Generations, Lost and Golden
Did the USMNT suffer through lost generation? Are they in the midst of a golden one?
Lost Generation?
It seems like I’ve been hearing about the USMNT’s “lost generation” forever, so long that I wasn’t able to recall when it first started. Based on some quick Googling, the earliest example I can find was actually a 2014 complaint by former USMNT head coach Jurgen Klinsmann, referencing the US’s failure to qualify for the 2012 Olympics. Klinsmann continued his lamentations in 2016, referencing DeAndre Yedlin as the main exception from his group to move on to play in Europe at a young age. The discussion really picked up steam after the US failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.
There have been lots of great pieces trying to explain why we suffered from this lost generation. But from the beginning, I’ve always been more intrigued by the question: did we actually have a lost generation? To answer that, we’d need to know what qualifies as a lost generation. What is a “generation” in soccer? While we’re considering lost generations, we should also decide what passes for a golden generation. So, like the formula, I decided to come up with some definitions and put together some data and see what pops out.
What’s a “Generation” in regards to the national team?
In its normal usage, a generation refers to a cohort of people born during a certain time period, usually somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Obviously that doesn’t work in soccer. I started by wondering if a single birth year should be a generation. That seemed too small, and definitely didn’t match up with the way people were talking about the lost generation as some amorphous grouping of birth years.
Next, I considered grouping five birth years to create a generation. This felt closer to the way people were using the term, but something about it still didn’t feel right.
Eventually, I decided to look to the way FIFA divides age groups. With U-17, U-20, and U-23 teams leading up to senior national teams, it just made the most sense to use that cohort of three birth years that are eligible for the Olympics, but too old for the U-20 World Cup, and use that as our soccer generation. But how do we talk about these generations? What labels do we use?
Label-Maker
If you talk to serious youth soccer experts, they’ll tell you we don’t need new labels. The 2003s are the oldest group who can play in the upcoming 2023 U-20 World Cup, and most squads will consist of 2003s, 2004s, and 2005s. But that’s too clunky, I wanted a collective label to use for that entire group together. My initial idea was a little sillier and was a riff on pop culture, and it’s the label system I used for years in my spreadsheet. Eventually, I decided to go with something a little more neutral before I shared it with the rest of the USMNT community, and I finally settled on the NATO phonetic alphabet.
I used that 03-04-05 grouping as the foundation, worked my way back to the oldest player I could find with at least 10 confirmed USMNT caps, and made his three-year grouping ALFA, the players born in 1916, 1917, and 1918. The next three years became BRAVO, and on down the list. When I got past ZULU, Kellyn Acosta became the ALFA-2 player with the most caps. And in the 2022 CONCACAF qualifier at the Azteca in Mexico, Ricardo Pepi became the first DELTA-2 with at least 10 caps.
So now that we have players divided into generations, how do we evaluate those groups against each other?
What makes a Legend?
You could just look at the total number of players from a given generation who ever played for the national team. You could make a simple graph showing the total number of caps each generation has contributed. Neither of those options seemed very interesting, and neither really captured enough information to allow us to compare and contrast. I eventually decided to create tiers based on how many caps a given player has for the USMNT. Once you have everyone sorted into generations and tiers, it allows you to get a feeling, at a glance, for both the quantity and quality that a given generation has contributed.
After getting every player in a spreadsheet with their number of caps and their birthdates, I decided where each tier would cut off. I also settled on names for each tier (although I went through several iterations, and I’m still somewhat open to alternate suggestions).
I have 191 players with 1 to 9 caps. These players are still being tracked, but they don’t get a tier name. Next, following CONCACAF qualifying for the 2022 World Cup, there are 114 players with 10 to 24 caps. This is the first named tier, and I’m currently calling them Associates. Sixty-three players have 25 to 49 caps, and they are the Veterans. Twenty-five players have 50 to 74 caps, and they are the Masters. Fourteen players have 75 to 99 caps, and they have my least favorite label, the Grandmasters. Finally, with at least 100 caps, we have the Legends. There are currently 17 Legends, with DeAndre Yedlin the active player closest to joining, sitting at 73.
What’s next?
Starting next Friday, I’ll have a post looking at each generation in detail. We’ll begin with the oldest generation to have a member play in a “modern” World Cup, the NOVEMBERs (1955 to 1957). We’ll then move forward in time each week until we get to the youngest generation currently on the board, the DELTA-2s. After that I’ll loop back to the older groups, until we’ve covered everyone. Then we’ll have to decide what a “normal” generation looks like, so we can judge whether a given group is golden, lost, or just somewhere in the middle.