What do Qatar bring to the Gold Cup?

 

The 2021 CONCACAF Gold Cup is set to kick off on July 10th, with a qualifying round starting on July 2nd to settle the final three spots in the 16-team group stage. In the field you have your usual suspects; Mexico, USA, Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, etc. But you'll also spot in Group D the return of an old Gold Cup tradition; the guest team. This time around it is 2022 Men's World Cup hosts Qatar, who are making their Gold Cup debut.

Qatar are a very often misunderstood team in this part of the world, so I wanted to bring a little clarity to what exactly they bring to the Gold Cup this year. 

They're good. Real good. Much talk has been made about how Qatar will be likely the worst team to ever host the World Cup, but over the past few years I think they have certainly shown they are very much at a World Cup level. Qatar are actually the reigning Asian champions, having won the 2019 AFC Asian Cup in dominating fashion. It might even be fair to say that their performance in 2019 was the most dominating in the history of the Asian continental championships. 

In that tournament, Qatar won 7 out of 7 matches, scored 19 goals, and conceded just once, to Japan in the final. They beat 2018 World Cup participants Saudi Arabia (2-0), South Korea (1-0), and Japan (3-1) and thrashed the UAE 4-0 in the semifinals. They were far and away the best team in Asia, a confederation that at the top is often measured to be at a similar level to Concacaf. It's very fair to say at the time Qatar were on par even with Mexico.

Almoez Ali scored nine goals at that tournament, and his partner in crime Akram Afif had 10 assists. A total of 8 Qataris made the team of the tournament.

They've got experience. Besides for their Asian Cup run, this generation of players also were able to play in the 2019 Copa America later that year, where they didn't fare nearly as well, finishing with only one point. To be fair, it was a tough group; they drew Paraguay and lost 1-0 to Colombia and 2-0 to Argentina.

The experience of traveling to the Americas to play an international tournament will not be a new one for many of these players, though of course they've never done so during a pandemic. But having a better feel for the travel and schedule can't hurt, and their group of Honduras, Panama and Grenada certainly is much weaker than what they faced in Brazil 2019.

They aren't bending the rules. Much fuss has been made in the past about Qatar naturalizing athletes from other countries to compete at the Olympics and in other sports, and this has carried over to football. Many people upon hearing that Qatar dominated the Asian Cup wanted to know which Brazilians had moved over there. I think talking about the rules on naturalizing citizens is a dicey discussion, but we actually don't have to get deep into it here because Qatar's football team isn't really built that way.

Of the 11 starters from that Asian Cup run, seven were born in Qatar and two more moved there when they were toddlers (one of those two, young star Almoez Ali, is also eligible through his Qatari born mother). Simply put, the criticisms of them abusing the rule about naturalized citizens are made up. And of course this is to say nothing of the fact that international football is a game played by international citizens, and many (most!) national teams have taken to recruiting dual nationals and naturalizing players. There is nothing wrong with that; but even if there were, Qatar are hardly the worst offenders.

There are lots of things to be mad at Qatari World Cup organizers about, but there is nothing villainous about the football team itself. Unless you are a big Japan fan, I suppose. Hopefully they bring with them some of their early 2019 form and put on a good show. How far will they go? It's conceivable that they win the whole thing, but it's also more than possible they flunk out of a strong group with Honduras and Panama. I'll pencil them in as losing a tight quarterfinal match-up against Mexico.

Concacaf WCQ: First Round Rambles, Second Round Hype

An Anticlimactic First Round?

The first round of 2022 World Cup qualification in the Concacaf region is complete. Emerging victorious from the six groups are El Salvador, Canada, Curacao, Panama, Haiti, and the surprise St. Kitts and Nevis. Across the four rounds of play, there was a lot of good football played and I thought it was a lot of fun. 

I find myself writing about competition formats quite frequently, probably too frequently, but I am going to do so again here anyway. I don't really think that this format was a fair or fun way to decide who advances and who doesn't. Ignoring the byes given to the top five teams (which I largely have no issue with), there is just something that doesn't feel quite right about how this group stage ended.

On the final day, we had five group deciding matches being played. In all five of them, the group favorite was at home, only needing a draw to advance. Canada, Haiti, El Salvador, and Panama all won anyway, while only Curacao actually coasted to a 0-0 draw to advance. Now don't get me wrong, I think that ultimately the best team won every group and nobody can really feel too hard done, but I'm not sure that Pot 1 hosting Pot 2 on the final matchday is really giving a fair shot to those Pot 2 teams. Would things have gone differently if it was Suriname hosting Canada? (For what its worth, Canada was not in Canada, of course.)

The Pot 1 teams were presumably given this as an advantage for being seeded; but being seeded is itself the advantage. To also give the top seeds a big advantage in the match against their only strong competition is a little much in my opinion. Compounding with this issue is the fact that goal difference was the all-important tiebreaker. Normally it is a logical tiebreaker, but in these circumstances where the big teams are running up the score on Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands, it seems a bit silly to have it play such a critical role. Guatemala crushed their opposition, did not concede any goals, and went on the road to Curacao and did not lose, but they are out because Curacao beat up the weak teams a tad more.

I don't think it made for a particularly exciting final day from the fan perspective, either. All the top teams only had to hold serve and we all knew that was almost certainly going to happen. It just worked out that both possible outcomes were not going to be very thrilling; El Salvador comfortably beating Antigua in a relatively full Cuscatlán was nothing special nor was Curacao grinding out a 0-0 draw.

