The DP Bottleneck, Cavan Sullivan, and Tactical Realism: Marlon LeBlanc's Masterclass

Welcome to the SCUF Podcast, we talk about U.S. soccer. Our guest today is the coach of Brooklyn FC, a U.S.L. expansion team in King's County, and he has a window into all levels of soccer development in America. He was head coach at West Virginia University for 14 seasons, he coached the Philadelphia Union 2 from its 2022 debut in MLS next pro through 2024, influencing players like Matt Freeze, Jack McGlin and Paxton Aronson along the way. He's a native of East Windsor, New Jersey, played soccer at Penn State, and he takes his team to South Carolina this weekend to face the Charleston battery. Marlon Blanc, welcome to SCUF. Thanks for having me on, it's my honor and pleasure to be able to join you. So first of all, let's talk about the World Cup a little bit. What takeaways did you come away with after the tournament? What did you see? Yeah, a lot, right? Yeah. It was really skeptical about the added teams, the bigger pool of teams and left feeling completely invigorated by the African selections, the extra teams that came in, the Cape Verde is the players. It was remarkable to see how much more fun the World Cup was despite maybe the thought process at the game to get ugly. I think there was only one really ugly game. So really impressed with the overall show that it was as well. I think that this World Cup hold on so many different emotional strings that the love that Real Soccer people have for the game and the showcase that it made for the people in the United States. It couldn't have been any better. A lot of times you tell people to watch a game and it's a really terrible boring game. And they don't understand why you love it. You get the common fan, the ones who can basically barely afford to go to the games and they go to the games and they see it and they're like, oh, I get it now. This is why you love it so much. The stars came to play in this World Cup more than any other World Cup for all the big names really showed out. It was just so enjoyable and so fun. And I think for the American soccer fan who wants people to adopt this sport as one of the top sports in this country, you couldn't have asked for a better showcase and a better showpiece for the game to hopefully build off of. Yeah, I've been astonished at how many people who weren't soccer fans have told me they just absolutely loved it and watched all those ever game. What did Spain's dominance tell you about the game at the highest level? I mean, yeah, I think what's interesting about Spain is that everybody looks at Spanish football and the possession, the possession, the possession. I think they were so good against the ball that it's, I think that's a forgotten part of it. And you could say, oh, well, they had the ball and they didn't have to defend. No, they were incredible against the ball, the way they transitioned following their turnovers, the way they got numbers behind the ball. You know, I think they don't have to make a save in the final, right? You could have literally the Premier League goalkeeper of the year in David Ryan, not step on the pitch and still have that kind of defending action and that kind of goalkeeper that it doesn't have to do a whole lot, just shows you how good against the ball they were as a team. But then obviously with the ball, everything that we all enjoy about Spanish football, possession with purpose, not just possession for the sake of keeping it, they move the ball from side to side, they move their opponents, they created overloads and they, when they wanted to be direct, that was, I thought, the biggest adaptation that people didn't really respect or truly recognize is that they would play passes that would break eight or nine defenders in all three lines in one ball and they were brave enough to do that and where is our ball's ability to get on the end of crosses and on the end of actions was fantastic. They were just a team in every sense of the word and that's the popular phrase going out about them right now is team, but their ability to adapt and to play what was required of them on any given match was really, really special. Yeah, I thought there was nobody who could show the commitment as a team that Argentina was showing in this tournament until they faced Spain. Do you think was a problem for the US and their loss to Belgium? That's a good question. Look, I think Belgium was always going to be a tough nugget to crack and I think at the end of the day, they're still ahead of us and I think people want to think we're just going to jump ahead of Belgium because we're playing at home and we've got all these players playing in Europe and that's not necessarily the case. The element of the attacking side of things and we could always compete with them but going forward we're still don't have enough in terms of the team connectivity going forward. We've got some individual brilliant moments and a Christian and a Balagan and a West and these guys who can kind of plug and play and have these runs of counter-attack and transition football. Belgium were so organized that we weren't able to transition against them and Balagan rarely had opportunities where he was on the break and we just ran up against a team that was on the day better than us and we didn't play our best game. I think that the identity of this team right now is still trying to find a way to grind out results whenever we don't play our best or our top guys aren't able to produce something like a special moment. We just didn't have any special moments in that game and we had some of the other ones that got us through it. One thing that was really cool before the Belgium loss was the way the fans sang at the end of the game and we asked Sergio Des when he came on the pod what he thought of Country Roads and he didn't know what we were talking about because he thought the song was called West Virginia. That's funny. You spent more than a decade in Morgan Town. What did you think of the fans singing that song? What did it mean to you? I got to tell you that was really in the nostalgic moment for me like hearing that and that was a song that I heard at every sporting event for 14 years but really kind of just connecting the dots of my time at West Virginia having worn the badge in 2025 as when I coached you as under 18s and then kind of like this real full circle moment of hearing that song. Somewhere I spent 14 years of my life and obviously one of the proudest years I had as my coached under 18s. It was really, really cool to hear that song, to see that song and see how it was kind of brought in and adopted by the American fans and the American team. It was like the last, basically the last 15 years of my life rolled in a one moment here in that song on that stage. It was really, really cool. But yeah, Country Roads is in a lot of ways it's home because my son was born there. My family grew up there. My daughter was 13 months. I think when we moved to the Morty Town, West Virginia, but that song is with the sensual West Virginia and in particular has a true home at West Virginia University or I spent 14 years in my life, I would shoot. Despite the fact that we ran into a team that is ahead of us in Belgium, did that feel like a step in the right direction for the, I don't know, for the nation's relationship with the national team? It's not a, it has not been an extremely warm relationship for the past, I don't know, ever. Yeah, I mean, in terms of that, what did you think, you know? Absolutely. I think it wasn't more than probably six months ago, maybe eight months ago where Pochettino was not happy that it wasn't a home field advantage playing some of those leading games, right? By the end of it, he's jumping up in the crowd and hugging with fans and fist pumping and everything else, so yeah, I think that that, you know, the World Cup obviously opens up doors for the national team and their success in the group stage certainly helped kind of propel it even more, but there certainly hasn't been that affinity with the national team in quite some time and, you know, you look at what it was a 2018 where we failed to qualify right and the amount of just absolute public kind of bashing the national team got that certainly did not help and in a lot of ways, you know, not only, you think maybe set us back a little bit by missing, but obviously set us back by the public perception that the men's national team in particular had with its fan base. So to be able to have full crowds, full football stadiums packed with predominant American crowd was really great to see in the way that, you know, the team kind of performed in that group stage was, you know, well received by the fans and I think it's something that we've all hoped, you know, could be something that could happen here. In a lot of ways, I think the Americanization of the WERFIVA World Cup felt like an NFL game in those stadiums, right? If you were to go watch an international outside of going to, you know, in England or in Argentina or, you know, like one of those deep South American countries, you don't necessarily see that type of one-sided fandom at an international