The USMNT walked off the field in Seattle looking like a team that just realized its alarm didn’t go off. Belgium ran them off the pitch 4-1 in the World Cup Round of 16, and it wasn’t even that close. The home crowd sat in stunned silence as Belgium kept pressing, kept sprinting, never let up. The U.S. didn’t have an answer.
ESPN’s Mina Kimes had one, though. And it came from a completely different sport.
“Someone call Mike Macdonald. We need to try some of his shenanigans on defense,” she posted on X.
A fan asked if she was messing around. Her reply: “I am being extremely serious.”
That’s Macdonald the Seattle Seahawks coach. The guy who just won a Super Bowl in February with a defensive scheme that made the 49ers’ offense look like a youth league team. The man who turns blitz packages into abstract art. Kimes apparently thinks the USMNT could use some of that chaos against world-class attackers.
The internet had opinions
Some fans were all in. “The way I said this exact same thing very seriously,” wrote one user. Another pointed out that if Macdonald can make San Francisco’s offense look like a kiddie pool, imagine what he’d do with a soccer back line that just conceded four goals.
But not everyone was buying it. “You can’t substitute trickery for a lack of talent,” one comment read. Another fan brought Kyle Shanahan into the mix: “I feel like Kyle Shanahan could throw together a killer soccer running scheme.” And someone else summed up the night with a shrug: “I think there’s already been enough shenanigans.”
USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino wasn’t joking. He said the team never found the flow of the game. They were disjointed, reactive, always a step behind Belgium’s movement. That’s not a scheme problem. That’s a performance problem.
This is the fourth straight World Cup where the U.S. exits in the Round of 16. The record this year was 3-2, with 11 goals scored. But the Belgium loss stung differently because it wasn’t competitive for long stretches. The talent gap showed up in a big way.
Will Macdonald ever get a call from U.S. Soccer? Almost certainly not. But the fact that Kimes even said it out loud tells you how desperate this loss made people feel. When soccer fans start yelling for NFL coaches, you know the pain is real.
The next World Cup cycle starts now. Maybe Pochettino takes a look at some tape. Or maybe he just hopes Kimes doesn’t have Macdonald’s number saved in her phone.
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