Exploring National Identity Through US National Team

Representing your country in soccer is hardly the same thing as being a “true” patriot of said country. That’s a whole other basket. FIFA has their qualifications of what it takes to play for a country, and that definition is good enough for me when it comes to soccer.

European teams have been doing it for years, if not decades. Klinsmann’s German team benefited immensely from a couple of native Polish (Klose and Podolski). As you mentioned, the French make it a practice to poach. So sure, we can have a team made up of kids from Akron and Charlotte and Topeka who all speak American and went to USA State College, but struggle to win games. Personally, dropping out of the WC in the round of 16 year in and year out, beating the T&Ts and Hondurans only to lose to Mexico every year isn’t exactly my definition of “success.” Or we can get the best players available to us by the rules set by FIFA, and if that means we start grooming kids who grew up in Bavaria, I don’t really care. I want to win. And if we limit our resources and turn down a kid who could play for us but speaks Spanish instead of English and ends up playing for Mexico instead of us, and then he’s on the field playing against us and beating our college groomed kids? No thanks.

I kind of link it to hockey in Canada. The canadian college teams are probably pretty good, but no one knows about it because the kids that are good enough play juniors. The 17-18 year old Americans who are good enough go to Canada, they don’t go to college. Soccer’s the same way. The best players go to youth academy’s, they don’t go to school where playing soccer is secondary to their “education.”

Klinsmann has discussed college a few times but mostly as how unique it is to the American system. We used to send college kids to the Olympics and they did quite well.

I think many of the pieces are in place for fully exploiting ‘home grown’ talent, but does being “American” necessarily play into that? I’m a black American. My family has been here at least 7 generations (as far back as we can trace, anyway), we’re all over the the South and Eastern US. Does that make me more “American” than one of my best friends who’s great-grandfather immigrated from Japan in the 1910’s?
I don’t think that should matter as much as finding and developing talent—whether it’s in the inner city or a trailer park, or first gen kids from Senegal or Ireland.
If Argentines can discover kids as young as 7 and get them into an academy, why can we?

As much time as I spend on this and other soccer sites I can’t speak to college players quality, but I do think ignoring them does the National Team a disservice.
Even though sports in general is a crapshoot, being from the US seems to be a harder road to success in soccer. There doesn’t seem to be as clear a path as there is in say, the UK.
So an non-soccer education might be essential for quite some time.

First the rant is about the November U-23 camp that the US had in Germany, which featured a number of players who play in Germany and some who were born there. This isn’t about the USMNT in General, one only has to look at the January camp list to know that each of the 20 players named to the camp all were born in the USA, and only one of them plays their club soccer in Germany.

Now yes even the December camp in Florida had 4 kids born in Germany invited, and 7 who play their club soccer in Germany, but is that alarming? To me it seems about finding the best available talent, perhaps has the US U20 team been able to qualify for their World Cup this summer, something like this wouldn’t be needed. I don’t see anyone complaining that 5 players from the Philadelphia Union were invited.

If a player is eligible by FIFA standards to play for a nation and a coach doesn’t consider them an option, well then I would have an issue with them. Of course Jurgen’s connections to Germany’s youth system and clubs would lead him to look there for potential talent, but to say that he has made a decision to not invite US born, or US based players to have a shot as well isn’t really factual. I think the simple reality of two U23 camps in the last two months speaks volumes about trying to give as many players as possible options.

Where I think Zimmerman’s stance breaks down is that Klinsmann doesn’t write the rules. FIFA writes the rules. Klinsmann, along with the coaches and federation heads of every nation, just play by those rules. If the U.S. was to play by a different set of rules (i.e. using only “real Americans” instead of the best players available with American eligibility), then we would be at a distinct disadvantage to the rest of the world.

So perhaps the conversation isn’t just whether Klinsmann should use only real Americans vs. using all players eligible for the USMNT. Its whether FIFA should redefine its rules in some way to restrict eligibility to only allow those players who actually have established national identity.

I look forward to a day where we don’t have these arguments because all the best soccer players eligible to play for the USMNT will be “real Americans” raised in the U.S. soccer system. Not sure we’ll ever see it though.

heh

But there is a difference between nationality (the nation with which you identify) and citizenship (the nation with which you have papers). This discussion seems to be an outgrowth of that.

