THOR

This toilet paper will get more likes than the Israel flag.

Did Tim Ream have the worst World Cup game in history? Horrible marking to allow the 1st Got dunked on to give up the 2nd Moved out of the way to block the 3rd Watched his teammate get pressured, lose the ball and concede the 4th while marking space and watching

@aaronleeb24 @HolderStephen Wrong. We can't yet compete against foreign players with 2-3 generations of inherited spatial awareness, who moved away from their families at age 8 to live, study and play at professional academies, taught by experienced professional coaches.

@HolderStephen Belgium didn’t start 2 of their best players… the analysis was wrong. We haven’t beat Belgium in our last 9 matchups. Not sure what everyone was expecting

So, honest question: Was all the analysis about *this* US team being different just wrong, or was this just a singularly awful performance? My uneducated opinion is they had an easy-ish road to get here and maybe we got fooled?

@shipwreckedcrew To beat Europe we need free MLS academies with schools and living facilities and professional coaching down to U6-U8 on 1 year contracts and bringing new kids on trials every week.

The US lost to Belgium because Belgium was a collection of significantly more talented players. Full stop, This pool of USMNT players has always had the problems exposed last night. That’s why Berhalter went after Tillman and Balogun so hard as dual nats. Pulisic never became the star he was envisioned to be, and on the WC level he’s not that good. Other than arriving late in the box, what other offensive skill does he have?

@EinSchwarzwelt My sons played for free @ an MLS academy U15-U19. Pro coaches, cutthroat culture, treated like an employee: start 20 games, win, beat foreign clubs, get replaced by kid from California. Sucks but builds determination/resilience but needs to start younger. U6-U8 like Europe and SA