match, you know. It just felt like something very, very different and I didn't get to see the US in person. Like the two games I got to see were not the US national team, but watching the game on television, they did a really good job of conveying what the atmosphere was like I thought on TV to the people who were watching you. What were the two games you got to see? I got to see France play Iraq and I got to see Brazil play Haiti and both in Philadelphia. What was it, I forgot to follow up on this. What did you think was the ugly game at the World Cup? That was the ugly game. You know what, a lot of people thought the final was ugly. I actually still found, and I guess that's probably the coaching perspective, right? When you're watching, you probably just watch the game a little bit differently. When I watched the US play, I'm probably definitely not as much of a coach, I'm more fan and wanting to be entertained and a little bit more caught up in the game, but I watch the other teams play. I'm probably watching to see what they're doing and how they're trying to expose you to phone it and everything else and you know, I didn't think it was as ugly. It wasn't as entertaining maybe as some of the other games, but you know, Argentine had clearly set up a plan that they wanted to plan on the counter and they wanted to try and switch the play and they took a lot of risk trying to do it whenever they set that deep and then they tried to counter it going out the other side because a number of times they got hit and intercepted and you were like, wow, I can't believe they're doing that. I had a way to stretch the game and transition either, so it was interesting and I was looking at that and just tactically how to try to solve it, but I didn't. Finals are always that way. They're cagey affairs, teams are taking little risk and they're never as good as everything as everything that led up to the final. They never are and they typically take special moments and special goals to win them. But I think because of the way Argentine had gotten to the final, I thought it made it that much more compelling because they were such late game heroic teams all the way up until the final minutes of each of those matches heading to get to the final right and so you thought that there was still a chance at something. But I think there was one game that was like a blowout, one or two games that were blowouts that weren't great games and not a whole lot of underwater watch, but for me, like the games were all entertaining and so was that game. I guess I just looked at it through a different perspective, that final. I didn't, I enjoyed it in a different way maybe than just the excitement of the end type of football that you saw in some of the other matches. Yeah, okay. How did you get into soccer in the first place? Like were your parents interested in the sport? I was a super hyperactive kid that got in a lot of trouble. So I got in the football because my mother just needed something to do with me and to keep me active and keep me busy and ran more in football than I did in baseball and more than even basketball. And it was probably one of those things where I just took on two really quickly and it's really hard to be a good basketball player when you're five foot, seven, five foot eight and baseball was just not enough to keep you engaged. So football stuck early on and I had a lot of friends that played, so I made it easy but you know, a time single mother who didn't have to drive me everywhere, I could get rides going to do these things. But yeah, just really stuck, it happened to be in New Jersey which back in the 80s and 90s was a hotbed for you soccer and some really good players came out of New Jersey back in those days. And so soccer was a big sport that was back in the days where you could go to a Rutgers game and there would be 10,000 people there on a Friday night to watch Lexi Lala's or Peter Vermease or any of those guys play and that's when college soccer really was professional soccer in this country because there was no MLS in the 80s, late 80s and early 90s. What did your mom do when you were growing up? My mother worked for Merrill Lynch for the longest time period and I remember as a little kid going to New York City at Christmas time because she was working in New York City and then in Plainsboro, New Jersey, they moved like their corporate office to Plainsboro and built a huge office out of there for I think the better part of over 20 years my mother worked for Merrill Lynch and then church and Dwight which was like the parent company of Armand Hammer. She ended up moving and working for them and so yeah, I had just my mom, my sister and myself and said, grew up in East Windsor, New Jersey and went to Heightsown High School which I just found out I'm going into the Hall of Fame in September my first ever Hall of Fame. I said, my school Hall of Fame, so that'll be cool but yeah, my mom worked for Merrill Lynch back in the 70s and 80s, early 90s. Tell me if you would, what kind of your youth playing career was like? Like, you started in Rex Ocker, I assume? I started Rex Ocker and Haslet, New Jersey before joining like a local Haslet travel soccer team and then moved from Haslet to East Windsor, New Jersey. Started playing locally in East Windsor before eventually ended up with some stints with GAK which at the time was a big club, German-American kickers and then finished up with Tom's River Bocah through my high school years. I was alive back in the old ODP days when ODP was a thing and New Jersey state select team and playing for guys on the regional team like Bob Bradley was a coach then, Bruce Arena was coaching the regional team back in those days, Ray Rhee, Tom Lang, all these Manichelle Shite, all these guys that came through the ODP system and so it a lot of ODP coming through before like I said, joining Bocah and then made my way to Heightsown High School to Penn State University. When did you go from Rex to like you know serious club soccer, what age were you roughly? That's a good question. By the time I started doing ODP I think I was like a U12 so it would have been right around that time I went from probably a little bit more of a travel organized type of soccer environment so at that time like it's hard to distinguish what was wreck then and you know travel everybody had a travel team, every local kind of club had a travel team and you would probably almost consider that to be I would almost consider that to be recreational now because you've really only played in like your local leagues, your state leagues, your regional state leagues and maybe a couple tournaments inside the state but we didn't do much traveling outside the state. It's very different than what it is now obviously but I think what I would consider to be more like not wreck would have been the first my first integration in ODP where all the best players in the state were coming together and then your regional teams were going and playing each other. It's definitely a far different landscape now but the only way that you're really back in those days were playing out of state teams is if you went and traveled somewhere but if you made it through your state cup and you went through regionals and you compete in those kind of events is when you really started to see some other teams. I'm interested in that because I guess I'm curious what like what you make of it all now like was it a good pathway is the pathway better now I mean you have a son who's coming up through the Philadelphia Union Academy right so you must be thinking about this stuff. Yeah and certainly far more more deliberate than thinking about it you know with my son's pathway because it's not even comparable now compared to what it was then you know we outside of us as parents wanted to drive in and to go watch games and travel and we haven't really paid a penny for my son since he was like nine years old to play football and you know kind of seeing that evolution like he started off with the Columbus crew academy when he was nine to play on their U12 team because we didn't have anything really in West Virginia to offer him and so we were the crazy parents that would drive him back and forth to Columbus Ohio two or three times a week at nine years old to do it and then that's a bit of a drive yeah this is before they would have they had their training ground now we're at you know historical Columbus crew stadium where they have the training ground now they would either if it was on the east side of Columbus it would take us two hours and 45 minutes to get there in two hours and 45 minutes to get back if it was on the west side of Columbus where they were training it would be three and a half hours and you know seven hours round trip so it was a lot but then when pre court decided to move the crew to Austin they ended up letting go a lot of their younger their teams and only kept 15 and he was just way too young to play play up with that age group and that was an interesting age group because his age group had three underage players and that crew group was a very good one but Cooper Sanchez now starts at Elani United was no eight that also