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    United States men’s World Cup qualification the stats that defined their road to Qatar

    Sure, it happened in just about the most uninspiring way imaginable: a 2-0 loss at Costa Rica that saw Los Ticos fans chanting “¡Olé!” as their defenders passed the ball to each other. But the United States men’s national team did the thing that they hadn’t been able to do in eight years and the thing that they might not really ever need to worry about doing again: They qualified for the World Cup!

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    With the USMNT automatically qualifying as joint hosts alongside Canada and Mexico for the 2026 World Cup and the tournament expanding to 48 teams next time around, this was the last truly grueling, geometrically organized qualifying campaign for the Americans. So, let’s take a look at eight key numbers from the first and only Octagonal. Here’s how the USMNT made it back to soccer’s biggest stage:

    1.8

    On the surface, it doesn’t look all that great — third place, behind both a Canada team that hasn’t been to a World Cup since DVDs were invented and a Mexico side that’s seemingly on the verge of crisis at halftime of every match. Overall, the USMNT’s results were … fine. Here’s how they compare to every qualification campaign since the 1994 World Cup:

    1998: 1.7 points per game, 2nd place
    2002: 1.7 PPG, 3rd
    2006: 2.2 PPG, 1st
    2010: 2.0 PPG, 1st
    2014: 2.2 PPG, 1st
    2018: 1.2 PPG, 5th

    In the six qualification tournaments before Gregg Berhalter took over as manager, the USMNT averaged 1.8 points per game. In the one qualification tournament after Berhalter took over … the USMNT averaged 1.8 points per game. Given that this is the most talented U.S. squad ever and that two extra teams in the qualification pool should have watered down the competition, just hitting the average might feel like a bit of a disappointment. But there’s very little correlation between performance in qualifying and World Cup success; the USMNT’s one run to the quarterfinals came in 2002, after a poor CONCACAF run that produced just 1.7 points per game and came down to the last day. On top of all that, there’s also plenty to suggest that Berhalter’s team was better than the results suggested.

    0.8

    A lot of weird stuff can happen across 14 games. Pick any 14-game sample across a Premier League season and you’ll be able to convince yourself that, say, Liverpool are losing it and Wolverhampton Wanderers are winning it all. In a low-scoring game like soccer, it takes a lot of games for a team’s true performance level to match up with their results.

    To start with, let’s just look at goals: scored, conceded, and then subtracted from each other. Going back to ’98 again:

    1998: plus-0.8 goal differential per game, 2nd
    2002: plus-0.3 GD, 3rd
    2006: plus-1.0 GD, 2nd
    2010: plus-0.6 GD, T-1st
    -2014: plus-0.7 GD, 1st
    2018: plus-0.4 GD, 3rd

    This time around, the USMNT scored 21 goals (second to Canada) and conceded 10 (fourth after Canada, Mexico, and Costa Rica.) It’s a plus-11 goal differential through 14 games, or a per-game goal differential of plus-0.8. Only Canada (plus-16, plus-1.1 per game) produced a better mark in the Octagonal, and only one of the previous six American teams outscored their opponents at a higher clip than Berhalter’s side just did.

    0.96

    Stats Perform only provides expected goals data going back to 2014 for CONCACAF qualifying, but it’s still useful to take a look since 2014 was the USMNT’s best qualifying run from a points perspective. Dig a little deeper, though, and some of the warning signings for the rest of Jurgen Klinsmann’s reign were already there.

    In 2014 qualification, the team’s per-game xG differential was just plus-0.26. In fact, it was better in 2018 (plus-0.4) despite, you know, Couva and all that. This cycle, the number leapt all the way up to plus-0.96, which, for some context, is what you’d expect from one of Europe’s elite club teams. The competition isn’t comparable, but in aggregate terms of creating and preventing chances, the U.S. dominated CONCACAF in the same way that, say, Paris Saint-Germain might do in Ligue 1.

    Overall, the USMNT both created the most xG in the Octagonal (23.3) and conceded the fewest (9.8). Strip out penalties, which can be a little unpredictable, and the same remains true:

    Despite the best underlying numbers in the competition, they finished third. What gives? The xG is a much truer representation of the team’s quality than their points total; the USMNT did the repeatable thing — creating and suppressing chances — better than everyone else, while the volatile thing — finishing the chances — didn’t always go their way. But there is one other explanation.

    1.46

    Despite what you see in the chart above, Costa Rica finished ahead of Panama. The main reason for the discrepancy, as the USMNT experienced Wednesday, is that Costa Rica is the only team in the region with a world-class goalkeeper. Keylor Navas faced 42 on-target shots in the Octagonal, and he conceded six goals. Based on the quality of the shots he faced, Stats Perform’s model would expect the average keeper to concede 10.97 goals. So, Navas essentially saved Costa Rica 4.97 goals.

    Meanwhile, the opposite was happening at the opposite end of the field in San Jose. With the two goals allowed against Costa Rica, Zack Steffen wrapped up qualifying with five goals allowed from just 18 shots on target. Facing the same shots that Steffen did, the average keeper would be expected to concede 3.54 goals, based on the model. That negative discrepancy of 1.46 goals was the second-worst in the Octagonal, despite Steffen only appearing in six matches.

    These are all the shots he faced, sized by the quality of the chance:

    Meanwhile, Matt Turner, who started the eight other matches, conceded five goals from shots the average keeper would be expected to concede 5.81 goals from. He basically saved an extra goal for the Americans:

    Coming into qualification, there were theoretical arguments for both keepers: Turner was a much better shot-stopper than Steffen, but Steffen’s distribution skills were way better than Turner’s. The past 14 games absolutely confirmed the former, but have done very little to suggest that there’s much value in the latter. The choice between the two seems pretty clear at this point, but the last time both players were fully healthy, Berhalter went with Steffen. Will he change his mind over the next eight months? And more importantly, can he afford not to?

