COUVA, Trinidad (AP) – When men’s soccer holds its world’s fair in Russia next June, the American pavilion will be glaringly absent.
A bumbling, stumbling, tumbling World Cup qualifying campaign ended Tuesday night with a calamitous 2-1 loss to already eliminated Trinidad and Tobago, the 99th-ranked nation in the world, when merely a tie was necessary to eke out the final automatic World Cup berth from one of soccer’s weakest regions.
“Unacceptable,” tweeted former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a U.S. Soccer Federation board member. “For us in USSoccer more than a wake-up call. Time for revolution. Need long term plan that is smart.”
After American soccer’s Waterloo, the fallout almost surely will lead to a new coach and possibly a new USSF head. There also figure to be calls for a reexamination of the player development structure, from youth teams through academies designed with the hope of producing elite prospects.
“There is no denying that this is a setback for all of us involved with the game in our country,” Major League Soccer said in a statement.