played up on that O16 and Kellen who is now signed with the Philadelphia Union my son Gavin Wolf Josh Wolf's youngest son was on that Columbus crew academy team and so there were a lot of good players that ended up leaving that club because they ended up you know having that little hiatus before the ownership of the browns group came in and saved the crew and so but yeah the idea of leaving there was okay we offered him the opportunity it's and believe it was only you know 10 or 11 at the time and we're saying what do you want to do if you want to come back to West Virginia and play on your local team here do you what do you want and you said you wanted something different and so he was invited to go out to Philadelphia to train with their group out there they really liked him and enjoyed him and offered him a spot immediately and the rest is kind of histories through the path but that was before you even that was before you even went to Philadelphia correct correct he spent a year and a half in Philadelphia while I was still in more and down West Virginia coaching at WVU but the process the identification process the academy structure the the free the free portion of the development and the coaching and the travel and he's been to Brazil and Spain and Scotland he's been all around the world and we haven't paid a penny for him to do it and you know even just that portion of what it was like when I was a kid to what where it is now and probably what the direction is still going in is it's incredible to see how much that process of being identified and developed has changed so much over you know last 20 30 40 years yeah that's cool so um can talk a little bit about the transition from collegiate coaching to the academy system like what were you able to take from coaching at West Virginia uh that you could apply to you know the academy what was different yeah I think um I was really fortunate at West Virginia for a good portion of my time there Oliver Luck was my boss the athletic director um and Oliver Luck was Andrew Luck's father the former number one draft pick for the Indianapolis coach Indianapolis Colts um quarterback who um forced him to retire early from concussions um but Oliver also was um one of the first people that um Don Garber brought over uh and Sunil Galati brought over from NFL Europe to um whenever Houston that franchise started so he was the president of the Houston Dynamo when it moved um and they created that team so I had an athletic director at at the time um West Virginia was considered you know one of the power five schools that actually had a football soccer background um and so and a lot of ways that gave me um a lot of freedom and leeway at West Virginia to not just be about you know results but wanting to do things in the right football culture in the right football way about developing players and um I really had a pension for wanting to have American players at WVU and not just go the international route and teach their own but that was just my kind of uh you know my ambition and I had an athletic director that that's really supported that um and so the transition for me to and my time at the academy is very very short so when I moved to Philadelphia I waited for my contract to end at West Virginia um joined my family had already moved to Philadelphia um and COVID hit right when uh we got back from I followed my son was in Brazil playing with the academy as a u12 player uh came back I think we're on the field for a few days and then COVID hit and so we had some time off and literally and during MLS is back when everything went down to uh Orlando if you remember for the MLS is back tournament I do remember that I had gotten a call earlier that morning from a number I didn't recognize so I didn't even answer it um and I'd say maybe like eight nine hours later I finally was like oh yeah I missed some calls there was a voicemail and it was um the at the time sporty director Ernst Tanner calling me um to somewhat do an interview with me over the phone I was already supposedly I was going to work at the academy but um everything got shut down and MLS is back they came back earlier they needed to make a change at the second team by coaching position and um I had two players that started for the first team regatis who spent four years with me um uh at West Virginia and as I think maybe second all time and in appearances at at the Philadelphia Union and yeah jacket Jack Elliott who spent four years with me at West Virginia he's now the captain Chicago fire um and was also a starter uh for the union at that time um had both uh kind of unbeknownst to me had Ernst had quizzed them about whether or not you know I could take over the second team um I think I might have been the only one at the time also qualified to take over the second team from a licensure standpoint um but uh so I didn't actually spend do one single game at the academy before I did my first game took over the team like middle of the week uh in August and uh we ended up beating Red Bull um my first game and there's a really cool picture of all the first team guys and the team was off to a terrible start that year uh in the USL championship and there's a really cool picture of Jimmy the staff and a bunch of the players watching the game down in Orlando and us coming back and winning and um it was uh that's kind of how I went from the college game to the to the pro sector and I'd always told myself I had no interest in coaching pros and I really enjoyed and was comfortable in college and maybe a little bit too comfortable at times but uh the thing that pushed me out of college more so it was just my my family and being apart you know from my wife my my daughter and my son were all living in Philly and I was living in in West Virginia and it just got old really fast so um just decided to join them and I didn't join them with the um with the thought that I was going to join the Philadelphia Union at the same time sometimes uh timing is works out well and then definitely uh was really really fortunate to have Ray and Jack both uh in the first team year uh to kind of put in a good word for me. Yeah yeah well I mean that's a credit to you that if they put it put in a good word for you how do you this is I got a few questions from listeners so I'll just say their names because it'll make them you know it'll make it cool I guess Sammy asks how do you balance the hyper specialization and singular focus that making it in soccer demands with equipping athletes to succeed if they don't become pros probably something you thought about a lot over the last two decades yeah great question um look I think that you know football there's so many um direct parallels between football and life um and I've had this really unique perspective that I have a son that's a high performer um and wanting to support that ambition knowing what it takes to kind of get to where you need to get to and hold them accountable for those things um but at the end of the day still kind of rolling it back to how it impacts life in general I'm buried and so the accountability the responsibility still being able to push the drive of that this you know hyper intense um a type personality environment um but related back to you know what's important in life and some of the lessons and some of the intangibles like all along with being a a high performer in the sport and they're not all gonna make it and even if you do make it it doesn't mean you're gonna make it over the course of a 10 15 20 year career and so you know my son signs his first professional contract with Philadelphia at the age of 16 and all I'm doing is saying great that takes you until you're 22 years old what's after that and so the understanding now of the intensity and the requirement to continue to you know stay disciplined stay after it don't lose sight of where you're at and I think um you know it's probably an advantage that he has and I think that very much that's something not too long ago about how football starts in the home and the best ones come through environments where it's you know it's in the house I think uh you know making sure that there's a discipline associated to you know just the general lifestyle portion of it as well in terms of making your bed in the morning having the discipline to eat properly you know making sure you rest and you sleep at night like all of these things are hopefully setting up for setting them up for success over uh a length of what it takes to be a pro but even if pro disappears preparing them for life in general um there's this funny story when I was working at Penn State um the Darby County um backroom staff came over to visit and see what we were doing at Penn State in terms of education resources background type stuff in our background and one of the the the backroom staff told this story of one of their top young players that were in the dining hall the cafeteria area having lunch and they heard one of their top young players say what part of the horse does horse radish come from and they all looked at each other like holy shit he'd really just ask that question and um you know it but but it was eye opening for them with