The New England Revolution left back has six career caps
New England Revolution left back DeJuan Jones has been added to the U.S. men’s national team roster for Tuesday’s friendly against Oman, U.S. Soccer has announced.
Jones replaces Joe Scally, who has left the team due to family reasons.
Scally was an unused sub on Saturday as the USMNT beat Uzbekistan 3-0 in the first of two September friendlies.
The USMNT will now face Oman at Allianz Field in St. Paul, Minn. at 8:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday (TNT, Universo and Peacock).
Jones has earned all six of his USMNT caps this year, with the 26-year-old making his debut in a January friendly against Serbia.
The Revolution defender turned in a strong Gold Cup, starting four of the USMNT’s five matches in a tournament that ended with a shootout defeat to Panama in the semifinal.
Jones has started 18 MLS matches for New England this season, scoring one goal and adding four assists.
Scally doesn’t want the USMNT ‘overthinking on the field’
For Joe Scally, there’s beauty in simplicity when it comes to the U.S. men’s national team.
The Borussia Mönchengladbach defender told Fútbol Americas on Wednesday that he felt Gregg Berhalter’s USMNT approach was too complicated.
“We’re not a club team, you know?,” said the 20-year-old when asked what qualities he wants to see in the next USMNT boss. “We need to just understand the simple tactics, simple system that we can all apply, that brings out the best in all the players. Not something to where it’s too complicated and you’re overthinking on the field.”
Scally — who is enjoying a strong season with Gladbach, appearing in all but three of their Bundesliga matches — was one of the few outfield players that didn’t appear during the World Cup, and had previously admitted that he was surprised that he didn’t get on the field in Qatar.
The former NYCFC defender didn’t necessarily want to trash Berhalter, acknowledging that “his ideas were good, [we] definitely played well in the World Cup.” However, he seemed to take issue with Berhalter’s more involved system, echoing a critique that has been offered from some corners of the fanbase over the years.
“The national team brings the joy out of the game, you’re playing for your country, you know, you’re just there with that extra fight,” explained Scally. “Knowing you have the crest on your chest should bring out everything you need in the game, not confusing tactics and all this… as a player, when you’re on the field and you’re overthinking things, it leads to silly mistakes and silly things where you’re not yourself, and you can’t express yourself. So I think that was one of the things that didn’t work out.”
It’s not clear whether Scally and Berhalter will be working together any time soon. U.S. Soccer appears likely to stick with interim head coach Anthony Hudson through this summer’s CONCACAF Nations League and Gold Cup. The federation has appointed Matt Crocker as their new sporting director, but the Englishman will not start in the job on a full-time basis until August 2. U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said that the federation would like to settle on a new USMNT head coach by the end of this summer.
Berhalter’s contract with the federation ended in December 2022, amid a conflict with Gio Reyna’s parents Claudio and Danielle — both former national team players themselves — and has now been a free agent for over four months.
The 20-year-old has entrenched himself as the club’s starting right back this season
Borussia Mönchengladbach has announced that Joe Scally has extended his contract at the club until 2027.
The U.S. national team defender’s previous deal was set to expire in 2026.
Scally has entrenched himself as Gladbach’s first-choice right back during the current season, starting 24 of the club’s 28 Bundesliga matches thus far.
“The most important thing for me is to be playing regularly. Borussia give me the chance to do that and help my development as a player,” Scally told the club’s website. “The club presented me with a clear plan regarding my future during our conversations. I’m pleased to be staying at Borussia.”
Scally joined Gladbach from NYCFC in January 2021 and became a regular with the club last season, making 20 league starts.
The 20-year-old made his U.S. national team debut in November 2021 and was named to the World Cup roster last year, though he did not see the field in Qatar.
“Joe has developed really well with us. He quickly made the transition from being a talented youngster in our U-23s to a regular for the first team, and even made the U.S. World Cup squad. This is a great example of the journey we want our promising youngsters signed from other clubs to take,” said sporting director Roland Virkus.
“This contract extension acknowledges his development, which we want to continue supporting in the future.”
