The U.S. men's national team has failed to go back-to-back-to-back-to-back in the Concacaf Nations League and, of the many lessons to take from it, the main one might be this: There's still not enough attacking talent around Christian Pulisic.
Pulisic alone isn't enough to consistently break down the kind of increasingly organized, talented, and deeper-sitting defenses the USMNT seems to be facing in some matches. With both of the team's starting fullbacks healthy -- Antonee Robinson bombing down the left, Sergiño Dest pulling the creative strings on the right -- there seems to be just space for the attack to click into a higher gear. The team has also often been able to get by with only one of those players on the field. And obviously, it didn't help that Monaco's Folarin Balogun, the team's presumptive starting center forward also was.
Still, it feels as if it shouldn't be this hard just because a couple of starters are out.
Even with some lineup rotation, the Americans attempted only five shots in a 2-1 loss against Canada in the third-place game. And in a 1-0 semifinal loss against Panama, their 12 shots totaled a meager 0.68 expected goals. Beyond some much-needed improvement on set pieces and some riskier tactical choices by coach Mauricio Pochettino, the main way for it to get easier would be for the other players to improve.
A prevailing sentiment among American fans is that the solution to the USMNT's biggest problem, then, is that the guys playing well at smaller clubs need to make the jump to elite clubs. And right now, two attackers in particular are sitting on a couple of career thresholds -- at an age when players often suddenly become significantly better, and at clubs where players at those ages tend to move to bigger leagues.
So, how might the likes of Josh Sargent and Ricardo Pepi project beyond the lower levels of the English Championship and the Dutch Eredivisie? Let's take a look.
Josh Sargent | 25, Norwich City
Sargent's career so far tracks pretty nicely with what we know about how players age.
He made 36 starts for Werder Bremen in the Bundesliga before his age-21 season. And he scored 11 goals and produced four assists -- backed up by below-average expected-goal and expected-assist numbers.
But the numbers were below average for any Bundesliga player, and we're talking about a teenager. The fact that Sargent was playing significant minutes in a big league at a young age was the most important thing -- it suggested, at some point, he'd become a capable pro.
But we also know that development does not tend to be linear. Players who play a lot at a young age don't just get better and better every year. Sometimes they have a couple of consolidation seasons when they're no better or worse -- just the same as the year before. Other times, they actually take a step back -- before ultimately taking a much larger step forward.
Sargent moved to Norwich City, then still in the Premier League, for €9.5 million in 2021. He really struggled for a bad team. Across 15 starts, he averaged 0.17 non-penalty goals+assists per 90, a lower figure than Liverpool's Joel Matip, Brentford's Kristoffer Ajer, and Chelsea's Trevoh Chalobah -- all of whom are center backs. In terms of attacking production, Sargent ranked 137th among all Premier League players who appeared in at least 30% of their team's minutes.
It wasn't much better in the Championship the next season. Sargent bounced up to 0.43 G+A per 90, but much of that can be attributed to the fact that he was playing in a worse league and for a team with more money, thanks to parachute payments provided to relegated Premier League teams, than most of the others in its new league.
Of course, we also know that players tend to enter their primes right around age 24. Sargent, now 25, turned 24 midway through last season, and the past two seasons have been the two best of his career: 0.88 G+A per 90 last year and 0.77 G+A per 90 this season.
USMNT forward Josh Sargent reveals how his mentality has helped him regularly find the net for Norwich in the Championship.
This is a pretty traditional player path: prospect plays a lot at a young age, struggles for a couple of seasons all of a sudden, and then suddenly breaks out right around his 24th birthday. The one complicating factor, of course, is the change of competition. Sargent went from the Bundesliga to the most competitive league in the world, the Premier League, and then down to the Championship, which, at best, could be classified as the eighth- or ninth-most difficult league in the world.