what was needed to actually prepare this young top talented footballer for real real world and real life and so it's an interesting question that Sam me asked because I think uh the more and more um I certainly gained a lot of satisfaction of being able to tell the current players that I have now the ones that I have I'll have in the future and the ones that I've had in the past that I talked to you know differently and I would talk to my own son um and having you know kind of grown with him and and this generation and seeing how they kind of process things I think it's allowed me to be a better leader in those regards hmm you said you said your son is 16 is that he's 18 now he signed when he was 16 uh with the with the club and the organization um these had a pretty cool pathway as well like he's gone through the process um grind it through you know a doggy dog academy in Philadelphia um got into the youth national team at you know at U 15 didn't didn't grow right away and kind of fell behind and went two years almost a little over a little under two years of not getting called back in to the national team to um spending the entire 20 25 calendar year back with the national team making the under 17 world cup team um and kind of you know going through the ups and downs and the peaks and valleys of of of competing and having struggles and realizing that development is not linear there are ups and downs there are um people who rate you really high when you're 12 years old don't rate you anymore when you're 15 years old to now you're uh you know your Alex Freeman who spends three years at Orlando City day and next time you know we're starting at you know if you feel world cup at the senior level so um football is is not linear in development there's ups and downs and peaks and valleys and um I can literally speak to any of my players along those same uh the same lines just having gone through it in my own household yeah it's like I imagine that the performance level smooths out the older person gets but man having a strong opinion about a 12 year old based on maybe like one day of watching them play yeah it's tough breakfast that day you know like absolutely you're a hundred percent right I think a lot of people and even us from a scouting perspective you you really only watch the games right you see a game and you don't know what's going on on that day that leads to a good or you know in different performance it's it's the everyday environment of seeing young players and you know I tell the story of like a Frankie Westfield who is starting for the Philadelphia Union now had an incredible under 20 world cup breakout um he was literally days away from going to Penn State and you know who knows if we'd have seen him again but we really just pushed and pushed and or incited um you know and I had him for two and a half years in the second team and I still remember talking to um to Tomarko Mitchell Vick about him and really pushing Frankie Westfield telling you this kid he's got some things competitor he's not perfect but he's got some things going to come along and we're in the airport flying home from a union two game he has a drop out of a player to go to Chile literally the very next day and he calls me and we're sitting in in the airport flying home and he's like what do you think about Frankie should we should we invite him and I said Marco you need to invite Frankie um and like just so grateful how open Marco was and it's I'm so happy for his success in New England right now because he's doing a fantastic job but Marco brings Frankie and he was arguably our best player at the last year 20 world cup and you know it was it was it was thanks to Marco for being open minded but he was almost literally at Penn State at the age of 18 now he's starts every game for the Philadelphia Union he's probably working on his second professional contract there's arguments that he could be in the next world cup cycle and maybe go into Europe soon but days I when I say days I'm not kidding he was a week away from going to Penn State when he when he signed his contract with Philadelphia Union to stay with the second team and eventually get to the first team um and that was in 2020 for um and otherwise he'd be currently a junior at Penn State which is crazy I think incredible I mean don't never give up I guess what everybody develops a different race you know and so to annoy somebody at 12 or 16 or 18 is would be foolish in a lot of ways you used a word to describe Westfield earlier that I want to follow up on you said he's a competitor and I I feel like I picked up on that watching the 20 world cup um how much is that what you're looking for from players I mean yeah I'm not asking for a specific percentage but just like talk about that a little bit uh I think it's a big piece uh look um there are national team got a lot of criticism for not competing and fighting right um and it's an element as to what our DNA is as a country that I think helps maybe bridge the gap a little bit in terms of us compared to a Belgium perhaps that's been playing this game far longer as our players exposed to you know international football on a weekly basis that really really competitive matches that um you know I don't think that it's always just about exes and owes when it comes to the way we need to put the best 11 players on the field that give us the best chance to compete in win a game um and you know in my year with the national team and and and maybe um not a whole maybe not fully in the us way in terms of the exes and owes but a little bit more fully in the way into the us way in terms of the DNA of the of the spirit and the competitive nature we were horrible in our final game when we be Portugal and in Switzerland or uh and uh the UEFA friendship cup where we played uh we played France, Argentina, Australia to make it to the final we'll play Portugal and we played terrible in the Portugal game but we competed and we fought and we ground out the result and we ended up winning the event um you know Frankie is similar to that and we didn't play this super clean for three three on the day uh we turned the ball over a lot we got uh outpossessed we got outplayed and similar to maybe what you saw in the US Belgian game but we competed and we found a way to win um I think it's something that I certainly look for I think it's something that maybe we were criticized for with our with our World Cup team prior to heading into it right that um the the fight in the character um I think Frankie some young players coaches need to make sure that that's still an element of um the player pyramid is the character and don't forget about the character should be the pinnacle of the the player pyramid and um you know not sacrificing um you know the the integrity and the character of the team just because a player maybe uh is so absolutely outstanding that you know you can't come off but um there's something to be said for guys that are willing to stay square and block a shot versus the guy who wants to maybe turns out it deflects off of him and finds a back of the net um I think uh it's it's not to not to diminish the importance of being a better soccer nation with great tactics and x's and o's and guys you can we're technically you know competent but not to lose that fighting spirit because argentina rode that fighting spirit all the way to a final they just didn't have enough in the final we get it done this time wow but if you watch uh you know the argentina player gui or colombia it's like it's like life or death to those gods it's transcendent really right yeah it's and spain has that in them too it's life or death uh the way they compete sometimes you just don't look at our teams and our players and and say that it's life or death every at moment out there and kind of maybe goes back to sammy's question that yes uh I want to one of the people send in a question that hyper you know hyper intense atmosphere but um football isn't life or death but when you're out there it is and you should play every moment like your life depends on it if you want to be the best hmm I was struck me watching spain that kukurea you know he's got that like really distinctive hairstyle and you might think well that's not a serious person out there but um man is he serious he is dead serious he's got a lot of dog in him yeah passion means something right he plays with passion he's not always the best player in the field but he will fight until the bitter end sometimes you need you need that kind of player I think you always need that kind of player um and and if you have eleven of them who are really good at football too but they all play like it's life or death and they have a passion that's why I spain in Argentina those those guys always seem to end up at the top and it's all sitting down I got um I want I do want to I'm going to ask you about your season that's ongoing but first let me ask you um don't know about the coaching education system because you have you have like every license you can get you mentioned it earlier you might have been the only person with the license to coach the Philadelphia second team what do you think of very general