Despite his new contract, Scally could still be sold this summer, with Bild reporting that Gladbach would be open to a sale if the price is right. Last month, MLSsoccer.com reported that Fulham was among several English clubs looking into a summer move for Scally.
The USMNT striker is taking a risk as he aims to escape Augsburg
Ricardo Pepi could have kept his grievances behind closed doors. He could’ve quietly asked Augsburg to let him leave and hoped his wish would be granted.
But Pepi, and his agent Jaime Garcia, have decided that quiet isn’t the way they want to do this.
In an explosive interview with Voetbal International, Garcia and Pepi put all their cards on the table. They don’t just want to leave Augsburg, they want the world to know just how awful the club’s been to them.
As much as they’d like it to be, leaving Augsburg isn’t all up to Garcia and Pepi. It was only 16 months ago that Augsburg invested a club-record $20 million into Pepi, and signed him to a contract through 2026.
They have an asset on their hands, albeit a disgruntled one, and are under no real pressure to let him go unless a suitable offer arrives.
But will such an offer come? Pepi’s big gamble leads off this week’s edition of the Americans Abroad Five.
Just knowing the scoreline, even a person that didn’t see the game could probably divine some of the ratings here. Christian Pulisic was dominant from kickoff, Weston McKennie conjured up two goals, and Alex Zendejas marked his becoming cap-tied to the team with a goal. If you’re a USMNT fan, it was a fun Friday night.
With that in mind, our ratings for a game that was never particularly close:
The USMNT midfielder found himself in an unfamiliar place this weekend: the bench
Yunus Musah’s name has been in the news quite a bit this season and more often than not, it’s been about his next destination.
Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Inter, among others, have been strongly linked with the Valencia midfielder, who seems destined to leave the Liga club this summer.
Lost among the hype and justified excitement over Musah’s potential is how he is actually playing with Valencia this season. And the answer appears to be: OK, not great!
It’s worth remembering, of course, that Musah is only 20 and in his first season as an every-game starter in La Liga. Interested teams aren’t just after the player he is, but the player he could one day become.
But right now, Musah and his club are going through a rough patch. The midfielder’s up-and-down campaign leads off the Five this week.
There was no last-minute injury heartbreak for the U.S. ahead of the World Cup
There were several headlines with Americans abroad this weekend but in a sense, the only thing that really matters is the story that didn’t happen.
Namely, no players on the World Cup roster got injured in their final game before heading for Qatar.
USMNT fans watched the weekend’s slate of games with their breaths collectively held, but there was no devastating last-minute injury. In fact, there was even a key player returning from a short spell on the sidelines.
Before we go on a hiatus for the World Cup, let’s get to the Five.
The 19-year-old feels his confidence growing with the USMNT
Joe Scally said he “felt free” during his 30-minute cameo against Saudi Arabia last month as he continues building toward a possible World Cup roster berth with the U.S. national team.
It was just the third cap for the 19-year-old, who made his USMNT debut in June’s friendly against Morocco. The Borussia Mönchengladbach right back told the Orange Slices podcast that he’s starting to feel more comfortable with the USMNT.
“I would say that last 30 minutes I played in that last game, that’s the best I’ve felt with the national team. I felt free,” Scally said. “I was able to show what I can do, and just go out there and try and make something happen those last 30 minutes.
“At the other camps when you’re making your debut or something, you’re a little more tense, you don’t want to make a mistake, you don’t want something to happen where you do something crazy. So that game I just went in there and felt free, like I could just go out there and play like I do with my club.”
Scally has gained a lot of confidence from locking down the starting right back position at Gladbach this season, beating out Austria international Stefan Lainer.
“This last camp really was a good one because you have more confidence when you earn that starting spot at my club where Lainer is healthy and he’s there, so I really earned the starting spot, Scally said. “To know that gives you so much confidence going to a national team camp and every game.”
Scally is in the mix for a USMNT World Cup roster spot, coming in on the right side of the bubble in our latest projection due to his ability to play both fullback positions.
