Over the course of its 14 World Cup qualifying matches, the United States men's national team scored 20 goals. Of those 20, a whopping four were scored by a center-forward. Put another way: American defenders scored as many goals in the Octagonal as American strikers did.
This is the blessing and the curse of international soccer: You don't get to pick which players develop into which positions; it just happens, because familial geography is destiny. Got two world-class keepers in Jan Oblak and Samir Handanovic? Tough luck, Slovenia. That's a pretty nice Mohamed Salah you got there, Egypt; would be a shame if you never developed any players who could pass him the ball, wouldn't it? Even the greatest national team of the 21st century struggled with this to a lesser degree. At Euro 2012, Spain had more midfielders than they knew what to do with but no strikers, so they just started one of them as a striker. Then, to fill the void, they convinced Brazil-born Diego Costa to play for La Roja instead of O Seleção -- and it all blew up in their face in 2014.
The USMNT, then, is experiencing a sort of C-list version of the Spain problem. There are competent players all across the roster, and even a bunch of stars playing for the best club teams in the world. There's just no one to, you know, kick the ball into the goal.
So, with seven months to go until the World Cup, let's check in with all of the potential striker options. We'll go in order of minutes played in qualifying, then minutes played in the Gold Cup, and then look at the handful of options who didn't appear in either competition.
Brace yourselves.
Ricardo Pepi, 19, Augsburg
He is the clubhouse leader to start game one in Qatar.
In the English language, we've developed all kinds of typeface options -- bold, underline, italics -- to emphasize words and statements. Unfortunately, there aren't useful ways to de-emphasize your language; otherwise, the first sentence of this section would've aggressively employed all of them. Consider it the weakest endorsement imaginable.
Why is that? Well, Pepi hasn't scored or assisted a goal in any professional soccer competition since Oct. 17. It's bleaker than that, though. All great attackers go through hot and cold streaks -- such are the vagaries of finishing -- but it's not clear that Pepi has even been all that unlucky not to score a goal in seven months. For his club teams, first FC Dallas and now Augsburg in the Bundesliga, he's attempted just 10 shots over that stretch. For reference: Liverpool's Luis Diaz attempted five shots in the first leg of Liverpool's Champions League semifinal against Villarreal on Wednesday. Diaz, and Colombia, will not be going to the World Cup.
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Pepi's still only 19, and the fact that he's playing a lot of minutes as a teenager bodes well for his future projections, but right now, he's just not a very good player. He still doesn't add much at all outside of his scoring, and that part of his game has disappeared, too.
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Jesus Ferreira, 21, FC Dallas
He should be the clubhouse leader to start game one in Qatar. As I wrote about at the end of qualifying, Ferreira led all players in the Octagonal in both expected goals and expected assists per 90 minutes. Of course, the rub is that he only played 229 minutes, so there's a ton of noise in those numbers. When he played, though, he was constantly getting on the end of great chances for himself, and he created plenty of great chances for his teammates. That's what he's been doing for the past two seasons in MLS, too.
Ferreira is not a pure center forward, but that's also the way the game is trending at the highest level. Teams want players who can float in and out of different positions and contribute to all phases of play. Compared to forwards in MLS over the past 365 days, he ranks in the 79th percentile for xG+xA per 90, per the site FBref. He's in the 96th percentile for progressive passes and the 75th percentile for progressive carries. And without the ball, he's in the 90th percentile or above for pressures, tackles and interceptions.
The one thing he doesn't do much of is get on the ball in the box -- third percentile -- but that's arguably the best skill of both Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie. We haven't seen Ferreira tested at the highest level or even consistently at the international level, but there's a lot to like here.
Gyasi Zardes, 30, Colorado Rapids
The USMNT vet -- he has 68 caps! -- lost his starting spot with the Columbus Crew and was just flipped to the Rapids for $300,000. We'll see how he performs with his new team, but that's not what you would call a "good sign." Zardes probably still offers the best off-ball movement among players at this position in the USMNT pool. He just hasn't consistently played and scored goals in a while now, and some of the U.S.'s best attackers already thrive off the ball.
All that said, the pool at the position is so thin that a hot couple of months with Colorado could easily push Zardes back into the World Cup picture.
Jordan Pefok, 26, Young Boys
With 21 goals and five games remaining, he's likely to finish the season as the leading scorer in the Swiss league. No one else in the competition has more than 17. I'm not sure there's another striker in the pool who would do what Pefok's doing were they put in his same position with Young Boys. He's scoring a ton of goals, which can't be said of, uh, any other American soccer player in the world right now.
But how do you contextualize that performance? Per FiveThirtyEight's global rankings, Young Boys rate as the 129th-best team in the world. That puts them a tiny bit ahead of NYCFC and LAFC, the two highest-rated teams in MLS. If there were a 26-year-old American lighting the league on fire for either of those two clubs, he'd be getting a ton of hype. Pefok also scored two goals in the Champions League group stages this season.
He hasn't exactly lit it up with the USMNT, though, scoring once in just over 200 minutes of competitive game time. He's not been given too many opportunities, and so his two standout moments for the team were the late winner in the Nations League semifinals last summer and his missed sitter against Mexico at the Azteca.
