Josh Sargent’s fast start for Norwich City has led to fans urging the American forward to stay at Carrow Road.
Sargent has scored three goals in his opening three appearances this season, hitting the ground running for the EFL Championship squad. The U.S. men’s national team striker has captained the side in Kenny McLean’s absence, scoring twice in league play and once in League Cup action.
Despite being linked with Wolfsburg, Roma, Leeds United, and Burnley this summer, Sargent has started the season with Norwich City and remains a member of the squad with only 13 days remaining in the summer transfer window.
Although the club may not be able to turn away a large transfer fee, Canaries manager Liam Manning is hoping that Sargent stays put in Norfolk.
“I’m hoping Ben [Knapper, director of football] turns his phone off so we don’t get any calls,” Manning jokingly said about the Canaries 2-1 victory over Portsmouth last Saturday.
“Sarge role models everything you want,” he added. “He’s a top person, a top professional. You see his work rate and how he leads by example. He’s top class.”
Norwich City next hosts Middlesbrough on August 23 before facing Southampton three days later in EFL Cup action. Manning will hope that Sargent is there for both matches, knowing that the longer he stays with the club, the better chance they have at being in the top-six race this season.
Looks like Paxten Aaronson is on his way to Colorado. Citing stability. I agree with these moves. A players stability at the young ages is far more important than chasing Europe. How many young talent has been wasted chasing the European dream to early? Most of them. Weah, Pulisic, Mckennie, Adams etc… barely have stability and they are in their mid 20’s.
i think this is another instance of a young player struggling with the transition into first team football in germany. he did well in holland, well enough to get some NT caps, but he’s not owned in holland. get down to it eintracht has his rights and has played him slightly over a dozen games in 3 years.
the dutch loans were effective enough to get him some NT caps but he hasn’t matched his brother’s initial burst onto the team. i think he could have sought a sale to holland again and done fine there. or in the championship or scotland or austria like his brother did. but the NT staff hasn’t responded much to the holland situation. so MLS it is. he puts up some numbers and maybe he thinks USMNT’s analytics-for-brains folks will push him harder to make it next year.
personally i haven’t yet seen why the NT needs him yet. but as a DP he will get all the playing time he can stand, for a rapids team that needs some goals. and sargent speaks to the NT will repeatedly respond to statistical flourishes regardless how i would have eyeball scouted your last NT appearance. so it is probably astute for him if cynical for us.
and i am sure some will say he has done well in holland. a few goals in no-defense holland is ok. the reality is he was on the field for that horrid swiss first half, then played 9′ in 6 games at gold cup. so he kind of needs a reset button or he’s probably done for the cycle.
personally i don’t see it, bring on cole campbell or yow or some of the other young attackers we’ve not seen.
Perspective here, the worst teams in the EPL this year were the best in the Championship last year or previous year. Norwich might go up next year but still play against the rest of the league far below the level of EPL, Bundesliga, LaLiga, somewhat SerieA and Ligue1
when he first started with norwich they were EPL, then went down. perhaps go up one of this years. they are on the edges of yoyo type team. if he’s patient he can get EPL ball with norwich without all the risk of trying to save some dysfunctional relegation battler. norwich would keep him around no matter how EPL went.
to me he should hang onto the yoyo, and if he has a 10 goal EPL season when norwich goes up, then we can talk an EPL move. otherwise his history is he scores 5 goals in a first division all year. and some EPL team who buys him for $20m or so will want more than that. and he’ll be back in shaky territory which norwich got him out of for a change.
i mean i think the NT perseveration on our part is weakminded, but from his POV norwich-to-NT is an analytical gift that keeps giving. he puts up 15 more goals, we call him again. and again. why would you give that up.
or is this an agent’s contract tactic.
Well, I can’t remember any other time when a club manager was begging an American striker to stay at his club. A classic case is Dempsey who often started the season on the bench, Pulisic who had to beg for time at Chelsea, and so on. Admittedly, Norwich isn’t at the same level, but if one assumes that the Norwich manager knows a thing or two about football (most likely as much or more than anyone commenting here since it is how he makes a living and puts bread on his table), that is high praise. I tend to give more weight to the judgment of those who have spent their lives playing and managing soccer than even the most knowledgeable fans. The professionals are not just watching games, they are running practices and studying videos of both their own players and players around their leagues. And general managers are keeping up to date on players in both lower and higher leagues, looking for possible transfers.