So, if you were a team scouting Sargent for a summer move to a better league, what might you expect? The first thing: He mostly is what he is. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but soccer players (and most athletes) age faster than we think. At 25, Sargent is already in the middle of his prime. Coaches love to trick themselves into envisioning what a player might be able to do in a new system -- it's more fun to imagine things you've never seen before than accepting what's in front of your eyes. But realistically, when you're acquiring a player such as Sargent, he already is what he's going to be.
And what is he? He's a really safe buildup option who isn't going to lose the ball, creates good chances for his teammates, and has scored a bunch of goals on a relatively low volume of high-quality shots.
From a more traditional scouting standpoint, I'd be especially worried about the latter when projecting Sargent to a bigger league. Though good shots are better than bad shots, Sargent hasn't shown much of an ability to consistently create shots for himself. If he goes to a better league and he's taking even fewer shots than he is now (2.26 per 90) or he's no longer able to get the high-quality shots we've seen in the Championship, his goal-scoring is going to crater.
From a more statistical perspective, there have been 20 players 24-and-under in the Championship since 2018 who have played at least 15 full matches and generated at least 0.6 non-penalty expected goals plus expected assists per 90 minutes. Sargent has done it twice, so that leaves 18 others. And among those 18, I'd say there are four players who have developed in a way that would make both USMNT fans and a prospective Premier League team happy were Sargent to follow a similar path: Aleksandar Mitrovic, Viktor Gyökeres, Ollie Watkins and Dominic Solanke.
But those four all did it over 3,000-minute- or even 4,000-minute-plus seasons. Sargent played only about 1,800 minutes last season, and he's right around that same mark at this point in the current season. The list of players who hit the 0.6 mark on similar minutes to Sargent is much less inspiring: Patrick Bamford, Steve Mounié, Nick Powell and George Hirst.
The players who tend to flourish beyond the Championship, then, are the ones capable of taking on massive minutes loads, surviving the physical toll of the league, and maintaining high levels of efficiency. The players who maintain the efficiency over smaller minute loads tend to be players who end up being good Championship players.
That seems like the most likely outcome for Sargent, but there's still the chance he ends up closer to that best-case grouping or at least somewhere in between the two groups we've established. We've at least now seen him do this twice. And though he's not a great athlete, he's good enough. Someone outside of the Championship should be willing to take the risk to sign him for the right price.
Ricardo Pepi | 22, PSV Eindhoven
The website FBref has data for more than 60 professional soccer leagues around the world. Among all players who have played at least 12 90-minute stints since the start of last season, Shanghai Port's Wu Lei is the leader with 1.3 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes. Ranking third is Lionel Messi's 1.1 goals per 90 for Inter Miami.
And in second, it's Pepi's 1.2 goals per 90 for PSV -- and he's doing it at a much higher competitive level than either of the Lei or Leo. Plus, at 22, he's 10 years younger than the former, and 14 years younger than the latter.
Among players who featured in at least 150 Champions League minutes this season, only Ousmane Dembélé, a player I recently said was the best in the world right now, has attempted more shots (5.8) than Pepi's 5.5 per 90 minutes. And in the Eredivisie, his shot map is Erling Haaland-esque: only one from outside the penalty area, almost everything inside the width of the six-yard box.
Pepi doesn't really do much else, but the ability to generate a high quantity of shots from the middle of the penalty area is perhaps the most important isolated skill in soccer, and Pepi turned 22 just a couple of months ago, so, uh, hello FC Barcelona?
Perceptive readers will have noted that I've used a couple of arbitrary-looking and random-seeming minutes cutoffs for both of the stats I've mentioned. They're not random, but they're definitely arbitrary. They're both as high as I could go without leaving Pepi out: He played only 164 minutes in the Champions League this season, and he has played fewer than 1,200 minutes in the Eredivisie over the past two years combined.
Though Sargent has mainly seen his minutes limited by injuries -- and Pepi himself is probably out for the rest of the season because of a knee injury -- Pepi's minutes have not really been limited in the same way. No, it mostly has come down to coaching decisions. Pepi has appeared in 45 league matches over the past two seasons but has started only six. And in the Champions League, it's a similar story: 15 matches, two starts.