It's absurd to read too much into one chance -- he scores that chance against Mexico more often than he misses it -- but it's instructive to think about where we might be had Pefok finished a famous winner away to Mexico. He probably starts the next game, right? And given how dominant the USMNT were against Panama, maybe he grabs a couple more goals, too. And if that happens, he's probably pencilled into the starting XI right now.
Josh Sargent, 21, Norwich City
At least he's ... playing?
Among players 21 and under in the Premier League this season, only 21 guys have played more minutes than Sargent. Almost all the dudes ahead of him are considered good prospects or at least players who are expected to go on to be average Premier League players. If Josh Sargent were to become an average Premier League player at center forward, he'd be an auto-starter for the USMNT.
The main issues: He's not an average Premier League player, and he's also not currently a center forward. Mainly used on the wing, "The Sarge" is averaging 0.17 goals+assists per 90 minutes, with underlying numbers that roughly match up. Not good. He's not doing much else, either, other than a helluva lot of defending because he plays for an awful team in the best league in the world. Maybe he'll have a bit of an attacking resurgence when Norwich go down. In the Championship, they've dominated the ball in a Manchester City-esque fashion.
He's at least had a better club season than Pepi, but that's not a high bar to clear.
Matthew Hoppe, 21, Mallorca
You, too, are forgiven if you don't remember Hoppe making an appearance in qualifying, but he did: for 18 minutes at the tail end of the win over Costa Rica in October. Here is his shot map for the entire La Liga season with Mallorca:
Per Stats Perform, that adds up to 0.11 xG ... not per 90, but total.
Hoppe scored a hat trick as a 19-year-old in the Bundesliga last season, and players who score hat tricks in a major European league before their 20th birthdays tend to go on to have pretty solid careers. However, everything that's happened since -- mainly, Hoppe not getting much playing time at any level -- have made that moment seem more and more unlikely as it fades deeper into the past. He's an absolute force on the field and has been kind of fun to watch in his brief flickers for the USMNT, but he seems really far away from a roster spot for Qatar right now.
Daryl Dike, 21, West Brom
Remember him? After tearing up the Championship as a part of Barnsley's unlikely run to a playoff spot last season, he scored twice in his first start at the 2021 Gold Cup. But after bullying Martinique in a 6-1 win, he didn't score again for the rest of the tournament, and he didn't play a minute in the final against Mexico. He moved to West Brom in January, but a hamstring injury has kept him off the field for all but 84 league minutes.
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Now, he has scored some goals. Across MLS and the Championship, his career average is 0.55 non-penalty goals per 90. That's fantastic... but it doesn't seem likely to continue. Per Stats Perform, he's scored 27 goals in the regular seasons of both leagues from 16.31 expected goals. He might be an above average finisher, but not to that degree.
The other issue is that Dike thrived at Barnsley on an outlier team that didn't care about possession and just pumped the ball into the opposition box as soon as they were able to. It was almost a different sport. This is extremely not how Berhalter wants to play, and it's not a style that really fits the team's great players, either. For his career, Dike has completed just 61 percent of his passes, and that number didn't get much better at the Gold Cup. It's hard to see him solving any of the team's issues with breaking down deeper defenses.
A lot can and will happen over the next seven months, though. There's just more uncertainty around Dike's future prospects than any of the other players on this list.
The Other MLS Guys
San Jose's Jeremy Ebobisse is tied for second in MLS with five goals so far this season, and a source suggested to me that he's potentially in the mix for a center-forward spot. He's played for the USMNT at various youth levels, and he was capped once with the senior team, for a 2019 friendly. But his underlying numbers (0.37 xG+xA per 90) this season are below his career average of 0.45. The site American Soccer Analysis (ASA), which created a metric called Goals Added (G+) that tries to value every action a player makes on the field, sees Ebobisse as close to a bang-average player (0.07 goals added above average) this season.
However, ASA's model rates FC Cincinnati's Brandon Vazquez as the fourth-best striker (0.88 G+ above average) in the league this season. After putting up impressive production in limited minutes over his first five pro seasons, Vazquez, now 23, has become a full-time starter for Cincinnati, and the increased load hasn't affected his performance at all. He's scored five goals and assisted another at a rate of 0.87 goals+assists per 90 minutes. And if anything, those numbers might undersell his performance because he's doing it on the worst team in the league.
Given the state of the position, there are a number of other players who could suddenly flash into contention with a red-hot domestic season. My guess is there's at least one player -- if not more -- who makes the final World Cup roster who no one is even thinking about right now. And the path of least resistance for Unknown Player X onto the World Cup roster would be in the striker spot.
No Striker
Now that you've read all of that, how do these names sound to you: Pulisic, Giovanni Reyna, Brenden Aaronson and Timothy Weah? One thing they all have in common: They're all better and more accomplished soccer players than any of the ones we've already mentioned. They're all getting minutes -- if not starting -- for some of the best teams in the biggest leagues in the world or in the Champions League or both. Oh, and they're all attackers who can score and create goals.
The sport itself is moving away from the mold of the traditional number nine for both financial and tactical reasons. Not only is it the most expensive position to recruit, but with the rise of goal-scoring wingers, it's now just generally an inefficient approach to have a pure scorer who doesn't touch the ball much in buildup play and can't interchange with the team's other attackers. Just look at the two best teams in the world, Liverpool and Manchester City: they've reached rarely-seen levels of dominance by basically ignoring the concept of the striker all together.
Given the makeup of the current player pool, should Berhalter not consider doing the same thing?