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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Netherlands is the European Champions.  Europe has great teams and players (France, England, Sweden, etc.). So being a European Champion is a great feat for the Netherlands Women’s National Team and shows that they are the best of the European Teams.

But..........the USWNT is the WC Champions!

Everyone has a great plan until they get punched in the nose. [/quote]

So in your opinion the USWNT are perfect and we should just keep business as usual because they won World Cup this year?

You’re attitude is exactly why the OP is warning against. The OP isn’t claiming this women’s team isn’t great the OP is arguing how much greater they could be and what we might want to pay attention to in order to ensure we remain successful. I instead of listening you’d rather just tag any criticism as a “hater” when the truth is we ALL want the USWNT to be successful. [/quote]

DP than the above, but I wrote the earlier posts that included the analytics.  A couple thoughts on this thread:

1.  The USWNT literally just played a perfect WC.  As I noted earlier, they were the #1 team in nearly every advanced metric used to analyze a team's play.  In addition, (a) they won all of their games, (b) they did not trail [b]at any time[/b] in any game, and (c) they did not need to go to extra time or PKs to beat any team in any game.  In the history of the WWC, this has never been accomplished by any team.  Let me say that again:  what we all witnessed over the last month has [b]never[/b] happened before in the (short) history of the WWC.  That the USWNT was able to accomplish this against significantly improved competition, including two of the other top 4 teams in the world by any ranking system (the host country and England), up-and-coming Spain, and the reigning European champs, is just amazing and should be celebrated.

2.  Despite this objective dominance and historic accomplishment, the OP (and maybe a couple others in this thread) have been critical of various aspects of the US play, including comments that the "defense sucks" (despite the analytics showing that the US was the #1 team in the tournament in expected goals allowed and shots on target allowed; plus, the US only allowed 3 goals in the entire tournament and kept 4 clean sheets), "shooting" was not good (again, despite the analytics showing that the US was the #1 team in the tournament in goals, expected goals, shots, and shots on target), and "Coaching - Ellis is a bad coach with great players." This last criticism is a more subjective claim, but my first response is that the USWNT just won a second consecutive WC, and did so in a more dominant and historic fashion in 2019, so certainly some credit in that improvement from 2015 to 2019 has to go to the coach and her ability to build a team, manage them over the course of a WC cycle, and of course manage them in the actual games.

Please don't interpret the above as a knee-jerk defense of Ellis and all aspects of the team.  I personally found Ellis' refusal to deploy her subs earlier in the game (when they might be able to have more impact on the game) maddening, and I would have preferred her not to shift into a 5-4-1 defensively as early as she did in the games against France and England.  I also agree with some of the OP's points about the quality of the marking by the CBs at times in some of the games.  However, I also appreciate that all of this is nitpicking a team that the data shows was the best offensive and defensive team in the WWC.  So while it is fair to be critical of aspects of the US game, we also need to appreciate that this is the best team in the world, and a lot of other nations wish their teams had the ability to play like the US.

3.  The OP's primary point was a concern that, if the USWNT won the WC, then it would allow US Soccer to "remain complacent with their approach for development and scouting. The fear is that our women's soccer program will remain stagnant looking for track stars of the next generation while European countries are developing both tactical style as well as drawing from a greater athletic pool than before."

This is, of course, a fair concern, and I don't think any fan of our men's or women's team feels great about US Soccer and their competence.  However, let's look at what happened after the USWNT won the WC in 2015.  That team included players like Hope Solo, Abby Wambach, Christine Rampone,  Heather O'Reilly, Lauren Holiday, Shannon Boxx, Meghan Klingebberg, etc., all of whom either retired or did not make the 2019 roster.  Some of those players are Hall of Famers and among the best women to ever play the game.  Yet the USWNT was able to successfully replace those players and integrate the replacements into the team by 2019.  And that is to say nothing of the fact that key starters from the 2015 team like Carly Lloyd, Ali Krieger, Morgan Brian, etc. were similarly transitioned out of the starting lineup and into reserve roles on the 2019 team.  In their place were a number of younger players like Mewis (26), Dahlkemper (26), Dunn (26), Horan (25), Lavelle (24), Pugh (21) and Davidson (20).  The first 5 of those players were either starters or played significant minutes, and Pugh and Davidson were given valuable experience, and I'd like to think that we would all agree that the USWNT and US Soccer did a good job scouting and developing these players, whether intentionally or by luck, between the 2015 and 2019 WCs.  This is a long-winded way of saying that I'd like to hope that the USWNT and US Soccer are able to continue doing a good job reloading the team for the 2023 WC, just as they did during the last 4 years.  Of course, they cannot allow themselves to become complacent, because the rest of the world will continue to try and close the gap.  But the USWNT just moved the goalposts on the competition in 2019, and they will need to continue to improve in a similar fashion to stay ahead of the competition.

4.  Lastly, as a side note, I'd agree with many on this forum about all of the problems about the pay-to-play model here in the US, and I wish that it changes and is improved over the years.  But for perspective, the following is a link to an article written by the primary women's soccer writer for the The Guardian in which she talks positively about aspects of player development in the US and how big a gap still exists in the UK when it comes to player development:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/04/england-usa-womens-football-school-fa-close-the-gap
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