Too many USMNT arrows are pointing down rather than up
The U.S. men’s national team came into September’s international window hoping to find clarity and belief, but after two dispiriting performances, they certainly didn’t get the answers they wanted.
If anything, more players saw their stock drop, and in many cases there’s no recourse beyond hoping they go back to their clubs and tear it up. Gregg Berhalter has plenty to chew on over the next several weeks, but he was probably hoping to have more “good problems” than what he’s looking at right now.
Who hurt their chances of playing a major role at the World Cup? And who seems more important today than they did a few weeks ago? Let’s check the markets and see where the individuals are trending.
Stock down: Aaron Long
We have to start with the fact that the USMNT, against two very different systems, struggled with progressing the ball from their back line into the midfield. There were multiple causes for that problem, but the one that stood out more than the rest was that the center backs were both inaccurate with their passes, and very predictable with their intentions.
Walker Zimmerman wasn’t at his best, but for Long, the possession side of things was a major source of concern. Injuries to Chris Richards and Cameron Carter-Vickers didn’t help, and Berhalter ended up subbing Long off in both games to get a look at Mark McKenzie.
The fact that Long started both games seems to indicate that Berhalter holds him in esteem, but it’s not like he lacks for competition. With Richards vying for time in the Bundesliga and all of McKenzie, Carter-Vickers, and Palmer-Brown all getting regular minutes at European clubs, Long’s form with the New York Red Bulls will need to be much sharper than what we saw in this window to ensure his place on the plane to Qatar.
Stock up: Matt Turner
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about whether Berhalter simply prefers Steffen to the extent that the starting goalkeeper job is a settled issue. That seems unlikely, but either way, Turner was the best USMNT player in this window, and there’s not much more someone can do than that.
The worry for Turner coming into this camp was that he’d played just one competitive match since moving to Arsenal this summer. Those fears of lost sharpness or confidence ended up being unfounded, as Turner was precise, fundamentally sharp, and kept Japan from walking away with a bigger margin of victory. He had less to do in the second friendly, but still responded well when called upon.
Based on recent play with the USMNT, it’s Turner that should have the edge to start against Wales on November 21. If Steffen is going to win that job, he’s going to have to impress with Middlesbrough in very short order.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
Stock down: Gio Reyna
Reyna’s place in the USMNT squad isn’t in question, and when healthy, he’s obviously one of the best players in the entire pool. Berhalter is frankly lucky to have Reyna and Tim Weah possibly vying for one spot (we hear you, play-Weah-centrally advocates, but it really doesn’t seem like Berhalter is interested).
But despite some initial success with Borussia Dortmund’s cautious approach to his season, Reyna was once again having to come out of the game due to what Berhalter said post-game was some muscle tightness.
Dortmund boss Edin Terzić has since announced that Reyna’s recovery time is less than two weeks, which is the good news. The bad news is that on a team with several other key players who aren’t exactly the most durable, it’s now worth wondering whether the USMNT can lean on Reyna as a starter in a World Cup match. At the very least, they need to enter each game with a very specific plan on how they’ll adapt if he pulls up.
Stock up: Joe Scally
It’s not that Scally was a revelation against Saudi Arabia. Rather, the fact that he managed to get high and wide in the attack on a regular basis meant that he had to be accounted for, which had a positive ripple effect for the USMNT going forward.
The USMNT doesn’t function well without a fullback taking care of this task, and with Antonee Robinson missing out due to injury, no other fullback in camp was able to reliably get to the right places at the right time. Berhalter gave this responsibility to Sam Vines against Japan, and then to DeAndre Yedlin on the other side against Saudi Arabia, before Scally’s movement allowed for some more familiar patterns of play to take hold.
It wasn’t a good camp for the USMNT fullback pool in general, so Scally — who has had something of a difficult time getting call-ups, despite being a reliable starter at Borussia Mönchengladbach — is benefitting from simply not doing too badly while others disappointed. But then, that’s kind of the story of this entire international window, and being a player who didn’t run into some kind of problem means Scally’s odds of being on the final 26-man roster should be better today than they were two weeks ago.
