Pragmatism in relation to youth soccer is barbed thing, sinking its hooks into popular opinion and leaving little ground for compromise. In one sense it is eminently sensical, a path in itself to developing similarly sensical soccer players. In another, it’s incomplete and limiting in its ability to develop truly transformative players for the next level.

Tab Ramos has lived in this confused middle distance for much of the last six years. He has worn none of the badges illuminated by those who believe so fervently development is as much about aesthetics, and what those aesthetics ultimately mean about the job you do as a developer of future talent, as it is about anything else. And yet he has other badges all his own, and even for hardened idealists like me, it’s beyond time to come around to their merits.

Tab Ramos has earned your praise.

Ramos has already crested a wave no U.S. U20 MNT coach ever has. With the U.S.’s group win last week, Ramos became the first U20 MNT coach in history to make consecutive U20 World Cup knockout stages (it’s happened before in consecutive years, but never under the same coach). With a win over New Zealand in the Round of 16, something most agree is more likely than not given the talent disparity, Ramos would guide the U.S. into back-to-back quarterfinals for the first time in U20 history. That reaches back to the U.S.’s first appearance here in 1981.

What all this means is hard to parse without the benefit of future time travel. Wins themselves at this level aren’t nearly as important as the process that got you there, but piloting a team into the knockouts of a U20 World Cup is extremely important. It imbues a handful of the nation’s top players – or at least those the federation has selected – with precious, irreplaceable experience in pressure situations at the highest international level. Ask any current pro who played in this tournament what a knockout experience meant to their development and you’re liable to get delightfully long-winded answers.

Ramos has facilitated something of a renaissance on the U20 level, and he’s done it with a style that practically screams of bald eagles and reflects the ethos of what American soccer is now, and perhaps not what it could be. How you feel about that sentence has likely guided how you’ve felt about Ramos.

Ramos got rolling on this topic in his pre-tournament press conference, about what his teams do well and why he thinks it does them well. I think this provides more insight to the man himself than anything I’ve ever read.

“As a matter of fact, when we meet with all the youth national team coaches, and we’ve had quite a few of these, we’ll talk about having a proactive type style in which we want to come after people. If you watch our U17s, it’s not different. They press the ball, they tried to have the ball the whole time in the tournament, they’re creating opportunities. Maybe in the second half against Mexico, Mexico had a little bit more of the ball, and that’s going to happen at times. But it’s not because it’s something that we do, but it could be something that happens in the game. “Because this is what fits our culture best. This is who we are, better than anything else. Our players want to make an effort. Our players want to work hard. Our players want to work for each other and want to suffer for each other. They want to be in the battles. So I don’t think we have a culture of players who just want to sit back and wait and counter. I just don’t think that’s who we are. We’re coming after people and sometimes we’re going to win and sometimes we’re going to lose.”

This is, it goes without saying, an exceedingly American viewpoint from a coaching perspective. And I’m not so sure it didn’t have a tinge of idealism to it as well.

There is an assumption, at least among people who’ve watched Ramos’ U20 teams play a not insignificant number of games, that he plays into the historic tropes of American soccer too heartily. His teams are full of try-hard, and the players he trumpets loudest and promotes tend to have some level of physicality to them that holds up on the international level. There is a reason there is no Mukwelle Akale (5-foot-4), Cam Lindley (slower end-to-end speed) or Jackson Yueill (more stationary No. 10) on this currently U20 World Cup roster. His midfield is a pumping engine, a subwoofer bleating out techno music, a rapidly pulsing sonar. This is what Ramos’ teams do. They run.

Ramos’ U20 tenure got off to a notably rocky start. He inherited a program that had basically gone through a reset after the disastrous failed 2011 campaign, which broke a streak of seven consecutive U20 World Cup qualifications. Ramos’ 2013 World Cup team was folded into a ridiculous group that featured Paul Pogba, among others, and they collapsed. Tab Ramos teams are rarely out-muscled and out-hustled, and yet even his calling card was thrown in his face in 2013.

Most U20 cycles end there, a replacement swiftly sweeping into the picture to rectify what had been a mediocre cycle by most all definitions. Ramos’ did not. Facing a relative public headwind (the amount of people who even care who a nation’s U20 coach is at any given time is minuscule), Ramos got another chance.

The intervening four years encompassing two cycles have been, to put it mildly, an enormous improvement. And Ramos deserves his shine for that, and for tapping into the American psyche in a way that carries an idealism of its own.

Ramos is a 4-3-3 coach. He’s run other formations, but if you ask him the one he prefers to run most often, its the versatile 4-3-3. It allows Ramos his swarming engine room in the middle, giving his teams the ability to clog the central channels, generate turnovers and hit with startling immediacy going the other way. It took him a couple cycles to find the personnel that allowed him to do this with the sort of harrying consistency he’d prefer, but he found his perfect mix this cycle. With his No. 6 du jour providing the anvil, his swarming No. 8/10 hybrid provides the hammer, smashing up opposition possession and hitting quickly and at pace the other way.

This is how it’s done in Ramos’ ideal world. Choke off the oxygen in the middle . Utilize that American iron lung and harry the ball all over the field for 90 tireless minutes. Press hard and hit fast on counters, breaks and builds limited to the sort of passes with which your comfortable. And finish your chances.

And at its best against arguably superior individual competition, this is the way the US operate at peak tempo. It’s how the senior team beat Spain in 2009 and how this very team beat Colombia two years ago.

Ramos is not an idealist, but there is a sort of idealism to his coaching. It’s there in his quote, that this is what fits our culture best. Jurgen Klinsmann’s lofty idealism was dashed on the rocks of American pragmatism in big games, and it’s hard to fault Ramos for attempting to make U.S. U20 players the best version of their American selves. There are times when Ramos’ roster selections puzzle me to distraction, and his insistence on never carrying a No. 10 is inimitably galling. I would probably not array my teams the way he does, if given the opportunity.

But that’s just it, isn’t it. Ramos has tapped into the notion that there is no one way to succeed, no singular approach guaranteeing developmental success at the next level. He’s simply tapped into the American vein and let it ride. After a hugely successful 2015 cycle and a 2017 cycle that’s now witnessed the first U20 CONCACAF championship in history and a World Cup run that seems as limitless as ever, Ramos has softened popular opinion the age of Barcelona. It is not particularly popular to front Ramos’ style, or at least it hasn’t been over the course of the past decade. That I think clouded how we viewed it. If you’ve watched any of Ramos’ U20 team this World Cup, the team is fun. It’s an enjoyable watch, even at its frenetic pace.

Whatever you think of his aesthetic style – and there are merits to it I perhaps didn’t acknowledge four years ago – there’s little question the U.S. has the right man in that position. At this point, how could you argue?