The All-Time USMNT Starting Eleven

Who is the Babe Ruth of soccer?

Next up is a request from Matt: “I’d love to see a newsletter where you pick a best 11 all time for the men’s and women’s US national teams”. I don’t think I have enough knowledge about the history of the USWNT to do that idea justice, so I’m just gonna stick with the USMNT for this exercise.

These selections are based on a combination of performance for club and country. Equal weight is given to both, but to make the team you needed a track record of success at both levels. Please let me know why I’m wrong. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said about moneyed interests in politics, “I welcome [your] hatred”.

Striker: Billy Gonsalves

For a very brief period of time, American soccer might’ve been the pinnacle of the global game. In the 1920’s, American industry was booming, as was immigration. In the northeast, the American Soccer League had been formed, and many of the teams were funded by various industrial titans and the occasional crime bosses of the day. The Bethlehem Steel Corp. absorbed its recreational team and turned it into one of the more successful ASL sides. The level of play was relatively high because of all of the European immigrants, but there were two other financial factors: 1) The booming economy allowed these teams to pay their players more than the biggest European clubs, and  2) no one, at the time, was making a full-time living playing soccer, so all of the factory-affiliated teams were able to give their players additional income by employing them at the factories. At its height, the league had upwards of 50 European internationals, and with the money and the high-level of play on offer, ASL teams would frequently just steal players from Europe, no matter what kind of contracts they were under across the Atlantic. The league eventually folded, thanks in part to stricter immigration laws, the Depression, and a bunch of petty squabbles among decision-makers, but these games were briefly bringing in crowds of 20,000 people per match. 

We need one at least one player from this era on our team, and the two weak-spots of this imaginary side are striker and left fullback. Fullbacks barely existed in the 20s, so instead we’re going with a guy who only had six caps and scored just one goal for the US. However, there weren’t as many international games back then, and Gonsalves (left, above) did appear in two World Cups (1930 and 34) -- bonus points for his importance-of-appearance efficiency. Gonsalves played for a number of clubs, most notably the Fall River Marksmen. He won eight U.S. Open Cup titles and three ASL Championships. After a friendly against Celtic, in which Gonsalves scored a hat trick, the Celtic manager called him the best player he’d ever seen. Jack Hynes, a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame, said: “Pelé could hit a ball, but he was nothing compared to Billy Gonsalves. Billy could hit a ball and make it fly. He was the greatest.” And maybe his nickname summed it up best: They called him “The Babe Ruth of Soccer”.

Attacking Midfielders: Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, and Christian Pulisic

These were the easiest picks on the list. In terms of the grand scope of a full career, Donovan and Dempsey are the two best American players ever. They’re tied for the lead in goals -- 57 -- and they’re both top four in total caps.

Dempsey gets the nod for the better club career. He played in the Premier League for seven seasons, including an absolutely fantastic 2010-11 campaign in which he scored 16 non-penalty goals and assisted six more for a mid-table Fulham side. Only Robin Van Persie, Wayne Rooney, Sergio Aguero, and Emmanuel Adebayor contributed to more goals that season. The year before, he did this to Juventus:

That big season earned him a move to Tottenham, where he only lasted one year, but it was a pretty good year! He scored seven and assisted five -- only Gareth Bale contributed to more goals per 90 minutes for Spurs that season. Also: never forget that Brendan Rodgers tried to use Jordan Henderson as a makeweight to bring Clint Dempsey to Liverpool.

Donovan, meanwhile, endured a bunch of high-profile European failures -- first at Bayer Leverkusen, then with Bayern Munich -- but his World Cup record is the best of any American. In 2002, he won the Best Young Player award. Just to give you a sense of the company he’s keeping: The winners since are Lukas Podolski, Thomas Muller, Paul Pogba, and Kylian Mbappe. The 2006 tournament was a disaster for just about everyone other than Dempsey, but Donovan’s 2010 tournament is what data analysts like to call “unfuckwithable”. He scored one of the great American goals ... in consecutive games. First, he roofed the ball from no-angle to start the comeback against Slovenia, then he scored the go-go-USA winner against Algeria that put the USMNT atop the group. And then he scored the tying penalty against Ghana in the Round of 16. He’s the country’s leader in World Cup goals and appearances. I still can’t believe Jurgen Klinsmann didn’t take him to the tournament in 2014.

