Reuters
It’s a scenario parts unthinkable and inevitable: The U.S. mens’ national soccer team is on the brink of missing the World Cup for the first time since 1990.
The U.S., which hosts Guatemala tonight at MapFre Stadium in Columbus, Ohio, would not be eliminated automatically if it fails to win. But a loss or tie would muddy the waters, adding pressure on the team to win its remaining matches in this stage of regional qualifying and perhaps leaving the Americans reliant on the outcomes of other teams’ games.
And so tonight’s contest — which occurs on the same day as an all-or-nothing match against Colombia to determine whether the U.S. will qualify for this summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro — represents a kind of make-or-break point for the latest incarnation of the U.S. program and its leader, the German head coach Jurgen Klinsmann.
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Friday’s 2-0 loss in Guatemala, the first-ever U.S. loss to that country, left the team behind Guatemala and Trinidad & Tobago — and ahead only of St. Vincent & the Grenadines — in group play heading into tonight’s matches. Two teams advance from each of three groups to a final stage of qualifying games.
“It makes the situation very clear,” Klinsmann said at a news conference this week. “We need to win this game.”
This is in some ways uncharted territory for the U.S. men, which has qualified for every World Cup since 1990 out of a region that, while challenging, is not at the competitive level of Europe or South America. (The U.S. women, meanwhile, remain in the familiar role of world beaters: They won the last Women’s World Cup in 2015 and qualified for this year’s Olympics in style.)
Before qualifying for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, the U.S. had not made it to the final tournament since the 1950 competition in Brazil.
With soccer in a seemingly constant battle to establish itself among major league sports in the U.S., it might suffer at least a temporary setback should the team fail to make it to the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
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Klinsmann, meanwhile, signed a four-year contract extension in December 2013 ahead of the last World Cup in Brazil. In that tournament, the U.S. advanced from a difficult group before succumbing to Belgium in the knockout stage.
The U.S. has suffered through a run of disappointing results in competitive matches: It tied Trinidad & Tobago in November, lost to Mexico in an October match that would have qualified it for the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup 2017, and fell to Jamaica in July in the semifinals of the regional championship tournament.
Sunil Gulati, president of U.S. Soccer, has said Klinsmann’s job is not guaranteed through the end of the 2018 cycle. Klinsmann, a star ex-player who also coached Germany, was a high-profile hire for the program, which has mostly employed American coaches in the post-1990 era.
Some fans and members of the media have called for the coach to lose his job. “The Jurgen Klinsmann era has been a failure and it is time for him to go,” wrote Michael Lewis, a longtime U.S. soccer journalist, after the Guatemala loss.
The team, meanwhile, is preparing for tonight’s game knowing Columbus is a friendly confine for the team, which has never lost a World Cup qualifying match in the stadium.
“We’re all there for one another,” defender Geoff Cameron said this week. “We all have the same idea. We’re doing it for this reason and it’s to go to the World Cup.
“We know how anxious we’ll be, and you want that goal to come early, but if it doesn’t you have 90 minutes to put the ball in the back of the net.”
Should the U.S. fail to qualify for Russia and Rio, the program’s focus will need to turn simultaneously toward the summer, during which the country will host a Pan-American version of the South American championship tournament Copa America, and revitalizing the program ahead of qualification for the 2022 World Cup.
