘94 tournament served as a springboard for the founding of MLS and in many ways founded the general American public’s connection to the sport of soccer itself, one that continues to deepen every day.
Yet Ramos cannot help but be disappointed these days when he watches the USMNT play. A little over a year out from what promises to be the biggest World Cup in history, the U.S.’s Nations League matches against Panama and Canada were played in mostly-empty stadiums, with little to no fanfare. It’s a sobering reminder to Ramos, of soccer’s — or maybe American soccer’s — continued struggle for relevance.
“We were hoping for so much more,” he said. “We were hoping that soccer would get closer to the NFL, to everything else. And here we are 30 years later, and it still hasn’t happened. I’m disappointed. This is the year where everything should be clicking, everybody should be excited about the national team and how well Pulisic is doing at Milan and how McKennie is doing at Juventus and how Adams is a leader at Bournemouth.
“And guess what? People don’t even go to the games. People don’t want to see it.”
(Top photo: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images)