If you care about the state of the USMNT going forward not just for 2030 cycle but for the decades to come, now is the time to start barking at US Soccer and MLS to unfuck this dysfunctional American soccer pyramid. Because our humiliating exit, our "golden generation" mentality in this Belgium game, our hard-capped ceiling against the Netherlands/Belgiums/Argentinas/Englands, the lack of proper depth to truly push the Pulisics/McKennies/Reams etc., all of it is a trickle down effect from US Soccer and MLS's decision making. Time to drop your MLS pom poms, stop putting your heads in sands, stop pretending that we have world class player development just because Union's academy beat La Masia Juvenil 5-0 in a scrimmage and seeing Kevin Paredes move to Wolfsburg do fuck all, or one or two MLS players moving to Westerlo or PSV and pretending that the league has done its duty developing proper talent for the national team. "Oh but Adams came through Red Bulls/Weah played one season in New York/McKennie spent two seasons at FC Dallas", yeah none of that shit is enough. You need 1000 Adams/McKennie/Weahs/Pulisics formed in a fire pit before your country even sees a Lamine Yamal come through. Start asking where are the upcoming American players born and bred in pressure cooker environments who have to prove themselves to rise out of poverty or out of desperation to become pros as teenagers; where are these thousands of American players in MLS or in the youth leagues across the country? Fundamentally, you need a competitive environment and a pyramid of divisions (local, regional, state, college, national) within an open ecosystem to replicate this sporting pressure. An open ecosystem means a club's or academy's survival hinges on scouting good players and selling them for profit. These good players in turn are forced to compete against other good players to keep their spots or progress in their careers. As a result said youth players have more hunger, much stronger resilient mentalities as a result. You see this clearly in France where their amateur leagues have so many French youth ballers fighting it out, being hurled insults, fouls, in tiny little village/city courts, all desperate for a French scout/academy/club to notice them and give them a chance to change their lives and these French clubs and scouts likewise take advantage of these players by platforming them and profiting from their transfer fees. It's not perfect (nothing is), the French have their own corrupt clubs/scouts/agents as well, but it somehow works. An open ecosystem means all of these things slowly fall into place. And if many American clubs go bankrupt in an open ecosystem, so fucking what? American lower division clubs already routinely go out of business and existence today under the closed ecosystem, why pretend this is preferable to an open market where possibilities for improvement and for a proper soccer culture is much more possible? Why should I give a single fuck about the poor MLS billionaire who might lose his franchise if he's forced to invest more resources into keeping it alive? I don't own Class A shares in those investments and neither do you, so fuck them. You can't make excuses about "lack of American athletes" (Lebron playing soccer nonsense) or not enough participation (this country has one of the largest registered soccer-playing populations in the world given its population size). You can't regurgitate propaganda about MLS being the one gleaming beacon of hope for American soccer when all they've done is the contrary (destroy everyone in their way). You can't protect your poor little billionaires who own these MLS franchises who refuse to take any financial risk for their sports franchises (fuck them). If you want an actual soccer culture, this is what it takes. American exceptionalism ("We'll do it the American way") cannot usurp how other countries approach this sport. France and Argentina know what they're doing because they all have these pressure cooker environments from the moment a child can stand on two legs, walk and kick a ball. American soccer has allowed profit and passivity to take center stage in every single decision they take when it comes to deciding the course of the sport's future here. We've allowed this federation to team up with Soccer NFL and treat the sport as "entertainment" instead of life, death and war like other top countries do. Ultimately we cannot continue to go down this path of one league cutting off every single avenue for soccer culture and youth development like what MLS is doing at this very moment (planning 500 million dollar MLS franchises just to kill a USL team in a large metro area that MLS wants to be in; creating MLS Next ecosystem that forces kids to stay in a youth league and that doesnt have to compete with other youth leagues). You can't go down this path and pretend that eventually in some not-too-far-off future that somehow it'll finally click and MLS will be this super duper strong wealthy world league. You can have the financial might of Saudi Arabia pouring billions into your league, not gonna change a single thing aside from more retirement league pensioners. You think I'm exaggerating, "how can you say all of this out of one bad result vs Belgium in a home world cup?" Because this is not the first time that this generation of American players were mentally unable to stand up against adversity, it's been happening for many years starting with Berhalter Sr but ultimately this stems from their own career journeys. Many of these current American players had to struggle in European academies but there never was a deep desperation to their frankly middle class struggles as upcoming players. You cannot mold a man with extreme mental resilience unless they've been pushed to the limit in their journeys. No world class coach can 100% fix these mentality issues, it's up to the players themselves to have built that mental fortitude. That's why an open ecosystem matters. We cannot rely on external leagues and countries with American expats to consistently give us world class players, ultimately you need to have your own pressure cooker environment to reliably create these top tier players. And until this starts happening, until this country starts taking this sport seriously we're going to see world cup exits like these. Maybe you can scalp a win off a Euro or Copa America champion but you're never ever going to truly compete as favorites. I'm done with defending these players. I'm done with pretending that maybe it was one bad day, one bad goalkeeper decision, one bad defensive mistake when I've seen 20 cumulative bad days against this level of competition across the years. A national team is a reflection of the sporting culture of its respective country and American soccer is fundamentally broken. You either demand better or you stay quiet and let these people take the sport from you and feed you slop. So open your fucking mouths and start demanding more from US Soccer.

@ldock93 Top foreign players join a professional club's academy at age 7 or 8 with schooling and professional coaches all paid for by the club. At that age our kids are coached by parents who maybe never played soccer. That's how far back the gap starts. College soccer is a joke.

People get mad at me for saying this, but if the SEC and Big XII schools were to add men's soccer programs, it would go a long way towards developing players and developing a bigger fan base

@TheSammahmood_ I disagree. Top foreign players join a professional club's academy at age 7 or 8 with schooling and professional coaches all paid for by the club. At that age our kids are coached by parents who maybe never played soccer. That's where the gap starts and it only gets bigger.

The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital. I played soccer for 20+ years. Grassroots. Academy. D1 college. Pursued professionally after. And I’ll say the quiet part out loud: The US soccer infrastructure is broken. In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement. For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal: Get recruited. Get a scholarship. Play college soccer. But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path. From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival. Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France. That player has likely been in a professional environment for years. Training daily. Playing meaningful matches year-round. Competing against grown professionals. Getting thousands more touches. Learning how to solve the game under pressure. The gap is massive. And it shows. American players are usually athletic. They are usually fit. They usually compete hard. But at the highest levels, that is not enough. The biggest difference is technical comfort. We do not move the ball like Spain. We do not combine like Argentina. We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood. That comes down to volume. Volume of touches. Volume of street soccer. Volume of futsal. Volume of unstructured play. Volume of high-level training environments. Volume of meaningful games. In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23. Parents spend thousands. Clubs charge thousands. Travel teams fly all over the country. Showcases become the product. Recruiting becomes the scoreboard. But the return on invested capital is poor. We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment. That is a broken operating model. And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer. You inspect the system. The US has talent. The US has athletes. The US has money. The US has facilities. But the foundation is wrong. We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system. Those are not the same thing. Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources. I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer. I’m saying it because I lived it. And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.