question what do you think of US soccer's coaching education system um yeah look uh my last taste of it was the pro license um and honestly it was the best coaching license I did with them was the pro license it was the most rewarding it was the most reflective it was the most collaborative um my cohort had guys like Wilfred Nazi and Mikey Varas and Rob Valentino and we had a really really great cohort and I think all of them have been really great um but it was it was the most rewarding and the most personal one um where it felt like I wasn't just doing something on a piece of paper and kind of going through a process just to get a license um it felt more like I was learning something um and doing something um I think that um it's my I don't remember a whole lot from when I did my A because it was so long ago um but I think I think whenever you kind of go through a lot of the coaching things it just seems very everything seems the same you know I can't tell you last time I went to a convention because you go and it doesn't feel authentic anymore and I don't want to sound um critical I learned more now by going and seeing coaches in their own environments and kind of seeing how they interact with their players how um how maybe they put their own twist on the way they want to play and and those kind of things for which is versus maybe a license or a course or just like a show put on for coaches to watch um and sometimes those are the best conversations are the best this for me um like collaboration and opinions and I think we kind of live in this world right now or it's right or wrong and and people's opinions are often frowned upon and I I guess I'm still part of that older generation that um maybe grew up a little bit differently where we didn't wear seatbelts and you know uh you know uh you know people smoked in in the same area you were in and you kind of just you didn't complain about it you just move somewhere else or you you kind of ask somebody to step out like now confrontation is or you know or or conversation is is mostly done through a computer screen or a twitter handle or something like that and um a lot of that collaboration is lost and I think that last course that I did with us soccer the pro license it was all about um communication and and collaboration and and and and working with others and um that part was fun but uh I don't know what those coaching courses are like now I did a um a presentation for an a license a couple years ago where I presented like uh like periodization I think it was um to like a cohort of an a of an a license group um but it was me just kind of speaking to them on a zoom you know um and then I fielded some questions at the end and um I was trying to be kind of the fact of trying not to be boring and trying to just be open and share um as much as um I could and you know I'm that way now people ask me now can they come out and I'm an open book yeah come over and watch no problem not in the field I've had some coaches locally from colleges uh agents some visiting coaches are in the world cup and who just wanted to come and watch a session or two um and I think for me that's the best learning that you can do is just being out there and and talking to people and seeing people and um you know maybe you see somebody you're like I would never do it that way that's horrible that's learning for me um uh versus uh feeling like you have to have your cone spaced out like this and your numbers or have to be like that and you know teach the overlap when you're teaching why play um I think you know opinions are one thing but kind of directive is another and there's different ways to manipulate wide spaces that don't necessarily have to be an overlap and I don't think that's the way that one person doesn't means that that's the way everybody has to do let me ask you this I mean I'm taking the I'm taking I'm actually taking the D license class right now um I coach like you ten soccer but um there's this emphasis and I and to your point about conversation I actually I've actually found it very useful I mean it's useful for me and thinking through how to like organize a training session and stuff it's good for me but there is this emphasis on the USSF game model and then finding the principles and sub-principals you want to teach and then tying those principles to player actions and um a critique I've heard of that is you want to teach we should be trying to teach player cognition which I don't think the two things are mutually exclusive but this this heavy emphasis on like we're teaching this action controlling or you know shooting whatever um there is this idea that when you're so focused on player actions you're not as focused on player like independent thinking as you should be what do you think of that is that a fair critique or um yeah I think so I think got especially the younger you are right um and everyone always talks about like especially with young players it's it's critical scanning right and red blue you know these kind of things that are trying to gain information from what's around you um and I think you you you often hear like coaches tell players like things like check your shoulders well what are they looking for and I think when you're super young and you're trying to teach like these cognitive type of actions it's typically there's not enough information to go along with what like check your shoulders and even today with senior players I have players checking their shoulders but all they're looking for is to see if there's somebody on them but the way that I've always kind of taught things like check your shoulders and with even with my own son is okay what is it that you're looking for so when you look over your shoulder are you just looking to see um who's on you or you're looking to see where your teammate is or where the space is that you can go next or you know what's the next path I can make doesn't need to be a chip doesn't need to be a through ball does it need to be a trivela does it need to be curving inward to outer like all of these all this information from a cognitive perspective when you check your shoulders is exactly what you're looking for right and coaches hear things like oh the critical scan the last scan right before the ball gets played or they get uh you know so and so scans uh five times every 10 seconds but like it's it's not just scanning it's actually processing information and so now how do you now take a training session that's about scanning and colors and you know direction and all these kind of things and actually have a process of what you're trying to achieve on the back end of it and so I've always like from a point where my son was eight or nine years old is you're what you're looking for when you scan is you're looking for your next action like can I break a line with my next path when I put the next player in and then you talk about what position do they play so if you're a 10 which is a dying position now and football is the 10 because everything's become so pet party or ruin football with tiki taka football right now everybody's so condensed and and compact that 10 is now eliminated now you're seeing the advent of the winger the juggling winger all the time um that those players need to be able to play in tight spaces and get out of them very quickly if the players brave enough to play the ball to them in between all the congestion um and so it's now can you find something as a 10 that's going to now make an attacking action happen that's different than a center back it's different than a winger it's different from all these other players but um you know look for what the next action is not just whether you can turn on I think most players right now only look to see if they can turn but it doesn't solve the next part of the process of why you're having that um that scanning action and so it's like little things like that that I think make a make a big big difference in in the development of the player in order to to hopefully teach them something that's more than just turning with the ball on one time there's another one where you always teach your players to maybe open up their hips to the inside of the field um versus facing away from the field or the facing the sideline when they receive the ball and I'd always been that way and then I started working with Jose Cleverson who was my assistant at in Philadelphia in Cleverson won a World Cup with Brazil a play for Manchester United he he's the forgotten player in the transfer when Cristiano Ronaldo went to Manchester United they both went at the same time but it was bigger news that that Cristiano went but Jose Cleverson within his own right is a World Cup winner and played a Manchester United and he says to me he goes but he's like coach what about if the player receiving the ball wants you to think he can't see what's behind him and he's actually setting you up to come and press him on the sideline but he in his mind has already thought of a way to getting out of that situation because for many many years I said oh you don't want to receive the ball this way because you can't see what's behind you if you're facing the sideline where the