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| Thursday, March 21, 2002 18:33 EST |
MLS has big impact on national team
By Marc Connolly
[ABC Sports Online]
Getting to the second round of the World Cup in 1994 was an astounding accomplishment on many levels for the U.S. National Team.
Forget about the home-field advantage or the fact that Bora’s boys didn’t have to go through qualifying. It may have taken eight years of distance from their glorious run to that fateful Fourth of July match against Brazil to fully realize what a big accomplishment it was because of one fact that tops all others:
Major League Soccer didn’t exist back then.
Chris Armas has blossomed into a vital player for the national team because of his experience in MLS. |
Let the critics and the haters and the TV rating mongrels and the Euro snobs say whatever they want about MLS. Let them bash the play, the ever-changing rules and playoff formats and some of the inexplicable signings of foreign players. That’s up for debate. But what no one can ever deny is the immense impact that Major League Soccer has had on bettering the U.S. National Team in both quality and quantity in six seasons of existence.
“MLS has helped us considerably,” said U.S. head coach Bruce Arena, who coached in the league in its first four years with D.C. United. “Right now, we’re down to about a 35-man pool, and I would think approximately 23 of those players are from MLS,
so it shows the kind of numbers MLS has been able to provide for the National Team program and the depth that we now have.”
Of course, the U.S. has produced many players who never would have needed MLS. All the phenoms coming out of high school such as John Harkes, Tab Ramos and Claudio Reyna had several options in leagues all over the world, and were able to jump right to the National Team at a young age to further make a name for themselves. The same can be said for players such as Landon Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley, who were able to make names for themselves via the youth National Teams.
Yet, as good as Donovan is -- Bruce Arena said on Wednesday that he’s “as good as any 20-year-old in the world” - he believes that he wouldn’t be a regular on the National Team had he stayed in Germany as a reserve player for Bayer Leverkusen. It was his move one year ago to the San Jose Earthquakes that changed everything for the attacking midfielder/striker.
“I have had the best year of my life and I hope that this year is even better,” said Donovan. “I’m playing games in the Champions Cup, I’m playing against foreign teams, and I’m playing with the National Team. Without me playing in MLS, none of that would happen. If I was in Germany, I wouldn’t be talking to you today.”
Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldn’t have. Regardless, Donovan would have been looked at as the cornerstone of the future to build around heading towards both the 2006 and 2010 World Cups. The same can’t be said for several players who needed MLS, such as defensive midfielder Chris Armas. Now an absolutely essential cog in the U.S. starting 11, do you think he would have made the National Team from his performances with the Long Island Rough Riders back in 1995?
“Armas would probably be working in a bank right now without MLS,” said Arena.
That’s where the league has done wonders - for the late-bloomers and the players who needed to find the right coach or the right mix of players to fully realize their potential and move on to the National Team.
Clint Mathis, the most explosive goal scorer the U.S. has when he’s healthy, is certainly one of those players who needed some seasoning in MLS before he was discovered as someone who could play at the international level.
Mathis believes that MLS helped his game tremendously the past four seasons since he left the University of South Carolina as the program’s third all-time leading scorer.
“I think that the league has enabled us to play on a consistently high level day-in and day-out,” he said. “Soccer has grown in the past few years, and the level of play has gotten better in MLS and has continued to allow us to play at that level. That’s bettered not only our league play, but has continued to better the players in the league to be able to compete at the National Team level.”
Columbus Crew head coach Greg Andrulis believes that the daily grind of practices and games has especially helped those mind-range players develop.
“Being a professional on a daily basis - making it your job - as opposed to the way it was seven to 10 years ago makes it so these guys have to come out and compete on a daily basis,” he said. “Major League Soccer has provided tremendous competition, too. Certain players develop a little bit different. They’re not always at the top of their games at 19 like Landon Donovan. They get into their primes at 24 or 25. We are seeing that with guys like Richard Mulrooney and Timmy Howard.
“Our league has really done a great job of creating an environment for them to continue to hone their skills and get even better. In the past, it was go to Europe or hang around here and play in some club stuff. Our league has certainly narrowed the gap between the players who are over in Europe like an Earnie Stewart or a Claudio Reyna and the guys who are here in the United States.”
Perhaps the best example that proved this “narrowing of the gap” came at this year’s Gold Cup when a predominately MLS squad made an impressive run through the field and won the tournament without the services of European-based stalwarts like Stewart, Reyna, John O’Brien, Joe-Max Moore and Tony Sanneh.
Take away MLS and who knows what would have become of a whole slew of National Teamers. The long list includes players such as Eddie Lewis, Carlos Llamosa, Ante Razov and Sanneh who have made an impact one way or another in World Cup qualifying over the past two years after not being in the mix for World Cup ’98. Countless others have come and gone to strengthen the player pool and provide Arena a headaches worth of choices to fill-out his final 23-man roster to take to the Far East.
“In all honesty, I don’t know what we would be like right now (without MLS),” said Arena. “There wouldn’t be any questions about the roster. The question would be ‘Do you have enough players for a 23-man roster?’ We have three teenagers that are competing for this roster and that has never happened before in the history of the game in our country. That is a tribute to MLS.
“Having said that, we need to paint a picture of how MLS is going to get better in the future. In each and every World Cup, we tend to be on the old side, but for this I
think we’re probably going in with an average age of 28 or so. I think we’ll be younger in 2006 and then that much younger in 2010. I think as the league grows, the National Team grows, and the National Team will be better for it.”
Knowing how much has happened since the Yanks were upstarts in ’94 makes one wonder just where the U.S. will be positioned in another eight years, heading into the 2010 World Cup.
Let the critics and haters discuss that.
Marc Connolly is a senior writer for ABC Sports Online. He can be reached at marc.connolly@abc.com.
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