Absolutely dramatic that these guys left France for the US, and it's not even their fault. They are by far the most talented and ambitious welders and sculptors in all of Europe. They meticulously produced masterpieces all year long, and yet the French government and French people in general spat openly to their face. two years ago, they cast the most complete and polished statue of Jeanne d'Arc I've ever seen: a 4.5m equestrian bronze covered in gold leaf, and they put it on a public square in Nice, right in front of the Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc church. It came out of their small foundry in Meaux, and traveled almost 900 km across the entire country to get to Nice. This is the best testimonial of French craftsmanship you could ask for, at a time when we outsource literally everything abroad. So what did bureaucrats do once there ? They tore it down. Officially the contract got canceled on a procurement technicality, no public tender. The real reason is that the atelier is suspected of being right-wing affiliated for praising christian symbols. They produce a monument the whole city should be proud of, and it is removed because of political assumptions. France messed up once again. Bureaucrats have become so blinded by ideology that we can no longer praise talent and ambition. They drive out the last people still doing great things, while becoming completely blind to the objective idea of beauty in the name of fake moral values. It's right to leave when you get more recognition abroad than from your own. At the opposite, the second they looked west, Peter Thiel came in with funding and Elon publicly praised their work. Their next big thing will stay in the US and they deserve it.

BREAKING: USA comes back from huge deficit to defeat Belgium 5-4 after receiving four surprise mail-in goals at 3:00am

🇭🇷⚖️ IF the football scales are tipped against Croatia, that only magnifies the success we have had since 1996! Croatia have a reputation of being GIANT KILLERS in world football and we should take that as a badge of honor. Croatia is the ultimate David vs. Goliath in world football! Remember that! 🇭🇷💪🏻

American sovereignty could end this month. Congress is preparing to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act. If the bill passes in its current form, it would merge the U.S. and Israeli military machines to make them effectively one and the same. How could any American lawmaker support this? Even if you love Israel, it is impossible to deny that this NDAA undermines our country’s sovereignty. The corporate media is going out of its way to ignore this story. They do not want the public to learn about it. We refuse to follow their lead. This episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, featuring an interview with former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, is a tell-all exposé on this jaw-dropping proposal. Watch the full episode below:

I exposed this activity in San Antonio and I was arrested for it.

To the London black cab driver who found me bloodied in the chaos of central London and drove me all the way to Reading: thank you. Thank you for cleaning my face. For the sugary tea at the BP garage. For delivering me safely to my friend's front door and refusing to charge me a single penny. In the trauma of that day, I never asked your name. I don’t think I even thanked you properly, and I am so sorry for that. But I hope you know that I remember you every single year. You were a hero when London needed one most. #SevenSeven #NeverForget #LondonBombings

Voice is back! 😂 Reflecting on an incredible night in Mexico… 🦁🦁🦁

Some moments are bigger than words… 🇳🇴❤️

It's great that so many MAGA influencers now want all the Muslims expelled from the USA. But let's be serious: it wasn't Democrats who flooded Texas with 330 mosques. The GOP is not going to save you. We must destroy the uniparty filth.

Well well well 😂

As Ødegaard was breaking up the scuffle, Haaland casually ran over and drank the Brazilian goalkeeper's water. 😂😂😂

Worth the 28-year wait! 🇳🇴❤️

Stopping Flock cameras and data centers is EXISTENTIAL. We either fight them or CBDC’s and Social Credit Scores are next. This is tyranny like we’ve never see. Even the soviets couldn’t track your every move. This is happening RIGHT NOW under a Republican President and Congress