With disappointment overtaking soccer fans following multiple failures by the U.S. Men’s National Team (USMNT) despite coaching and personnel changes, with no relief in sight, U.S. soccer legend and Fox soccer analyst Alexei Lalas believes the team should become more “exclusive” and less “inclusive.”
In short, he believes the USMNT’s diversity is not only not its strength, but it’s actually a weakness.
“We oftentimes talk about our diversity, and we talk about it in the fact that it is one of the advantages we have, and of the great things about our country,” Lalas said on First Things First. “But with that diversity comes diversity of thought. If I go and ask a hundred soccer people out there, ‘What’s beautiful soccer?’ I’m going to get a hundred different answers. And it might be based on ethnicity, where you grew up, even geography. All of these different things.
“So I’ve argued that the homogenous nature of some other countries and cultures just in population in terms of size are much more manageable. And there is a collective understanding and, more importantly, an agreement in this is how we’re going to play. But getting 11 men to represent this great country of 350 million people, and all be on the same page, that is very, very difficult.”
Lalas then offered a competing vision for the future of the USMNT, a team built more by what players have in common, rather than a “melting pot.”
“I’ve argued before that maybe our best route to actually being better from a men’s perspective in soccer is actually being more exclusive, not being as inclusive,” Lalas explained. “In that if you went to the New York metropolitan area or Southern California and you just took players that all grew up in the same area, had all this shared experiences, maybe that would be better in terms of an understanding.
“This melting pot fallacy that I’ll be the first to admit, I bought into. And I’m not saying it can’t happen. It just takes a lot longer and with a lot more work. And especially when it comes to a national team, you don’t have time to be able to do that.”
There are points and counterpoints to Lalas’ assertion. Some will point to the success of the recent French teams to suggest that a diverse roster of players with differing backgrounds can be successful. However, one can look at the recent success of the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT), a group that was not overwhelmingly diverse, and see that a team with players of similar backgrounds can also win.
Either way, the key to winning is having good players and good coaches. You can be as diverse or homogeneous as you want, but if you don’t have the best players and coaches, you won’t win.
