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Beyond the spark of Joe Gyau or the clutch of young players waved onto the field to face the Czech Republic earlier this week, there were two moments that were really striking this week, when thinking about the immediate future of top-level U.S. soccer. The first was the sight of the USMNT's MLS contingent, one Nick Rimando, throwing himself around the box to make sundry point-blank saves in the win over the Czechs. The representative for the once marginalized domestic league essentially telling the European, Mexican and youth delegation "I got this" seemed as neat a distillation of any of the changing national team paradigm -- one that would have been hard to conceive of just months ago. And back in the USA the day after the game, MLS commissioner Don Garber and U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati both spoke at a Bloomberg Business of Sports summit. The former was asked to consider the potential broader base of U.S. domestic soccer and was asked, as he often is, about the prospect of promotion and relegation. As usual it was not something on his radar as he looked down the pyramid. Gulati, meanwhile, was asked to look up his particular organizational pyramid to consider whether the U.S. might consider another tilt at a World Cup bid. Yes, if the bidding process was changed, was a slightly bruised Gulati's view. But what neither man was asked was how the recent personnel shift in the national team, with Gulati looking down to the domestic base and Garber looking up to the league's potential international profile, might affect their future working relationship. One man who might have asked such a question -- had he not been traveling back from Prague on Thursday morning -- was Jürgen Klinsmann, who used the international break (or lack of it, in MLS's case) to lobby again this week for the league to release players for FIFA international dates, something that, for friendlies at least, the league doesn't usually mandate. Yet if the U.S. national team is to make the next step in its progress -- perhaps toward a World Cup semifinal, which was Klinsmann's new stated benchmark this week -- it is increasingly looking as if MLS will be much more central to the conversations about how that is going to happen, and if Klinsmann's cheerfully iconoclastic record when it comes to existing league power structures is anything to go by, some of those conversations could be uncomfortably direct. The discussion about international dates is just the beginning. - Carlisle: U.S. blessed with goalkeeping riches
- Davis: Bocanegra was a U.S. trailblazer When given the opportunity to look at where the U.S. needs to improve after Brazil, or setting expectation towards Russia, Klinsmann tends to speak as much in his capacity as U.S. Soccer's technical director as he does head coach in emphasizing, for example, the playing rhythms and focus of top players (of which international games are a part) rather than talking about, say, a particular crop of young players coming through. Other than the huge spread of potential U.S. players, including a three-million-strong diaspora worldwide, one of the consistent historic logistical challenges for the USMNT is establishing not just a rhythm for international contenders, but multiple rhythms according to availability -- and then trying to mesh them at the right time without grinding the gears. Clearly, being able to assemble something like a first-choice squad on a more regular basis would be an improvement, but to do that something maybe has to give. A slight aside: it feels slightly alien to be talking about the idiosyncrasies of MLS in this context. For so long a league built on its own quirky exceptionalism within soccer, it has become progressively more integrated with the global game, from rule changes to kit deals, engaging with all but the very top levels of the global market and now, the reverse migration of national team stalwarts to the league. Some of this has happened so incrementally as to be barely discernible -- until you look at an old YouTube clip of a shot from the 40-yard line crossing the 30, the 20, the 10, etc. -- but the post-Clint Dempsey influx of U.S. internationals has been dramatic. Yet funnily enough, coming as it did in that state of exception that is the run up to a World Cup, the end focus of that particular tournament inevitably dominated the story of those returns, rather than a lot of discussion on what that, in turn, would mean for the USA afterward. In some ways, Wednesday's friendly marked the start of all of us who follow the league and national team really living with the new status quo. And yes, it felt a little strange to see a U.S. team looking so experimental because of the lack of MLS players. As Mikkel Diskerud was working on improving his aggression in midfield against the Czechs, Michael Bradley was warming up for a game with Toronto in Philadelphia that night while Clint Dempsey was in L.A., helping Seattle ease past Chivas USA to maintain its Supporters Shield charge. It all felt off-balance in a way that went beyond the experience of the European pool versus the U.S./Mexican pool that usually informs mid-cycle national team games. But if this is going to change at all, expect more conversations about the MLS schedule to come -- and for some of those conversations to be initiated from the upper technical echelons of U.S. Soccer. It's not that versions of these conversations haven't happened already -- in fact, the freezing temperatures for the last MLS Cup in Kansas City provided a backdrop (a prompt?) for one of the more serious MLS committee discussions yet about moving closer to the FIFA schedule. And as an MLS spokesman told me this week, there have been senior meetings at the ownership level addressing the summer friendlies with European opposition that add to the domestic schedule. Decisions on the latter tend to be left at the individual club's discretion, and with a 19-team league as it currently stands, off-weekends occur on every team's schedule. It's still not perfect; even with the league having added a full two months to its schedule since its formation, schedule crunches occur and everything is subject to scrutiny. As for the FIFA calendar, the same spokesman pointed out that the weather in Canada and the Northeast makes it almost impossible to conceive of any fair fall-spring schedule that doesn't include a lengthy winter break of at least eight weeks (as compared to say, the Bundesliga's already lengthy-seeming five weeks). The league, the spokesman said, works closely with its TV, ownership and U.S. Soccer partners on many matters, including the schedule. For now, the most recent changes have been made in order to give the league more recognizable TV slots as it tries to build domestic ratings and awareness. In many ways, juggling all this -- as it relates to what may soon become the very vocal demands of the national team coach -- is a luxury problem, and a conversation that MLS and its partner teams have invited themselves to join through that pursuit of prominent U.S. national team players hitherto playing in Europe. From asking to be taken seriously to purchasing the means to be taken seriously, the league certainly now has to think seriously about some priorities in the way its own development plan tallies with that of U.S. Soccer. The league and U.S. Soccer are both working in pursuit of global credibility, but to do so they'll need to find creative ways to share their tools.
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