Stock down: Ricardo Pepi
Progress isn’t linear, and anyone hoping that Pepi finally breaking his long goal drought meant that he’d come roaring into this USMNT camp was disappointed by how he struggled to really get enough touches to be a factor against Saudi Arabia.
(AP Photo/Jose Breton)
Some of that was simply the entire team struggling to break into the attacking third with consistency, and there’s only so much Pepi can do to fix that. He’s not a channel-running No. 9, and he’s not going to drop off the front line as a false nine either. If the team can’t get out of their own end, he’s not going to be involved.
But the real reason Pepi’s stock fell a bit is that Jesús Ferreira came in, and the USMNT attack instantly started finding angles it hadn’t been seeing earlier. Ferreira has taken some flack for jumping too early for a header against Japan, and he didn’t bury any looks against Saudi Arabia, but the entire attack was more lively once he came on. Not to get too into the weeds on modern soccer thinking, but an attack that is creating chances is believed to be better for winning games than a team that can’t get out of second gear going forward.
With Ferreira seeming to be the best fit for the players around him, Jordan Pefok being the hot hand as a finisher, and both Pepi and Josh Sargent skewing towards being best as pressing forwards, it feels like Berhalter has to sort through some tough questions. There’s a really good case to be made for there only being one spot for Pepi and Sargent, given that they’re the two most similar players in this group.
For Pepi, the best cure would be to light it up over the next few weeks at Groningen. If his profile becomes pressing/target man who is also scoring regularly, the questions here are not nearly as pointed. It’s just that, like we said, progress isn’t linear, and one goal in nearly a year could be a blip rather than the start of things to come.
The USMNT and Saudi Arabia sure did play a game of soccer
The U.S. men’s national team fanbase was hoping Tuesday’s friendly against Saudi Arabia would wash the taste of a dispiriting defeat to Japan out of their collective mouths.
We have three key takeaways to get into, but as you can probably guess if you watched the game or simply read the three paragraphs preceding this one, none of them is good news.
Opponents to USMNT center backs: Here, have the ball
Saudi Arabia plays a markedly different game from Japan: they attack in a 4-3-3 formation that becomes a 4-1-4-1 out of possession, maintaining a high defensive line without a corresponding high line of contention up front.
The object here is simple: let the other side’s defenders have the ball, stay compact from back to front, and leave teams few options other than to play perfect diagonal switches or balls into the space in behind. The10 Saudi field players, from the deepest defender to the highest attacker, were often only 30 or so yards apart, leaving no space to pass into the midfield and build that way.
Interestingly, this much different approach still left USMNT center backs Walker Zimmerman and Aaron Long (and eventually, in this game, Mark McKenzie) with the same problem they faced against Japan. They were on the ball, with an opponent who took all their simpler options off the table. The challenge, in both cases, was that the center backs had to play passes that solved a problem rather than simply finding a midfielder or fullback to do that.
While the turnovers weren’t as costly — Saudi Arabia has less athleticism than Japan, and were less forcing turnovers with tackles than they were intercepting errant passes at midfield — they were still a pretty regular factor in this game, and while the USMNT piled up possession, they were often completely muted when they tried to do anything with it.
Berhalter’s side has figured this problem out before. It’s not like teams in CONCACAF have never heard of “let the center backs have all of their possession” as a tactic before. Yes, Japan and Saudi Arabia would have also qualified out of the Octagonal, but there’s an issue with execution right now on the USMNT side.
For one, Zimmerman and (especially) Long seemed to struggle on some very straightforward passes that they have both probably completed literally thousands of times in professional games. Secondly, the USMNT seemed unable to shift the angles to open Saudi Arabia up, which means the problem extends to what movements are being offered by the other eight field players.
No Musah no party
Yunus Musah was in the stadium for this one, watching from the stands after making the trip down the Mediterranean coast to Murcia. Unfortunately for the USMNT, his stock ended up rising despite him being in street clothes, because for the second straight game, it became clear that the “MMA” midfield doesn’t function anywhere near its best without him.
