Big Blue View
Seeing TV highlights of World Cup soccer (excuse me, football) matches at a nearly unrecognizable MetLife Stadium (excuse me, New York New Jersey Stadium) the past month, and watching the US Men’s National Team games played on the west coast, got me to thinking about parallels between that team and the New York Giants. For a moment I thought it was too far-fetched to write about (and that may well be the case, you can be the judge). What tipped the scales for me, though, was this tweet on X during the USMNT’s awful loss to Belgium that ended their World Cup:
The more I thought about it, the more parallels I found. Just for fun (well, it may not be fun to think about if you’re an optimistic fan of either team), let’s look at a few.
Unlike the Giants, who have four Super Bowl rings, the USMNT has never won a World Cup. Still, they have usually qualified for the World Cup, and they had a good run in 2002 (only 6 World Cups ago). The exception was 2018, when the USMNT could not even get out of their qualifying CONCACAF group (which includes North America, Central America, and the Caribbean nations, none of whom have been serious threats to actually win a World Cup since the US finished third in 1930). Like the 2021 Giants, who were coming off a promising first season under head coach Joe Judge, the 2018 USMNT had high hopes for getting to the World Cup that year and making noise when they got there.
We know what happened to that Giants team. By season’s end they were afraid to do anything but run the ball in Chicago, and then at home vs. Washington they lined up in “surrender formation” deep in their own territory rather than even trying to get a first down. Judge was gone soon after. The 2018 USMNT under coach Jurgen Klinsmann, which had reached the second round in 2014, had a dispiriting home loss to Mexico in qualifying and were shut out in Costa Rica. Then Klinsmann was replaced by former coach Bruce Arena, and with a World Cup berth on the line, lost at lowly Trinidad and Tobago and did not qualify.
Brian Daboll replaced Judge as Giants head coach and had immediate success in 2022, leading them to the playoffs and even a playoff win in Minnesota. The Giants were exposed, though, the following week in Philadelphia, and it was all downhill from there until Daboll’s firing in mid-season last year. The autopsy on Daboll’s tenure was that the first year success was a mirage, with wins coming mainly against bad teams or usually good teams having mediocre seasons. The USMNT in 2022 turned to Gregg Berhalter (who had already coached them once). Berhalter got the team through CONCACAF qualifying and into the World Cup, an immediate improvement over the 2018 result. The USMNT even made it through the...