    84.3

    Just as everyone predicted back in September, Fulham full-back Antonee Robinson was the USMNT’s most important player during qualifying. The back-flipping, self-proclaimed Jedi appeared in 84.3% of the Octagonal minutes, more than any other player. He led the team in both chances created and expected assists.

    Those numbers are boosted a bit by all the minutes he played. Among guys with at least 200 minutes, he was fifth in chances created per 90 minutes (1.5) and seventh in expected assists per 90 (0.18). But in the minutes that Robinson wasn’t on the field during qualifying, the team didn’t score a goal and they conceded twice. He’s not a star — or even really a potential star — like other players on the roster, but he’s emerged to lock down a problem spot in the starting eleven that’s plagued the USMNT pretty much ever since the modern emergence of the fullback as a key tactical role.

    8.8

    Before qualifying started, Tyler Adams seemed like perhaps the least reliable among the USMNT’s quintet of Champions League starters. Not as a player, but as just simply as someone you could expect to be on the field. After featuring in 76% of the minutes in his final season with the New York Red Bulls in 2018, he’s played just 40% of the available Bundesliga minutes since joining RB Leipzig.

    Somehow, though, the USMNT’s qualification campaign coincided with one of the healthiest runs of Adams’s career. He was the only player other than Robinson to feature in at least 80% of the Octagonal minutes. Among players who appeared in at least five matches, he unsurprisingly led the team in interceptions (2.8) and tackles (6.0) per every 1,000 opponent touches.

    The team just doesn’t have another player who can do anything close to what he does — sweeping in behind the attacking line in possession, rarely turning the ball over, and extinguishing any counterattacks that cross midfield. The team scored three goals and conceded four in the 20% of qualifying minutes without Adams on the field. He’s the most important player on the team.

    50

    For all the talk of the USMNT wanting to dominate with the ball, the results have been better without it. As The Athletic’s John Muller pointed out after the Panama match, Berhalter’s team simply wins more games when they have less possession. After the Costa Rica match, the USMNT ended qualifying with 1.5 points per game and a plus-0.2 goal differential per game in the 10 matches during which they had at least 50 percent of the possession. In the other four: 2.5 points and a plus-2.3 goal differential per game.

    But that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Measured by their xG differential, four of the USMNT’s worst five games came in matches when they had at least 60% of the ball, but their best game was the 3-0 win over Honduras. In that one, they had 72% of the ball — more than any other match. Although the score lines don’t suggest it, the U.S. dominated the balance of chances at home against El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Jamaica, while also dominating at least 60% of the ball.

    More than anything, what this shows is that the USMNT still doesn’t really have a clear identity or style of play. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, but Berhalter’s side has a vacillated from a team that looked like it only wanted to play in transition to a trigger-happy press-all-the-time-whirlwind to a slow-moving possession machine that tried to create space with horizontal ball movement. In the draw in Mexico, they passed the ball forward with 49% of all of their passes. In the draw to Canada, just 25% of their passes were played forward.

    According to Stats Perform, the USMNT were the only team in CONCACAF not to attempt a shot from a fast-break situation. And despite attempting the second-most shots overall, they generated just the fifth-most shots from set pieces. With attacking space at a premium in the international game, it’ll be a lot easier to make a run in Qatar if they up the ante from dead balls and start clicking whenever they do have room to run.

    0

    Sergino Dest, Weston McKennie, Christian Pulisic, Giovanni Reyna and Tyler Adams still haven’t played a single minute together for the USMNT. With five stars waffling in and out of the lineup, it’s a little easier to understand why the team’s approach has changed so much from game to game. You just shouldn’t be asking Paul Arriola or DeAndre Yedlin to do the same things you’d be asking from Reyna and Dest.

    In fact, outside of Adams, none of these other guys even appeared in half of the qualifying minutes. Get all of them healthy at the same time, and this is automatically a significantly better team than the one we saw in qualifying. Forget Berhalter’s tactics or whoever you think the backup right-back should be or even what needs to happen with the concept of “a striker.” The health and development of these five players will have a bigger effect on the USMNT’s performance in Qatar than anything else.

    One of the reasons that’s true, though, is because of the shape the roster has taken around them. In addition to Antonee Robinson, Miles Robinson and Walker Zimmerman have formed a solid-if-unexpected first-choice center back duo, with, theoretically, a pair of Bundesliga defenders (Chris Richards and maybe John Brooks) backing them up. Then, in the midfield, Yunus Musah went from a fledgling prospect who wasn’t doing much as a winger for Valencia to a ball-carrying center-midfield dynamo for the USMNT. He didn’t play in the Nations League less than a year ago, and now he’s a key piece for Berhalter’s group.

    Players like Timothy Weah, Brenden Aaronson, Kellyn Acosta, Luca de la Torre, and even the aforementioned Arriola have also provided solid-to-good minutes. And while most of the options deployed at striker have struggled, Jesus Ferreira led all CONCACAF players with at least 200 minutes played in both non-penalty xG (0.91) and xA (0.41) in qualifying. He was brilliant in limited minutes; will Berhalter take notice?

    All of those names, too, are in either their peak or pre-peak years. Weighted by minutes played, the USMNT’s average age (24.3) was three years younger than any of the other teams in the Octagonal.

    A lot can happen in eight months, but the immediate mission — make it to Qatar — has been accomplished. And because of the age of the roster and the potential for increased availability of the team’s stars, it’s likely to only get better from here.

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