Kellyn Acosta has had some fine moments with the USMNT, and his set piece taking ability actually makes him a pretty valuable member of the squad going into a tournament where prep time is low (side note: the USMNT wasn’t particularly threatening on dead balls in this window, but they probably didn’t want to show any of their designed plays off yet either).
However, he’s more suited for a game where the USMNT is going to be on the defensive, needing that extra ball-winning and positional sense more than other, more flashy traits. In a midfield with Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie, against a mid-block opponent who was always going to be a puzzle to solve, he was redundant.
Photo by JOSE JORDAN/AFP via Getty Images
The MMA midfield isn’t even a perfectly ideal balance of roles, as there’s no true playmaker and no true expert in terms of occupying spaces without the ball. Adams and McKennie make up for this latter issue with ferocious effort, but even when Musah — who thrives as a facilitator and ball-progressing midfielder rather than as a true No. 10 — is in, it’s a case of hoping the three can emphasize what their games do have to such an extent that what they lack isn’t a big deal.
When you take Musah out of the mix, that scenario doesn’t play out. The USMNT were sluggish in terms of their tempo, and so much of their time in possession saw Saudi Arabia keep their collective shape, herding possession back to the center backs or even to Turner. The USMNT wasn’t suited to play without their best player in terms of shifting an opposition shape in the middle third. Most teams will miss that player, but it feels like the U.S. learned today just how severe that absence is for them.
Berhalter more or less acknowledged this with his final pair of subs, with Brenden Aaronson coming into Acosta’s spot. Nothing much came of this spell, with the best USMNT chance largely coming down to the FC Dallas connection between Jesús Ferreira and Paul Arriola, but the moves alluded to what was missing in this one.
Right now, it’d be very smart for the USMNT to seriously look at making sure Aaronson has the reps to step in for Musah (or for that matter McKennie, as neither player has a spotless injury record). It could be that Musah, Adams, and McKennie are good to go for 270 minutes in eight days in a desert climate where temperatures are famously very hot, but you don’t want to walk into Group B with all your eggs in that particular basket.
Struggle for fullback balance
Musah wasn’t the only normal starter whose absence was keenly felt. Antonee Robinson may be back very soon for Fulham, but without their normal left back, the USMNT seemed to struggle with the balance between its two fullbacks.
Without Robinson, and after Sam Vines struggled to really make the same kind of impact that Robinson does against Japan, Berhalter moved that responsibility over to right back. Sergiño Dest, normally seen as an attack-first fullback, was asked to not push so high, and to dip inside to help change the angles in possession. DeAndre Yedlin had the job of providing that serious width on the other side.
The problem here is that the USMNT’s best attacking right back is, you know, Dest. He’d have thrived on the right with that kind of assignment, and ended up being the more dangerous attacking fullback despite having to pick and choose when he got forward.
Yedlin wasn’t poor, but he wasn’t influential either, and the USMNT system needs the player with this responsibility to be a constant factor. Particularly against a team playing a mid-block like this, this fullback role is a major factor in pulling the opposition out of their shape, and Saudi Arabia’s comfort without the ball starts with there being no true danger from Yedlin being higher up the field. The timing of his runs made him easy to defend, and he wasn’t getting much help from Acosta to open that space up either.
As with the midfield quandary, Berhalter addressed this with a sub. Joe Scally came in not long after Yedlin was caught by a bad tackle from Saud Abdulhamid that deserved a harsher punishment than the yellow card it got, and was pretty quickly more of a factor in the attacking third than Yedlin had been.
Perhaps that’s the benefit of the USMNT coaching staff having an hour-plus to analyze the game and tell Scally exactly what to look for, or perhaps it’s just a fresh player coming in against a tiring opponent.
Either way, the situation underlined how much the USMNT’s hopes hinge on unbalancing teams by using their fullbacks. It’s not good news that Robinson’s health is right up there with Musah’s, and Pulisic’s, and Reyna’s, but that’s where the USMNT is at right now.
We know they can hit a high enough level to be a serious threat to advance when everyone’s healthy, but is everyone going to be healthy in November? There are now 55 days for Berhalter to figure out how to make sure the answer to that question is positive.
