Dylan Gwinn, Breitbart Sports Editor Joins!

**Nigel** (0:00)
It's the Hammer and Nigel Show. Hello, my name is Nigel Jason Hammer is here. We go straight to the hotline and bring on Breitbart Sports editor Dylan Gwinn.
Man, oh man, what a disappointment last night in the World Cup. The USA loses to Belgium 4-1. I thought there for like, I don't know, in the first couple of minutes, the USA had a chance, but boy, it was kind of an embarrassment for those maybe who tuned in last night, really wouldn't pay attention to soccer, but said, hey, I'm going to check this game out. What did we watch last night? What did we witness?

**Dylan Gwinn** (0:35)
Well, that was very unfortunate for those people.

**Nigel** (0:38)
Yeah.

**Dylan Gwinn** (0:41)
If you're an American who chose last night to be your introduction to soccer, please, please give it another chance, because that was not the game you wanted to see. Look, the US men's team has had a very good run in this tournament, and they've drummed up a lot of excitement about the sport, and got people really excited about possibly turning the corner, possibly becoming one of the, joining the elite club of nations in the world of soccer and competitive soccer, and last night proved that we're just not there yet. I mean, you could see it, you mentioned it.
For the first few minutes, okay, but they scored that goal, that first goal, which was an abject, just debacle for Team USA. They scored that within the first 10 minutes. You know, and you could see right away, and Carly Lloyd, who has had her fair share of success as a member of the US women's team, she talked about this after the game. You could see immediately that the American players were, they were timid, they were scared, they looked out of their element, they looked like they were not big enough for the moment, and all those things were true.

**Hammer** (1:53)
How does that happen, Dylan, at home? How does that happen when they're playing in the United States and a rocking Seattle Stadium? How does that happen?

**Dylan Gwinn** (2:02)
I think it's just the competition. I mean, look, this is like the divisional round of the NFL, right? Like when you get to the round of 16 in the World Cup, all the fakes are gone, all right? There's no more, you know, plucky wild card team that won five in a row and they had this magical run and they get, you know, did better than everybody thought they could and they're this scrappy team. Those guys are gone now.
There's no more scrappy upstarts. The Cinderella stories have all ended. When you get to the round of the 16 in World Cup, these are the elites, these are the blue bloods, these are the European powerhouses, the South American powerhouses, and they just, you know, I think our guys looked across on the other side of the field and said, you know, we're not really ready for this.

**Hammer** (2:57)
Right, right.

**Dylan Gwinn** (2:57)
You know, home field advantage is great, but home field, you know, at the end of the day, it comes down to who's on the field. And Belgium had five or six guys on their team who are the stars on their major European club teams. We don't have one single player on Team USA who was a star on his European club team, if he's even on a European club team. And that showed yesterday, that showed.

**Hammer** (3:25)
And Dylan, how much of this will ever change? Because no matter what happens, as much as people have kind of gotten into the World Cup here, like whether it's because we're, I think doing an awesome job hosting it, or Team USA got hot and went on a little bit of a run, the fact of the matter still is the best athletes in our country play football and basketball, the best athletes in the rest of the world play soccer. And I don't see that changing.

**Dylan Gwinn** (3:53)
Well, no, that's not going to change, but that's not why we're losing though. If you look at that game last night, we did not lose because Belgium's players were bigger, faster and stronger than our guys. That's not what happened. Our athletes are perfectly fine athletically to go out there and compete at the world level. They're just not good enough. I mean, that's just the bottom line. They're just not skilled enough. The European players come up from a very young age in a club system where they play year round and they play year round against clubs from other teams, clubs from other countries.