next action has to go but maybe that player is setting you up because he's already seen what's there and he wants to make you think that oh yeah come get me on the sideline and now he's got a way to wiggle out of it and he surprises you and I thought it was a really really interesting perspective to have and it took up Brazilian World Cup winner who played a Manchester United teach me that but he's a hundred percent right we can't just pigeonhole everybody into doing the same thing because perhaps that player has a different way of looking at the game that maybe you don't have a way that you don't see yourself as a given as a coach. Well one more coaching education question the grass roots the grass roots sort of stuff I know you're a million miles beyond this and you're I'm sure you're not just like going out on rex soccer fields and checking things out but is there anything we can do better on that front and I and I ask this in the spirit of like growing the game producing better a broader deeper pool of players because I mean a lot happens at like you six rex soccer that could go really well or could go really poorly and it just feels to me I'm kind of leading question here but it feels to me like US soccer barely is paying attention to that or maybe it's just too big of a thing to pay attention to I don't know. Yeah it's another great question I think I'm a little bit I my focus right now is on attacking play really and I was asked a question as you know why haven't that why hasn't the United States developed world-class attacking player yet and I kind of want to cycle this back to your question there about like you soccer and grass roots and and I cycle back and my son's not grass roots anymore is 18 now but there are times I'll watch him play and I'm not in Philadelphia anymore I'm not there every day to kind of mitigate kind of what he's doing and I tell him he's playing like a robot and I guess where I'm going with that is that at times I feel like we're as coaches we want to we want to coach too much and players especially today the way they learn the way they kind of get information is always on a computer screen it's always on the internet it's always you know chat gpt kind of thing that the way they follow instruction sometimes you need to tell them what to do in order to do it that there's a lot of self discovery that's missing now for me and the creative player is hard to find and it goes kind of back to this whole adage how do you teach creativity and can you and can't you and I think you can I think sometimes you need to leave a player alone just give them an objective and ask them to solve it versus telling them you know you have we want to play this way and have formations and and want them to play one touch or play two touch or pass the ball or or on the flip side they don't pass the ball and we don't want it we don't want to tell them you need to bring a teammate into it I think we're we're missing a little bit of the freedom of the player who needs freedom and the directive of the player who needs directive and I don't think you can treat every player the same but you can treat them all fairly but if we want to coach young players we have to leave them alone as well and stop telling them always what to do because as they get older and you can't tell them what to do anymore when lamina mal is doing something crazy and now you want them to do something crazy themselves to make a moment out of nothing when the player that you told them they have to play the ball to isn't there at that time and they don't know what to do next that's kind of where it starts to break down and so for me I when I was coaching in college and there would be like you 12 you 13 games going on and you 17 games are like I'm feel 25 but I was on field five I would love to stop and watch the younger kids play and watch them all chase the ball around and hear the coach say spread out spread out but which is funny because when they get to senior football if you ever took an aerial view of a team in possession everybody's in like a one quadrant of the field all 22 players right out somewhere 21 one goalkeepers on the other side of the field and everybody else is literally pigeonhole then because the game is so condensed it's funny that we scream spread out spread out you know I used to love watching because the game for me there the fun part of it the experimental part the trying things part um you know I almost feel like uh too many players now play especially attacking players play and play safe instead of taking risks and taking chances and um you know it's the that was like the Clint Dempsey that used to get you excited to watch him play because he would do you know things that you know he was just so brave and bold and um you know who's that player now uh in our team and that's you know you saw a little bit from Balrogon how we just kind of wanted to turn and go to goal all the time and I think that's why people were so excited about him but you really don't see as much of that anymore um and you just wonder how much of that can be mitigated even at some of the younger the younger age groups like like because development is up and down and because we shouldn't be saying at 12 years old this kid is that the anointed one or he's not gonna be any good um I think about how much freedom we take away from players at young ages um you know I think that that's something that we could do better okay awesome okay this is a question from Mateus uh that's a Brazilian name by the way two weeks out from their first game Brooklyn FC had like 13 players on their roster what was the process of putting together the squad yeah uh it's you know in a lot of ways um it's been the big as challenge of my career uh you know I wasn't hired until December um yeah good luck um kind of putting a squad together for January preseason in December around the holidays and and everything else and yeah yeah it's in a perfect world I wish I would have had you know six months to you know a year to kind of get ahead of things with Brian Brian was only hired before I was a month and a half before I was um and so in a lot of ways it was not an ideal way to put a team together and yeah it was it was a it was a big struggle it was hard um it's still hard we still only have 22 players on the roster it's not done and it's um you know it's not gonna be done before this season ends and um it's one of the many things of starting a new franchise that's been uh really really challenging in which we like I said I wish we could add six months to a year the way Rhode Island did it you know to put it together um Kano was a good friend he was also in that pro license cohort that I mentioned before Kano Smith um at 10 months he was hired before they've kicked the ball in in Rhode Island and um you know to do it you know six weeks before we bring the team together was was a challenge and eight guys in your first training session um Matthias it's uh well you really got to focus on those eight players yeah yeah you're always spending the positive right when you're coaching but I would tell Matthias that uh it was not easy it's still not easy it's still a process um and and there's a lot of growing pains in the player acquisition process I've Brooklyn that we're still working through can you talk a little bit more about your work in relationship with Brian McBride how does how does that collaboration work yeah great uh Brian and I get along really well um I think Brian uh believes in in in the game model and the principles and the foundation and the identity that we want to have for this club and this team um I was pretty uh pretty adamant about that when I went through the process I did it's funny I did this process he reached out to me when I was in Qatar for the under 17 world cup um watching my someplace um and I got the email obviously Qatar or something like 12 hours I had or something like that and I got the email asking to meet uh in the next like 24 hours on like a zoom call um but by the time I actually saw the email it was already like middle of the day and like going to meet with them like uh pretty quickly so that was an interesting process but uh yeah Brian um he I was really adamant when I did the interview of how I wanted to keep character at the top of the player pyramid um we would explain what a player pyramid is real quick for us so you look at like like what is important when you build like what is the player like is technical is tactical you know like all those kind of things that go into him being uh a player um and why you would want that player to be in your team um what is the makeup of that player uh and in all the facets of you know can he shape a ball can he um you know what position he plays is he good in the air all these things that make up whether or not you would want a player in your team um but a lot of times it's like the character part and so like no one would ever debate that Terrell Owens was a great wide receiver um all right you know um that um um uh gosh why is his name escaping me right now who was he uh no going to go back to football um who was uh the Italian uh center midfielder who uh pilo um not