Take Rupert Murdoch – is he American, Australian, British or a non-national/globalist?

There are players who don’t necessarily have home nations, but they do have citizenship. Some are stuck between countries due to war or famine or disaster. Others have escaped their nation so their paperwork changed, but not their nationalitiy – say Alonso. In a global word questions of national identity will be both more common and less useful.

The word American captures both an identity and a holding of papers. Some USMNT players may not consider themselves within both sets. That’s ok.

It’s also OK to question their affinity to the people here.

Which I touched on receiving for Christmas in your book rec thread. One of the first subjects it explores is how xenophobia and classism restrict club and country from being successful, specifically in England, but really in every country.

If someone from another country has a good idea, do you shun the idea because it isn’t from your country? What about race? What about income level? What about city? What about building? At some point everyone has to realize we’re all humans, and competing is fun, and drawing up imaginary lines to base our rivalries about is great, but that’s all it is. Tactics will always be affected by physical attributes, so it’ll rarely be one flavor worldwide though mimicry will happen, other than defending a code of morals, everything else should get stuffed as it’s discriminatory, stubborn, overly prideful, and it’ll result in poorer performance.

Sure Klinsmann is going to make changes at every level, sure everything is going to be different, but an American born coach would’ve done the same. Change happens, cheese gets moved, some will get hurt, can’t please everyone, shouldn’t try to, and it’s still a bit early to lynch Klinsmann, not that I’m thrilled with the team’s performance under him so far, any changes he makes will take months if not years to come to full effect.

Besides, we’re America, we’re a melting pot, we should be proud of our diversity and open mindedness if anything.

Can national identity really be explained by a non-national?
Perhaps. Alexis de Tocqueville did a pretty good job in his day.

Furthermore does a national team in a global era need to represent its nation? By “represent,” do you mean American racial, cultural and economic make-up?
I don’t think that’s possible. Americans don’t really agree on our values. We want to put the best team we can on the field, first. If they happen to be a diverse group great! And if they’re a WINNER, even better!!

Or is it just there to win as many games as possible playing dual national mercenaries?
Depends on the values of those making team decisions. If they adopt a win-at-all-costs mentality, that’s probably what you’d get. Klinsi might be under some pressure, but the USMNT barely makes the nightly news.

I believe if the financial reward for a soccer career was as lucrative as could be for a career in gridiron, baseball or basketball, we’d see more ‘home-grown’ talent.

Investment in soccer is what will make soccer better in the long term.

Some may say, "Why is there a Kyle Beckerman right now occupying the No. 6 (defensive midfielder) role, when we have Jermaine Jones playing for Schalke or Michael (Bradley) in Verona and they’re really good players?"
Right now, what I tell (Beckerman) to do, he’s doing it 100 percent.

That reads to me like he’s implying neither Jones nor Bradley have bought in, and tat he thinks Beckerman is an eager beaver, which is kind of obvious from how he plays in my opinion.

I love everything else he’s talking about in the interview, seems to be really well versed in some of the bigger current global soccer topics like Athletes Performance.

In my eyes, this isn’t in any way a unique issue. Nani plays for Portugal, was born in Cape Verde. God knows how many Scotland and Wales eligible players have chosen England instead, or how many African players have chosen to play all over Europe. Hell, if you want to see how things can cut both ways, think about how much better the USMNT would be if Giuseppe Rossi and/or Neven Subotic were on board. Those two alone might be enough to make the US a borderline top-10 team rather than the 25-20 range they currently inhabit.

Opportunism of this type just isn’t at all uncommon and it’s something I don’t even really notice. FIFA has their rules, and though they may be flawed in the macro sense there are plenty of 100% justifiable reasons for them in the micro sense. I don’t see an objective way of making them significantly fairer, and that being the case I just don’t know if it’s worth getting all that upset about. Yeah, international football is in a lot of ways a worse version of club football with stricter roster rules and more widespread fanbases. There are ways to correct for a lot of the problems, but none of them are likely to avoid the creation of new and greater problems without a fundamental rethinking of FIFA’s roster rules. Would that be a good idea? Probably, yeah. But I don’t really get the impression that’s the kind of thing Zimmerman is complaining about.

Both on Sounders and the national team.

Hadn’t read it before and it was awesome.