Benjamin Cremaschi scored two goals for the USA during their FIFA U-20 World Cup round-of-16 triumph over Italy on Thursday.
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While the senior United States men’s national team prepares for a pair of October friendlies, the next generation of USMNT stalwarts has secured yet another quarterfinal appearance at the FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile.
Behind a brace from Inter Miami’s Benjamin Cremaschi and another goal from the San Jose Earthquakes Niko Tsakiris, the American youngsters flattened Italy 3-0 in Thursday’s round-of-16 clash to set up a final eight showdown against Morocco on Sunday. Win that, and the Americans will find themselves in the last four for the first time since their fourth-place showing in 1989.
But the rush to declare this or any U-20 tournament as irrefutable evidence of the bright future of the U.S. men’s national team is nonsense, as even the most cursory glance at the history of youth national teams – both within the USYNT program and globally – makes eminnently clear.
The USA’s U-20 Quarterfinal History
The U-20 World Cup exists in strange terrain among the average national team fan: notable enough that they take note of the results, forgettable enough that few recall what happened in previous tournaments
If fans did have a stronger historical perspective, they’d realize the American kids acquitting themselves well is not even remotely new. This will be the fifth USA quarterfinal appearance in the last six tournaments, and seventh since the century began.
Over the same span, the senior team has reached the World Cup quarterfinals once and the knockout phase four times.
In other words, the American youth program and the senior program have both generally achieved at stable levels in the last two-and-a-half decades, and the current tournament doesn’t change much about that.
A trip to the semis or beyond would be less precedented, but still far from a predictor of senior team success.
Here’s a list of the nations who have made exactly one U-20 final four appearance this century: Portugal, Serbia, Spain, England, Ukraine, Nigeria, Mexico, Czech Republic, Venezuela, Mali, Chile, Egypt, Colombia, Ecuador, Israel, Paraguay, Morocco, Austria, Costa Rica, Iraq, Senegal.
Of those 21 teams, only one – Spain – has won a senior World Cup in the same time frame. Two – Venezuela and Mali – have never qualified for the senior event.
Repeat Success The Real Predictor
It’s only when you look at nations that repeatedly sent their teams to the last four of the U-20 World Cup that you begin to see a greater concentration of global elites that includes Brazil, Argentina, France, Italy and Uruguay.
And even then, the pattern that becomes most clear is that European teams underperform on the U-20 level relative to their senior success. That reflects a slightly lesser priority some European nations place on the event – the UEFA U-21 European Championships are arguably a bigger deal to some nations – and also a lesser willingness of European clubs to release players for the tournament than their counterparts elsewhere around the globe.
That’s not to mention the handful of European stars who have already become fixtures for their senior national sides by the time the U-20 tournament rolls around.
None of this should rain on the American parade. Reaching the quarterfinals is worth celebrating. Even more worth celebrating is the developing trend of reaching the quarterfinals repeatedly, a better indicator of an improving player development landscape than any single tournament success.
But the factors that determine the fate of an individual U-20 generation and a senior national team are very different. American fans should resist the urge to place expectations for the latter based on the former, when there are volumes of history that show there’s little basis for doing so.
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