pilo um the african one uh who gotten all the trouble and um i can't think of his name either at the moment it's embarrassing you know talking about cinematic guy um yeah yeah uh even if you look at um you know uh just some of the best players who were just for a lack of better words uh assholes but you know like guys who you know maybe brought their baggage on uh in the locker room with them like guys who can uh you'd love to have on your team when you're playing against somebody else but you don't love to have them in your team you know six days of the week uh because they're destructive to your environment or um the old coaching rule never make uh a rule that your best player can't follow well if this player can't follow any rules and you're screwed right because how do you hold your entire team accountable it's that guy um so for me the character was important the guy who was willing to sacrifice himself and make a near post run as a as a center forward that's going to open up your tent to come in from behind or your weak side winger to come in from behind to score the goal where the guy who's just going to check off is running weight for the cut back um like that you guys waiting for the cut back yeah exactly and no goal gets scored right and so um like the character park for me the guy who who lives a life um and and that that still i would take a worse player with a great character who's going to help the team win then take a guy who might score 16 goals but perhaps your team loses you know eight more games because you know it was all about him scoring the goal um like that that for me and some organizations still want the player who's going to you know who's going to maybe get the goals and and you risk it and and you roll the dice on it that it's not going to disrupt the team but uh i've learned that the older those guys get without being mitigated the harder it is to kind of rain them back into the team concept um and so character for me is at the top of the player pyramid and what i've made really clear to ownership um and and brine was that uh when we go and get players it it can't just be the most talented guy if the character's not there um if we're going to build a real team uh that's going to last the test of time then um it seems to be done on the right foundations and the right principles both uh from a playing perspective and from a character perspective call me old school ballot telling you hit it ballot telling all right different issue all the time um so talented top of literally at one stage was up there what you consider to be one of the best players in the world um but so many issues off the field uh probably went through a lot in Italy i imagine i mean we know he went through some stuff there some racism i'm just gonna be clear about it oh yeah hundred percent hundred percent um you brought a handful of players on loan with you from the union academy how is it integrating them into brooklyn fc um and how does that you know the balance of expectation shift between from more development to now it's more about i imagine more about results yeah um obviously whenever you bring guys in on loan it can be a really tricky situation right um because those players aren't necessarily always happy that they're on loan um but at the same stage they also know that that's not necessarily whether features going to be in the long run so sometimes that can be tricky but i brought two guys in who i knew and i'd work with for a number of years um and i knew that they would commit to what we were trying to build in terms of an identity and uh one of the discussions i had with Brian early on and just as recently as now that the european winnow is opening uh has opened up that we didn't want to build our franchise on loanes the usl is already a high turnover league in terms of players and could build your franchise on on loanaries then what identity do you really have but these were guys that i knew would buy into the identity of the culture that we wanted to establish and would add to it um both Marcus Anderson and cj only the two guys you talk about i had in the second team both their first team players and filled off in now but needed a bigger challenge than mls next pro this year for where they were in their development pathway um and and my relationship with philly obviously helped and um both have come in and and been big players for us uh this year and so um it worked out well i'm glad uh it's working out well for them it's working out well for us as a club and and what we want to do um but in a lot of ways they've been great examples for you know what what i'm speaking towards in terms of the character having want to play um establishing the the identity identity and the culture of what we want to establish and um you know not feeling like um they aren't committed to the cause it's been it's been really good for for all parties and so about as well as a loan could go i guess it's pretty easy for you to vet the character of the union players because you coached them already how do you vet the character of the uh of the other guys you and brine want to bring in like how rigorous is that process yeah it's hard and it was hard and kind of goes back to what you were saying is when you only have 13 players two weeks before the season starts it's because that's what you're trying to do but you're trying to do it on wise cow you're trying to do it by talking to other people um and a lot of our kind of process this year is just learning who these guys are because nobody knew anybody when you pull the team together right with that close season um not just a playing standpoint but even just like we said from um getting to know who they are as human beings and establishing relationships um and you know it's uh it's it's not an easy process uh i told people in joke that i i didn't sleep i was having such a hard time sleeping at night because i would spend 16 hours a day staring at my computer screen and wise cow trying to watch players play and trying to get a sense of who they were on on a computer screen and um it's it's a challenge uh now as we still are trying to establish a scouting department in our club um being a new franchise we don't have that out there yet and trying to get eyes on players versus just always kind of identifying try to suss out who they are on on a video because as we alluded to earlier we're not there day-to-day with them um and and making those kind of determinations and decisions based on on video can be really really tricky and and and not always tell us the whole doesn't always tell the whole picture what's your favorite what what when you go into wise cow you pull up Kellyn Leblanc you're gonna look at him try to figure out if you want to bring him in what's the first thing you look at duels um i think it depends on the position um if it's an attacker i like to look at um you know essentially the production of what they do goals and assists obviously um then if it's a defender probably i'd like to look at duels if it's a center back um i like and i think it always kind of rolls back to what your game model is and what your principles are so it's it's probably not the same for every coach you get alone ever obviously each position um but specifically to what my game model likes when i would like it to look like um i'm huge on tactile flexibility i have a game model um and specific principles that i want to say um but i was able to have that that same game model and put it in with like you know the national team for example um which um if you looked at probably where i was if you've ever seen a Philadelphia Union game you'd hardly call it great football um um there's not a whole lot of of the ball and you know it's heavily transitional um and you think about what u.s. soccer's game model is a four three three winger possession style you know like it's talked about the antithesis that's completely separate right but i was able to take things from my game model from what i did with the union implemented into you know the u.s. soccer game model which i thought helped us and and undefeated 2025 uh playing all internationals um and you know my game model in adapting it now and so i'm not fixated on it being a four three three or four four two or three four three it's more about the principles and the ability to be tactically flexible um with the players that we have so if i were to look up a player i'm looking specifically to see you know what can they do what are their strengths um how could that fit into our game model does it offer us something different than what we already have um we didn't probably get to do that this year and building this roster because there was no time to really do that um but that's definitely something that i want us to do moving forward in in terms of our player acquisition and and you know left footers versus right footers can know are they uh do you have a player who can play both as a winger and as a nine um those kind of things i think for me is i i think i'm one of my strengths as a coach is being able to utilize players in different roles to get the most out of them and get the best out of them um and not feeling like i