The 2021 Gold Cup officially begins this weekend. The biennial championship of Concacaf boasts a lot of the familiar faces as well as a few newcomers, and as usual features the best teams at something less than their full strength.
That is, again, as usual. What is a touch unusual is just how understrength the US men’s national team happens to be compared to, say, their rivals from Mexico, Costa Rica and Canada. While those three teams are missing key players here and there, US head coach Gregg Berhalter has chosen to go down the depth chart at virtually every single position. You could make a very plausible case that there is not a single first-XI player in this US squad, and I don’t think we’ve seen a Gold Cup roster of that sort from any country in the region since way back in 2009, when then-US head coach Bob Bradley assembled a similarly experimental crew.
The primary goal now, as it was then, isn’t necessarily to win the tournament. That would be an unadulterated good thing, obviously — winning is a habit. But in this summer’s tournament the goal is less about winning the whole damn thing and more about building depth throughout the player pool ahead of World Cup qualifying, which is now less than two months away (and full disclosure: I am starting to have frequent nightmares about qualifiers. That’s typical for me, but these have instilled a heightened sense of dread given the events of Couva four years ago).
Nothing else that happens in 2021, not the Nations League title nor any particular outcome in this Gold Cup, matters at all in comparison to World Cup qualifying. It is not something lopsided like “Qualifiers are 99% and the other stuff is a measly little 1%;” it is “Qualifiers 100% and everything else the USMNT does in 2021 is in service of that goal.” If the US fail in World Cup qualifying once again, nobody will remember last month’s win over Mexico or anything that happens here in the month ahead, because they will not matter. At all.
Here are the two main things that Berhalter has decided to do with the Gold Cup roster in order to give the US have the best chance of leaving past World Cup qualifying failures in the past:
