Ryen Russillo pushes back on ‘drive-by’ USMNT critics: ‘I would lose my f*cking mind’

Ryen Russillo doesn’t think the USMNT’s Round of 16 exit was a mirage. He just wishes fewer people who ignore soccer for four years at a stretch were the ones telling him so.

Belgium tore through the Americans 4-1 on Monday night in Seattle, and by the next morning, the sports media discourse had filled with the same voices that show up only once every four years, ready to diagnose a sport they haven’t watched since the last World Cup ended. On his Barstool podcast, Russillo said that particular strain of commentary — the four-year drive-by — would send him into a fury if he were the one absorbing it.

“If I were a soccer guy and everybody’s doing this four-year drive-by telling me what’s wrong with my sport, I would lose my f*cking mind,” Russillo said. “Could you imagine listening to me doing a podcast where basketball only mattered for a handful of games once every four years, and I got some guy from Good Morning America telling me what’s wrong with my sport when he hasn’t talked about it for four years?”

Rusillo copped to being tempted to run through the worst offending tweets on air with producer Steve Ceruti before thinking better of it.

“I realized that probably would make a few enemies,” he said, “or I would alert my enemies that they exist. We don’t need to do that because a couple of them are my friends and I read the tweets and I’m like, ‘Jesus, you could also not say anything,’ but very few of us that talk for a living can find a way to not say something when something is this significant.”

Russillo wasn’t just annoyed at how soccer outsiders were piling on. The instinct, he argued, isn’t specific to this USMNT team or even to this sport; it’s just how sports fans process disappointment generally,

“I think it’s wrong to then treat it like the quarterback who you just don’t believe in, and they win a playoff game, and then we know they’re going to have two more chances to disappoint us, so we can still feel like we’re right, and then we never want to give that quarterback any credit,” he continued. “Look, I’ve done that with certain quarterbacks.”

Russillo argued the USMNT gets the exact same treatment, just stretched out over four years instead of a single season. The team spends four years building a reputation, and then one tournament, however it actually goes, gets filtered through said reputation instead of judged on its own terms. A bad showing against Belgium confirms what everyone already believed. A great group-stage win over Paraguay doesn’t move the needle because it was never going to be enough to undo four years of prior results.

“It looked different to me,” he said. “Oh wait, we have guys that can make plays? We have guys that can win one-on-ones? We have multiple guys that can score, as opposed to playing defense and hoping that your goalkeeper is better than everyone else? So, I thought there was real improvement, and I just think it’s way too simple to go ‘Oh, round of 16, same old, this sucks, see you in four years.'”

It’s worth noting that the expanded 48-team format gave the USMNT 10 extra days alive in the tournament compared to prior World Cups, which meant a month of investment in this team before Belgium ended it. It was enough time for the group stage to build genuine optimism that a single bad night can’t fully erase. As Awful Announcing wrote this week, the Americans scored 11 goals in the tournament, more than double their previous four World Cup appearances, and won more games in a single World Cup than any American team ever had.

“I refuse to believe that this thing is just the same based on the way this team played, despite being eliminated, because the Belgium game sucked,” Russillo concluded.

Unfortunately, it won’t stop the four-year visitors from showing up in 2030 to tell everyone what’s wrong with American soccer again.