Don’t you just love this time of year? Things start to wind down, you get a moment to breathe, and then you gather round with those people you cherish and … decide if it’s time to burn your national soccer federation’s existing structure to the ground.

Happy Inquest Season, everyone!

It happens every four years. By definition, only one country can leave the World Cup with the title. Perhaps a couple of others with minimized expectations can also consider their trophy-less runs to be successful, but the majority of the 32 teams will head home feeling like failures. After Saturday’s 2-1 loss to France, some in the English media have already begun calling for “an inquest” into the federation’s shortcoming. And you can bet other calls-to-inquest are being harmonized in front of fireplaces across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

I, however, am not a practicing Inquestador. I just like to watch with an ironic remove. Instead, I abide by the fact that soccer is incredibly random — and that what makes the World Cup so compelling is how it plays up the randomness, with so few matches, and those matches occurring only once every four years. This tournament isn’t designed to unearth the best national team in the world; no, it’s designed to create what we’ve seen so far: utter and complete chaos.

So, with that in mind, let’s take a look at all of the favorites (and the United States men’s national team) who have been eliminated and see if there’s anything they can do over the next four years to give themselves a slightly better chance at conquering the randomness.

The calls for Gregg Berhalter’s job during the World Cup were baffling to me. (OK, I’m not baffled; almost everyone hates their manager because of everything I just wrote.) The USMNT was the youngest team at the World Cup, they made the round of 16, and they went toe-to-toe with both England and the Netherlands.

The results won’t show it, but this was America’s best performance at a World Cup since America started qualifying for World Cups again in 1990. Most of that comes down to the massive increase at the top end of the talent pool, but Berhalter deserves plenty of credit, too. The manager’s job is to get the talent to play up to its capabilities, and that’s what happened in Qatar. This team did not underachieve.

Of course, you can convince yourself that they did underachieve… if you have a completely unrealistic understanding of how good the team’s players are. Ultimately, here’s what happened in Qatar: The US had nine players who were up to the requisite starting level of a team that makes a deep knockout-round run in the World Cup. In the starting XI, they were missing a second top-level center back next to Tim Ream, and then a third attacker between Christian Pulisic and Timothy Weah.

The bigger problem was the lack of depth. While the midfield was one of the best at the tournament, there was no fourth guy who could come on for Weston McKennie and maintain a similar level of performance. The same is true at fullback; Antonee Robinson played every minute of the tournament at left-back, while whoever replaced Sergino Dest was, well, a lot worse than Sergino Dest. Up top, Brenden Aaronson was ineffective off the bench, and when Gio Reyna finally got to play against the Netherlands, he too was totally ineffective.

The Reyna story then blew up over the weekend when Berhalter’s comments at something called the HOW Institute for Society’s Summit on Moral Leadership were made public. About one unnamed, under-performing player, he said, “We were ready to book a plane ticket home, that’s how extreme it was.” It was quickly revealed that this player was Reyna, and both staff and players were frustrated with his lack of effort in pre-tournament training.