Ultimately, like I said, I think Curacao are the better team and have the much better shot at beating Panama, and it has to be said that Guatemala definitely *could* have beaten Curacao and then they wouldn't need me to make this excuse for them, but I feel it was a little bit of an anticlimactic way to go out. Is it fair? Maybe? But hey, even if it wasn't, we got the "fair" results so I can't complain. Anyway, the second round promises to be more exciting, and the octagonal promises to be even more exciting than that, so I don't want to sound too negative.

Looking Ahead

The second round takes place later this month, and has a much simpler win and you're in format. The two legged ties for a place in the octagonal will be as follows: 

St. Kitts and Nevis vs El Salvador

Haiti vs Canada

Panama vs Curacao

St. Kitts did great to get this far, seizing their moment in a weaker group and defeating Guyana to clinch before the final match even started. But over two legs, it is hard to see them dealing with El Salvador, who are eager to get into the final round after having been removed from it due to the format change.

Haiti vs Canada is an exciting storyline as a rematch of the best game of the 2019 Gold Cup and one of the best games in Gold Cup history. Canada come in looking awfully good while Haiti have been just decent when compared to the 2019 version of themselves. I believe Canada will win this one, but hopefully Haiti can give us another classic.

Panama vs Curacao is an interesting series that is tough to call. Both teams have World Cup dreams and to fall out before even making the octagonal would be a miniature disaster, but only one can move on. Panama really labored through the March window, just squeaking past Barbados and Dominica but they really put the hurt on the DR in the game that mattered the most. Curacao did quite the opposite, they looked so strong throughout the round but in the decider against Guatemala just barely skated by. I'll take Panama, but not by much.

USL League Two, Player Development, and Supporting Local Soccer

Hello everyone, I return! Had a very busy spring but now am going to try to do a few posts here and there during this exciting Gold Cup/Nations League/WCQ summer. We're back today to discuss the USL League Two, an interesting lower league in the United States with a very not-interesting name. Oh how I wept when the USL decided to name its three leagues the Championship, League One, and League Two. But despite my grumbles about copying an English naming scheme, I like the USL League Two a lot. It's a great source of local soccer and I have found myself going to few games in the area every summer (besides last year, obviously) for a while now. 

There are around 80 League Two clubs scattered across the US as of right now, and they play a 14-game regular season that culminates in a 16 team playoff tournament from May-July. But after going to a few games this past month (my first three events since the pandemic hit!), I wanted to talk about where the USL2 stands in the US soccer world. The venerable sage of Concacaf, Jon Arnold, wrote last year about the relationship between minor league soccer and minor league baseball. It's well worth your time if you haven't read it before.

To continue with that same school of thought, if the USLC and USL1 are in some ways the new minor league baseball, then the USL2 is a combination of all the famous wood-bat collegiate baseball leagues across North America. It is a league stocked mostly by college players looking to maintain NCAA eligibility, though there are a few veterans from pro teams or just older amateurs on many rosters as well. But why does every baseball fan know what the Cape Cod League is, and not many soccer fans (even fans of American soccer) know about the USL League Two?

This is the question I have been asking myself over the past week. Here we have a strong developmental league that produces MLS draft pick after MLS draft pick, and yet even MLS diehards do not seem to care. Going to many of these games around New Jersey, the crowds are mostly parents and local coaches, with "conventional" fans mostly only showing up to playoff matches or special event nights. Why aren't the diehard Union fans showing up in nearby South Jersey to see some of the top draft prospects? Where were the Red Bulls fans when Jersey Express (who supplied several players to the Bulls over the years) were playing games at NJIT just a mile away from Red Bull Arena? 

When I ask the question: 'why does nobody care about the USL League Two?' I of course understand why most people do not care about it. It's not supposed to be widely cared about. But while the other USL divisions flourish with the more niche soccer audience, the USL2 generally speaking, does not. There are a few exceptions of course. The highly successful Mid-Michigan Bucks, after moving to Flint in 2019, drew crowds of 5000+. And in Des Moines, which lacks a pro-team, the Menace have had averaged a few thousand fans for decades. But these cases are few and far between.

Now one thing that people are going to say about a league that feeds into the MLS draft pool is that, well, the MLS draft is mostly a worthless endeavor with the exception of a handful of players at the top. In reality, the MLS draft stocks the USL Championship, not MLS. But can the same not be said about the Cape Cod League and the MLB draft? There are literally thousands of players drafted into organized baseball every year, and only a small percentage of them ever make the big leagues. So the Cape Cod League (or any moderately successful collegiate summer league) boasting about how many MLB draft picks they have among their ranks is ultimately not that impressive, yet those boasts draw in respectable crowds. The USL League Two makes similar boasts (75% of the players drafted in 2020 played in the USL2), yet it does not draw in fans the same way.

I don't really have a grandiose point to make about the USL League Two, but I feel like this conversation is worth having. US Soccer fandom seems to emphasize local soccer so much; fans love to talk about what it means to support their local club and after the recent Super League debacle I think fans all over the world have taken a closer look at what they can do to support the local game instead of the big boys. And yet, the USL League Two, a fantastic product with an interesting player pool, cheap tickets (often free tickets), and a summer schedule that largely doesn't conflict with European or Mexican leagues, doesn't seem to be gaining any traction. 

If you have a local League Two club, and unless you live in Montana you most likely do, I really recommend checking out a game this summer and seeing how it is. Thank you as always for reading, and enjoy this week of Nations League and World Cup qualifying!