This raises some questions, the most important of which is: Why is Pepi's manager, Peter Bosz, choosing 34-year-old Luuk de Jong over him, week in and week out?
Herculez Gomez and Kasey Keller discuss Ricardo Pepi's contract extension at PSV.
De Jong has started 55 league matches over the past two years. As we've talked about, raw minutes played tends to be a good predictor of future success, but I think that's less to do with experience gained from being on the field at a young age and more to do with a coach, seeing players play every day, identifying something in a player that makes him comfortable staking his job security on giving a teenager valuable minutes.
So, were I scouting Pepi for a move to my club, I'd ding his projection a bit for his inability to beat out De Jong in the starting lineup. But the bigger ding would come from all the sub minutes. Many studies have shown that substitutes do pretty much everything at a significantly higher per-minute rate than starters. For example, analyst Michael Caley found that subbed-on strikers take 23% more shots than starters. That already should begin to deflate our expectations for a shot-heavy, in-the-box center forward such as Pepi.
Much of the sub effect presumably comes from playing against tired legs and also just playing in second halves of matches, when goal-scoring rates are significantly higher. But a large part of it also comes from the way per-90-minute statistics are calculated. As I wrote about last week when Pepi landed 26th in our latest edition of the USMNT Player Performance Index:
The amount of injury time has grown in recent seasons, but as analyst Elliot McKinley has shown, the way we account for injury-time minutes is broken. Most data providers cap game minutes at 90, so if you come on in the 89th minute and play nine minutes of injury time, you're only awarded one minute of game time. Play enough sub minutes, and you will rack up a bunch of invisible minutes. Score some goals during time that no one is accounting for and it will look like you're better than Messi.
Lastly, there are the Eredivisie effects. PSV's underlying statistics in the Netherlands are equivalent to what, say, powerhouse Paris Saint-Germain put up in Ligue 1 each season. But as we just saw in the Champions League: PSG outplayed Premier League leaders Liverpool across two legs, while PSV lost 9-3 to second-place Arsenal. There are serious questions about the quality of the league in which Pepi is scoring most of his goals.
If we lower the minutes threshold down to Pepi's minimum over the past two seasons and cap the season age at 21, the following players, in addition to him, have scored at least 1.0 non-penalty goals per 90 minutes in the Eredivisie: Jurgen Locadia, Mido, Lassina Traore, Jonathan Reis, Kolbeinn Sigþorsson and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar.
Though Mido went on to have two really nice seasons at Marseille and Tottenham, the rest of his career was a huge disappointment. Huntelaar had a really nice career, but he was already a multiyear starter for Ajax when he was Pepi's age. As for the other names, those aren't players for whom I'd want to be in the market.
I also suspect part of the reason Pepi hasn't played much for Bosz is that he's a very limited player in possession, compared to De Jong, who completes a ton of passes for a center forward. With Pepi, you can't just plug him into any system right now and expect a seamless fit. No, your system needs to account for a forward who doesn't contribute much else beyond his shots from the center of the box.
Pepi, then, represents a higher ceiling and lower floor option than Sargent. And I think the average outcome for both of them is still somewhere below "average Premier League forward." But there's still enough there for both players to suggest some upside.
Sargent has two seasons of high-level Championship performance, lots of early-age Bundesliga minutes, and some buildup-play ability. Pepi, meanwhile, is three years younger and has produced an absurd number of shots. Anyone who wants to sign either player will need to weigh all of the different potential outcomes and factor all of that into however millions of dollars they'd be willing to pay.
The good news for Pochettino -- and there isn't much right now -- is that he doesn't have to make any kind of significant financial bet on either player. And he doesn't need to commit to one over the other. Unlike the clubs who might sign Pepi or Sargent this summer, the USMNT only needs one of them to work out.