Gary,
“A classic case is Dempsey who often started the season on the bench, ”
If you throw out Clint’s first half season at Fulham, Clint averaged 42 appearances across all competitions and 12 goals every season he was in England.
Research the regulars for Fulham and you’ll find that those numbers meant Clint was a regular part of the core.
The idea that Clint was unappreciated is a fantasy.
A big part of that is that Fulham had 5 managers during his time there. And of course he had 1 new one at Spurs.
That’s 6 managers over 7 seasons.
If you are saying Clint spent a lot of time winning over managers , compared to a lot of players, that is true. Also, he did fall out with Martin Jol towards the end because he wanted to get out of his contract a year early.
Considering that I watched every single Fulham game I could, I’m aware of his situation. Yes, a large part of it was having to win over new managers. Nevertheless, he often had to do it even though he had done well the previous season. I remember when Mark Hughes had taken over as Fulham boss and early in the season he took Dempsey out in something like the 60th minute and the Fulham home crowd began chanting, You don’t know what you”re doing.”I’ve seen a couple of thousand games and never seen anything like it.
Gary,
The other thing about Clint and managers was that he was positionally ambiguous. He lined up in maybe 4 positions and could do the job in all of them. Fulham were not an offensive juggernaut as you know, but if there was a chance Clint was good about taking it. I think a lot of his managers didn’t know what to do with him.
But obviously the fans knew.
Amazingly, ESPN has this guy rated as the 5th or 6th best striker in the pool. Just ahead of Jordan morris.
That’s crazy. We don’t have an Isak, so once we can accept that we have several decent options at roughly the same level, you have to look at form. And right now Sarge is hot and would be my starter if the USMNT played tomorrow. I think Pepi and Balogun have higher ceilings, but neither are playing…
Well if they are looking at it from Poch’s viewpoint, Pepi and Balo then his next three strikers at GC were Agyemang, Downs, and Haji so Josh would be 6th. As I said last week if he stays in the Championship Josh has a chance to show he is better than those 3 each week. He hasn’t scored or assisted since ‘21 roughly 750 minutes for the US, although he has faced mostly decent competition. No Haiti, Trinidad, or St. Vincent.
hopefully this isn’t double posting but sargent’s last assist for the NT was in 2021, and his last NT goal was cuba in 2019, despite getting a lot of key playing time, eg, started half the world cup, some qualifiers, both 2021 NL finals games. in those same games, wright and pefok and others scored. so i don’t think it translates and it’s becoming a massive waste of time how many second and third and fourth chances club stats get you.
given a choice i rate him behind balogun pepi wright (my 3) agyemang ferreira vazquez dike and others. it’s a production position to where all our offense is supposed to funnel. that funnel cannot be closed for shop at the end.
heck i would play weah reyna pulisic mckennie out of position at striker before i’d play sargent there.
and to get at the degree of misguided hype around this, you can’t have a defense that takes risks to create for the attack, then an attack of guys like sargent and musah where they don’t score or assist when they get it. if sargent is in there for defense, then the actual defense needs to be capable of marking. the whole thing needs to work as team defense. if the wingbacks are there to take risks and play balls in, the striker needs to be a finisher.
and i mean on the NT level. we know by now the stats don’t translate.
pick a lane.
“and i mean on the NT level. we know by now the stats don’t translate.”
We do?
Who is we?
What stats exactly?
To play devil’s advocate a little because I’m bored:
The scoring drought by Sargent for the USMNT seems like a damning indictment, but those 5 yrs amount to only 7 games, and they were against top level competition. Even Haaland went 6 games without scoring, on the best team in the world, certainly better service than Sargent ever got.