Donovan also proved he could contribute at the highest level with two successful loan stints at Everton on either side of the 2010 World Cup. He dropped into the team midseason both times and either scored or assisted a goal every 90 minutes. That ain’t easy, folks! MLS was below his level, but it’s not like he coasted through each season, either. He throttled the league, year in and year out, scoring 145 goals and assisting 104 more in 340 games. 

Perhaps Donovan and Dempsey represented the two poles of American soccer. Donovan was the academy-bred, polished prospect who followed his own path, rather than the one everyone else wanted from him. Dempsey, meanwhile, was always set to snarl and as Bruce Arena once put it, he simply just tried shit. Plus, he played with the same chip on his shoulder that so many US fans felt when they supported their team.

Christian Pulisic, then, is a combination of the two. He came through Europe’s elite finishing school -- the Borussia Dortmund academy -- but he also possesses the Dempseyian traits of on-the-fly creativity and an always-simmering, low-level anger. He’s already achieved more than any American player ever has: He’s been an elite-level attacker for two of the best clubs in the world. And while he’s only got 34 caps for his country, he’s been the best per-minute player in USMNT history, too. Pulisic has essentially played 21 competitive games for the US -- Gold Cup, Nations League, and World Cup qualifiers -- and he’s scored 11 goals and assisted 10. So long as he stays healthy, it seems like American soccer finally has its first superstar. He doesn’t turn 22 until September.

Center Midfielders: Claudio Reyna and Michael Bradley

The two best midfielders of the two most-recent generations get these two slots. I really wanted to pick John O’Brien, and even though I make the rules here, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Donovan called O’Brien “the best soccer player in the USA”. He left the US for Ajax at age 17, and he scored in the win over Portugal and assisted in the draw against South Korea at the 2002 World Cup. He struggled with injuries, only played one 2,000-plus minute season for Ajax, and retired before he turned 30. But he played every minute of the 2002 tournament, when the US made it further than they ever have within the expanded format of the World Cup.

However, in 2002, Claudio Reyna was named to the all-tournament team, something no American had done since the 50’s and something no American has done since. Really, he was the first American-born field player to make a full-time career out of playing at the top level in Europe. The country has never had a passer at the level of Reyna, and part of me wonders if he didn’t come along like five or ten years too soon. The smooth-passing midfielder came back into style right around 2008, or right around when Reyna retired. Maybe his CV would’ve had something glossier than Wolfsburg, Rangers, Sunderland, and pre-UAE Manchester City. He was brilliant in the 2002 loss against Germany -- a game the US really should have won. Bonus points for helping birth a son who might be on the list if we do this again in 10 or 15 years.

As for the other spot, perhaps John Harkes should be an option. A national-team captain, he’s the first American player to play in the Premier League. He’s also the first American player to score a screamer in the English first division while sporting a truly exquisite mullet. You just don’t see this kind of shit anymore:

Unfortunately, Harkes falls out of contention because he ... slept with teammate Eric Wynalda’s then-wife and was left off the 1998 World Cup team because of it! C’mon, John. 

Anyway, even without the intra-team marital indiscretion of a predecessor, Michael Bradley would be the pick here. He was ever-present for the US for a decade, and his runs from deep were invaluable for a team that A) tended toward conservative personnel, B) lacked a central creative passer, and C) often played strikers who tended not to score goals. The team always seemed to struggle to find the right partner for him, partially because he was capable of playing a number of roles -- from the 10 all the way back to the 6 -- but he was at his best when he was breaking play up, pushing the ball forward, and making runs into the penalty area. Much like Reyna, he was able to establish himself as a starter across a number of different leagues: the Eredivisie, then the Bundesliga, and then in Serie A. Once he was back in MLS, he played for arguably the best team in the history of the league. Also, he scored the best goal in USMNT history:

He’s third all-time in caps, he’s scored 17 goals, and according to Transfermarkt, only Landon Donovan tops his mark of 21 assists. Peak Michael Bradley was good at just about everything.

