Landon Donovan is considering running for the president of the USSF. Let's assume for a second that he gets that spot. You can expect that the US will still be bad at Soccer while all of Donovan's fans walk around and complain that it is not his fault. That sounds a lot like the Presidency of Donald Trump, and if you think about it, that is a fair description. Donovan is not a leader, and he was not an all-time great player in international terms. He is just a guy with a name who marketed himself fairly well. He could hardly play in Europe, and his US teams did absolutely nothing in international play.
If that is what you want, that's what you'll have to look forward to.
That will do
Donovan's presidency would be the beginning of a "that will do" regime which simply goes back to the old ways. "Oh, we used to do it that way. That will do." That is all Donovan knows, and he is just not good enough to give us any better ideas. How can you expect someone who was not all that good to begin with to fix your program? Have you ever noticed how a lot of the best coaches were actually really good at what they did? Have you also noticed that all the other coaches got into coaching very early on because they were not stellar players? Donovan doesn't even realize that he is not that good of a soccer player in the first place.
Because of that, it might be a struggle for him to accurately identify talent.
The same old coaches
We know that the coaches the U.S. has been using are not very good. Donovan is not going to find someone else who is going to coach the program properly. He will go back to what he knows because that is all he ever did in soccer in the US.
He will pick people who do not have the guts to tell him that he is not very good, and that will make the team worse. This is a professional sport, and you need to be let go if you are not performing. We do this in every other sport, but the U.S. is terrible at soccer because we do not make decisions with our heads.
Soccer is a kids game
We have not learned our lesson in America. I want you to think about other sports around the world and how they are perceived. What is the most popular sport in England? Soccer is their favorite and happens in every town every year. Cricket comes right after that, and most of their best athletes play those two sports. They have rugby right after that, and that is what they love. American football is a kids game. Baseball is a kids game. Basketball is a kids game. We need to just accept that soccer is a kids game in the US, and we need to stop pretending like we can fix US Soccer when no one wants to play it past the age of 22.