If we exclude Pepi and Balo for now, our most consistent and clinical finishers are probably Pulisic, Weah, maybe McKennie. So why not have a guy that presses, is completely unselfish, and more than willing to combine and setup those guys. That’s Sargent. Of the others you mentioned, only Haji Wright is close to his level right now.
i prefer the old approach, which is put up or shut up. it’s been a long time since he earned his supper at NT level.
and if we’re gonna do analytics, after you have some caps, it’s USMNT stats, not club ones. club stats get you in the door. do something. he doesn’t.
i listed more than a half dozen guys who do something. we can parse precisely whom against, but i don’t have to question whether they are even capable at the level. they have scored goals, including in the same games he failed, at places like the world cup. at a point just be objective and say who scores and who doesn’t.
your argument is anti-science and basically disguised reputational stuff. as with many other players on this team, his routine presence is based on the unproven theory they could be productive and are our best chance to win. even as we lose and they don’t score. even if wright or pefok come on for them and do score. or reyna outshines them from the wing.
at some point these need to be positive “he does things” arguments and not negative “tear down the competition” arguments. eg we ignore who scored at the world cup because wright scores fewer league goals. absurd.
i don’t have to speculate wright might score at a world cup — he has.
and the argument he plays the toughest opponents, meh, but that kind of gives the shop away, no? who wants to start the guy who gets the big games and does nothing?
this is kind of why the NT sits where it does. it’s all paper based theories that if i give many of the same guys 5 more years in the same tactics this eventually turns around. that’s religion and not science.
and what you’re missing re “can’t we indulge in the pressmaster because others can produce,” is they don’t produce that much on the biggest stage. we got 3 goals at the world cup in 4 games. that’s not going to work — particularly if our concept is more risky wing offense and less team defense.
i mean, when we needed to beat iran, it’s not some 6 goal deluge like england. it’s a single blood and guts goal off a player’s midsection. we then go out to holland 3-1.
ergo we don’t score enough to indulge a nonscoring intangibles striker. nor do we emphasize team defense enough where he fits an overall scheme. as i keep repeating, this is a muddle, with mids picked for hustle, or you wanting forwards for defense, while we pick backs for offense. that sounds thoroughly confused. hence we ship a goal or 2 every game and score maybe 1 ourselves. which is not a winning recipe.
but then we’re the odd team that loves to cavalierly screw around with the ball in our own box — for routine goals allowed — but considers directness and attacking aggression on the other end almost a bridge too far — that would be risking possession.
JB,
I think you have to put things into context. My context?
It’s 2025 and we shortly have to put together a team for the 2026 World Cup
Josh Sargent appearances and goals by national team and year
National Team Year Apps Goals
United States 2018 6 2
2019 6 3
2020 0 0
2021 7 0
2022 4 0
2023 0 0
2024 4 0
2025 1 0
I think you have to put things into context. My context?
It’s 2025 and we shortly have to put together a team for the 2026 World Cup.
I’m amazed at the laser like focus on Sargent’s past failures.
The 2018-2023 Sargent isn’t good enough to be on this 2026 WC team.
But the 2025 Josh is. Unlike some, I believe some players actually need some time to learn their jobs and some get better over time. If you sucked in 2022, it doesn’t mean you suck in 2025.
Not only that. It is entirely possible that the 2025-2026 USMNT is better team than what Gregg was able to put out there. So Josh might actually get some service like what he gets at Norwich.
Dave Sarachan did not want to cap Josh so young but at the time it was cap the kids so fuck it. Josh subsequently went back to a pretty questionable club situation. Eventually he earned his way out of that shithole. Werder Bremen was such a disaster that he deserves a medal just for getting out of there reasonably intact.
Some of you seem to think Josh is slumming at Norwich. The truth is he’s lucky to still have a career at such a high level. If I were him, I wouldn’t be thinking about the USMNT at all. The only thing he needs to think about is being as consistent as possible and scoring every goal possible for Norwich. If he does that this season everything else will take care of itself for club and for country.
While it seems like Pochettino has already (mostly) written him off as a good fit for his system, Josh remains the third best striker in the pool. Talent and ability have little to do with Josh’s place in the pecking order. What matters to Pochettino is can you do what he asks you to do? In 2026 Pochettino will have CP and Ricardo to score the goals. Nevertheless, should anything unforeseen happen the USMNT may be forced to make use of Josh.
National teams are notoriously temporary constructs, built for specific tournaments. Meaning with a team as thin as the USMNT it would not take much for an injury or a suspension to affect how they set up and play.
If you’re just looking at this through the lens of hair color coordination, there aren’t really a lot of great options. I think all of them are better than Norwich, though the orange-yellow-green combination has kept the stadium free of birds for a few years. I think I would go Burnley.