Defense: Steve Cherundolo, Eddie Pope, Thomas Dooley, Carlos Bocanegra

Cherundolo and Pope are two of the most consistent players in the history of the program. If either one was healthy, they were starting. Cherundolo earned 87 caps, Pope 82. The former wasn’t necessarily a game-breaking, field-stretching modern fullback -- there aren’t many of those, no matter what country we’re talking about -- but he made a career out of not making mistakes in or out of possession. He’s a club legend at Hanover in Germany, where he played 12 seasons and served as club captain in the final four. The team finished in the top half of the Bundesliga table in more than half of his seasons. They call him the “Mayor of Hannover.” That seems nice. 

Pope, meanwhile, is the American player I most wish I got to see play in Europe. Reportedly, he turned down plenty of opportunities to go abroad, and he was just such a consistent player that it’s hard to picture him not being successful ... in whatever alternate reality I create in my head. Pressing wasn’t in style yet, but it would've been fun to see him marshal the space in behind a high defensive line.

Dooley gets the third nod for a couple of reasons: 1) We needed someone from the 90s in this team, and 2) he’s the only American, to my knowledge, who played a substantial number of minutes for a team that won a domestic title in Europe’s Big Five leagues. Dooley made 199 appearances in the Bundesliga, scoring 20 goals and assisting a further seven. In 1990-91, he played over 2,000 minutes for Kaiserslautern as they won the Bundesliga. I really can’t think of too many other US players who were ever good enough to start for a title-winning team in Europe. Born in Germany, with a serviceman American father, supposedly Dooley didn’t even speak English when the USMNT first recruited him in 1992, but he played every minute at the 1994 World Cup and then captained the team (after the dismissal of Harkes) at the 1998 tournament. This is what professional soccer players used to look like:

The final spot goes to Bocanegra, who captained the team for six years despite the presence of Donovan and Dempsey and Bradley and others. I’m cheating a bit, but I feel as though my attempted bamboozlement is fitting. The US has always struggled to fill the left-back slot; a friend and recent podcast guest suggested I just leave the spot empty. Cruel. Demarcus Beasley was another option, but he only played in this position late in his career; his national-team heights came ... higher up the field. Bocanegra, though, played out wide from time to time both with his various clubs and with the USMNT. He captained Fulham and Rangers, and he also played a handful of successful midtable seasons in France with Rennes and Saint Etienne. Apparently, Fulham fans called him both “The Jackal” and “The Black Snake”. Not sure what’s going on there; maybe Nic Cage gets the role in his biopic. Anyway, Bocanegra holds the record for most goals (17) by a USMNT defender, he won over 100 caps, and he was gonna be on this team no matter what happened with the left-back slot.

Keeper: Brad Friedel

The hardest choice on this list, and the glut of keepers just goes to show you how silly and random international soccer is. The USMNT's deepest position for a generation just happened to be the only position where only one player gets to play at a time.

Kasey Keller was a fixture in the English and German midtable -- for Leicester City, Tottenham, Borussia Monchengladbach -- for over a decade. He started for the USMNT at two World Cups and he also probably put together the greatest individual goalkeeping performance in the history of the program:

Tim Howard made roughly 800 saves against Belgium in a Round of 16 match, got a call from President Obama, became a meme for about a week, and also spent about 10 years as one of the better keepers in the English Premier League. Manchester United bought him to replace Fabien Barthez the summer after they won a league title, and while that ultimately didn’t work out, he was a mainstay for an Everton team that finished in the top six in half of his seasons with the club. He has more clean sheets in the Premier League than Peter Schmeichel or Edwin van der Sar.

And yet, Friedel is the answer. I unfortunately have no great data to back this up, but Friedel in 2002 -- when he saved two penalties -- was better than Howard in either 2010 or ‘14 or Keller in ‘98 or 2006. Plus, Friedel holds the record for most games in the Premier League by an American, and only 22 players of any nationality have played more matches. He has fewer caps than Howard or Keller, but I think his peak-level excellence combined with his incredible longevity gives him the edge over the other two. Plus, he was a stud for a number of different just-outside-the-top-4 clubs and a therefore in a number of different systems, unlike Howard, who did it all for Everton. It’s a shame that they all had to play the same position.