International soccer? USMNT January Camp was good!

Three things to remember from the 2025 edition of America’s most cherished meaningless soccer tradition

Part of the magic of international soccer is that it is secretly at least two different sports. At its highest level, it is the 2022 World Cup final: An enthralling combination of dramatic narrative stakes and balletic athletic execution — the absolute pinnacle of sports in terms of the weight of the moment and the quality of the players.

Somewhere at the end of the spectrum, international soccer is the United States Men’s National Team at its annual January camp — a bunch of dudes having a good time.

Since the early 1990s, the USMNT has held a training camp and between one and two friendlies in the month of January. In the mid-1990s the CONCACAF Gold Cup happened in January and early February, this had a more direct purpose. But over time, as the Gold Cup moved to the summer and more American players moved to leagues in Europe that have real games in January  it has become less of a directly preparatory training camp and more of a thing that happens because it can. Major League Soccer is deep in its offseason, so you might as well call some of the guys who might be relevant a few years down the line in for a few training sessions and a game or two.

Generally, the games in question take the form of chill kickabouts against other CONCACAF teams pulling from their non-European talent, or Scandinavian teams playing guys from their domestic leagues who are also out of season, or occasionally a team from Eastern Europe or Asia that can be convinced to pool together youth prospects who their clubs don’t mind losing for a couple of weeks. 

And so, earlier this month, a group of men who may or may not ever play meaningful minutes for the USMNT gathered in Florida to win two matches against Venezuela and Costa Rica. These matches almost certainly did not convey any meaningful information about the future of Mauricio Pochetino’s team, or the direction of American men’s soccer, or maybe even the careers of any of the individual players.

But they were tremendous fun. And international soccer isn’t always about progress, it is often about nonsense. January Camp is a celebration of that nonsense. Here are three things worth remembering from January camp, 2025 edition.

We should all buy season tickets to the Matko Miljevic Experience

Here, presented with minimal editorial comment, is a list of facts about Matko Miljevic, a midfielder who scored his first senior international goal against Venezuela on January 18.

  • Miljevic was born in Miami, but spent much of his youth in Argentina, where he joined the Boca Junior academy.
  • Per Wikipedia, he also excelled at youth taekwondo and won the Argentina Open in 2014 and 2015.
  • After playing a couple of seasons at Argentinos Juniors, Miljevic signed for CF Montreal in MLS in 2021.
  • In 2023, Miljevic felt he was not playing enough with Montreal, so he covertly signed up to play in Québec Calcetto Soccer League, a local indoor amateur league.
  • While spectating on a match in the aforementioned indoor amateur league, Miljevic allegedly got in an altercation with another player and punched him in the face. These actions resulted in a lifetime expulsion from the Québec Calcetto Soccer League.
  • Because playing in an indoor amateur soccer league was in breach of his contract with Major League Soccer, as was striking someone in the face, Miljevic’s contract with Montreal was terminated shortly after news about his covert indoor soccer career was reported in September 2023.
  • Miljevic returned to Argentina for the 2024 season, where he played for Newell’s Old Boys. His contract there was terminated at the start of the new year.
  • Despite being without a club, Miljevic was included in the USMNT’s roster for the January games, and he started the match against Venezuela.
  • In the opening moments of the game, the USMNT won a penalty and, brushing off established semi-established set piece taker Jack McGlynn, Miljevic decided to take it himself.
  • Miljevic’s penalty was a soft roll to the near center of the goal, and was easily saved by the penalty.

What a wonderful array of misadventures. Will Miljevic ever be a good enough player to feature for the USMNT in a more serious way? Probably not! He technically is not currently employed as a professional soccer player. But Miljevic is rapidly rising up the priority list of soccer players you should be paying attention to, at least for entertainment value.

Big Patrick Agyemang is 20 years too late, but also right on time

Patrick Agyemang took the long route to international soccer.

Relatively unheralded as a youth prospect out of East Hartford, Connecticut, Agyemang started his post high school career at Division III Eastern Connecticut State. From at more or less the lowest rung of the pathway to professional soccer in the United States, he worked his way up: First by dominating in D3 for two years, then by doing the same at D1 University of Rhode Island, then by adding a stint of summer professional soccer in USL League Two with the Western Mass Pioneers.

Finally, Agyemang was drafted to MLS by Charlotte FC. He eventually earned a spot as the team’s starting striker, and has established himself as one of the more promising young attackers in the league. 

The thing that is important about Patrick Agyemang is that he is a large man. Rhode Island had him listed at 6 ‘4 and 180 pounds, but he has probably filled a little more than that since going pro. This puts him in a weird place in the modern game — but perhaps a good one for the modern United States national team.

Soccer has largely gone away from the traditional big man up top. Until the ‘90s and early ‘00s, the best teams in the world spent a lot of time crossing the ball into the box for a physically dominant striker to knock into the goal. They generally don’t do that anymore, mostly because the math turns out to be pretty heavily skewed against that working most of the time. 

But even if the best goalscorers in the world these days aren’t generally large guys, a large goalscorer can still be an asset for teams. Currently the best strikers in the USMNT pool are Folarin Balogun, Josh Sargent, and Ricardo Pepi. None of those players are small, but neither are they capable of really physically dominating a center back.

Agyemang definitely can, and he also has the skill and technique to translate his size into kicking a soccer ball really hard at the goal. Agyemang is maybe the eighth or ninth best striker eligible to play for the USMNT, but he’s an outlier in the player pool and to a lesser extent in modern soccer. It’s not crazy to think that with the right combination of bad luck for others and another good season or two in MLS he might make a real USMNT roster.

And for a guy who was playing games against smaller schools in the University of Massachusetts system just five years ago, that’s pretty good. 

Some Guys to Remember

One important role of the USMNT January Camp is to give international experience to guys who have always kind of been around, but have never quite broken through to the main roster. This provides great fodder for Guy Remembering, as in “Remember when Steve Birnbaum scored a late winner against Iceland?” or “Remember when Djordje Mihailovic was going to be the breakout star of the Gregg Berhalter era?”

In that spirit, here are some guys worth remembering out of this roster:

Indiana Vassilev: During the topsy-turvy chaos that was American prospect-watching in the late 2010s and early 2020s, Vassilev briefly broke through at Aston Villa and was maybe going to be the only American playing the Premier League. This extremely did not happen, but he is having a good career at St. Louis in MLS and is still somehow only 23. 

Brian White: A stalwart MLS striker and the pride of Flemington, N.J, White scored his first USMNT goal in this camp. He will probably never be a regular national team player, but he has been very good in MLS for close to a decade and it is nice that when people look back on USMNT results in the future he will have an international goal to his name.

Caden Clark: Clark hit the American soccer scene like a bolt of lightning in the fall of 2020. At just 17, he scored his first MLS goal for the New York Red Bulls and quickly found himself fast tracked to the Bundesliga with RB Leipzig. There, his career kind of stalled out, and he ended up back in MLS. Still just 21, if Clark does end up being as good as many thought he could be, it will be fun to remember the false start of his late teenage years in the context of a (hopefully) more straightforward later career.

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