need to buy a specific player to do a specific job um but you can only go maybe so far with that thought process uh and i'm not not even enough to think that um spending money on a big player can also help you get bigger results too um well i don't want to take all your whole day but i do i do i do have to ask about cabin Sullivan um he i i got to tell you this i used to go on fought mop to see check and do a little cabin check in so you know see how he did in his union two game and uh always cj only was the one who scored like every every single time i'll oh that's cj cj guys scored again but what do you think of Sullivan is he um you know gonna save american soccer i love that question uh first off uh fought mop is awful it gets so many things wrong in their i ai it's incredible um really really oh my gosh they've gotten goal scores wrong there's a lot wrong you'd be surprised as as a kuchu would go back and and we'd go back and use uh opta or stats bomb or one of the real true analytics that you get from a match um and how it compares sometimes to what fought mop ad is completely off um especially if it's like you know what the difference is is it fought if you use fought mop and there's a multi camera system it's typically better but with an m last x pro for example you have the single camera that that you know if you think about the first couple of years the camera sometimes didn't keep up with the action right like it was over this right like and so it's it's it's missing or it's misidentifying players when it's on the far field or the sun maybe decide to play a game at 11 a.m. and in boxbar stadium and the sun is glaring down because of the way it's hitting the stadium it's misidentifying who some of the players are in certain parts of the field so a lot of the fought mop it stuff can be inaccurate that said um uh cabin um i had cabin in the second team he was 14 when i first introduced him into playing in the second team and i'd known cabin because he's my son he's an o9 and my son's an o8 so they've been playing together since my son first came to fill in alphia to join the union so i've known him since he was um you know a real little kid eight or nine years old really good friends with the family i had quint and his older brother played for me as well um who's on the first team and you know it's been to youth crawl cups as well um and his cabin going to save us soccer cabin will not save us soccer by himself what what is really really important to me and i think i read somewhere Andrew Carlton came out and had a lot to say about um american players and an mls and um he's taken a lot of heat up for it but he's not wrong uh what what you're seeing right now with cabin Sullivan is is he's been given the opportunity to play um and if you were to go through every team and major league soccer and you look at who plays the nine who plays the ten who plays the seven the eleven or the eight you'd be hard-fest hard-pressed to find americans who are playing in those positions because those are the dp positions and you don't see very many americans playing in those spots i don't know what the number is but you might be able to count it on one or two hands i would think so yeah out of the thirty teams and those five those five number positions um but what you're seeing right now is an adaptation of giving a young player an opportunity and a chance and him growing and he took a lot of criticism early on when he first started playing always not that good of this that yeah there everybody's a critic who doesn't see the every single day they just see the ten minutes that he came on the field um and cabin is a very very good player and um he's uh what we like to refer to as a high potential player but he's not just potential anymore cabin belongs on the field um much like i believe Justin Ellis who i had with the national team belonged in the national team uh i pushed for Justin to be in with us um and you see him now what he's doing with our land or city um much like you see with a lot of other young players out there they're capable it's just about being in an environment where they're allowed to fail and and or succeed um and cabin that has the temperament and the personality and the character that he will win ugly if it requires him to win ugly um but he also has the ability and the skill to take a player on because he has the character to be brave and change the game i think it's really really naive of fans out there to think he's the second coming when messy was his age nobody thought of him as being the second coming um and for a while there messy got criticized right up until 2022 when he won the World Cup that you know that he wasn't in the same league as mattadona and pelae and and the greatest whoever played the game until he finally won the World Cup now everybody's a call my gosh the mess is the greatest uh you know it's i think people are who don't see him every day it's easy to criticize him and it's also easy to celebrate him when he does something special in a match and say oh he's the second coming but to see him every day you have a different perspective of um what his potential is and and how far he still has to go and he has great great potential but he still has a long long way to go um and i still text cabin you know i don't know every other week like i said he's he's you know everybody's best friend at this point yeah he's best friends with my son they hang out they go them all they talk he's it's something different but um i will i will text him and tell him if he's been shit and i'll text him and tell him he was great um and like what makes him a little bit different is that you can text him and tell him uh he he wasn't very good and before i done it his dad has told him his mom has told him his three older brothers have told him and i think that's maybe what separates him um from from the others is that that whereas you know the adidas contract and the commercials and uh you know the spotlight and him alas and all those kind of bells and whistles that are around him he is incredibly grounded he is incredibly down the earth um he has a showboy mentality um but if you if you know him there's a humility there too and i think that's what maybe makes him a little bit different than the others no one's trying to just protect him from the media no one's trying to like you know keep them out of he can handle himself and there's trust me there's nothing uh you can say that's so bad to him that he hasn't heard already um and that he doesn't let people be smart enough that he doesn't let people just kind of fill his ego um he sees through that kind of stuff so for a 16 year old he is incredibly old beyond his years and i can i can say that his best years are still ahead of him but he still has a long long way to go um but man he's he's every week i turn on if i watch a Philadelphia Union game he's the best player in the field at 16 years old um and you know even some of the things that don't come off the ideas for me or or and i guess i look through it with a little bit more of a development eye than just uh um when you say what do you look for when you turn on wisecout when he doesn't score or it doesn't make an assist the idea that he tried uh that didn't come off um it may not show up on a stat page to say oh he didn't score 16 goals and get tennisist this year um maybe only got five but when he's 18 when that ball does come off you know those are the kind of things that i still look for in a player and his his character to compete at least really does pop off the screen hard to imagine him wilting against Belgium at the world cup i don't think he's gonna save american soccer just to be clear he'll be one of the special ones so and hopefully there's a generation that are gonna be uh more like him but he's only 16 years old we don't know what he's gonna look like at 20 he could be exponentially better he could be the same you know what does that mean at 24 he's not in his prime until he's what 28 and so there's that's you know 10 12 years away from yeah for it even hits his prime um there's there's uh we would be naive as a soccer culture to annoying to any one player as the next guy and um you know messy people knew messy was going to be good they ever think he was gonna be the greatest and be the guy to bring a world cup back to Argentina it probably not they had him on drugs trying to stretch him out to grow more than five foot seven right for a long time um and all he did was uh was change football before people's eyes but he was a very different player in his first world cup than what he was in this one there probably was nobody busier and ran more than Leo messy when he first started playing now there's nobody who runs less yeah that just frenetic energy of those old highlight reels from like him playing and shavings league and stuff all right uh marlin thank you so much for this good luck this weekend against the battery and good luck with the rest of your season good luck to your son calon with his career too thank you i enjoyed the conversation thanks for having me on let's do it again all right i would love that thanks everybody for listening we'll see you