OT: Klinsmann (Likely) Out as UMNT Coach, Off to Southampton
Multiple news outlets reporting that Klinsmann is likely out as the USMNT coach and is off to Southampton for the same position.
It's time for fresh blood for the US, so as long as they pick up someone good(Roberto Martinez is available I think).
Southampton? They're a fairly successful squad right now, why would they mess with a good thing?
At least you're not a Newcastle Fan. Or worse, an Arsenal fan.
I know but this feels like a moonshot when I think So'ton really just needs to keep the ship steady.
I was going to edit my post to make that more clear, but got beaten to the punch by a comment. Lesson is to do a more careful scan before posting.
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seems like USMNT is still years away from being a serious contender.
I think it is less a matter of years, and more a matter of generations.
You are talking about the Lions of course, correct?
optimistic.
I don't think that's the right way to look at it. Most coaches don't expect to win a World Cup on the job. Only a select number of countries can aim for that. Coaches do want to get to the WC, though, and the U.S. has shown that it can do that - every time since 1990.
The U.S. job isn't bad. The pay (AFAIK) is solid, the level of competition in CONCACAF not too tough, and the federation is reasonably patient - Klinsmann lasted five years, and Bradley five years before him. And fans here are nowhere near as ruthless as they are in Europe or South America.
well the previous coach left for egypt...
could probably get trinidad's coach to come over, or another german who wants citizenship
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All of our best athletes play football or basketball.
Imagine LeBron as a goalie, Adrian Peterson as a forward...you get the idea.
We simply cannot compete until soccer is the sport in the country that is considered the top shelf, glory sport.
I played both football and soccer, and they are different games and skillsets. Good point about Altidore.
My deeper point is that the superior talent(clay) goes to the other sports, and USA has less to work with than other countries.
Both my kids play soccer at a premier club in my state, but I find it interesting on the boys side, even at age 10, a majority of the premier talent gravitates to football and basketball.
Football I can agree with, at least for certain positions. Basketball no. Skill is incredibly important to basketball in a similar way to soccer. So is quick thinking, spatial awareness, vision, etc., i.e., everything that goes into what people refer to as kinesthetic intelligence, which is not the same as raw athleticism.
And of course if you put some random athlete on a soccer field who has never played before they aren't going to impress. The point is, nearly all of our best talent, whether athletic freaks or just all-around excellent athletes end up focusing on other sports. Even if they do play soccer as a kid, they are probably getting mediocre instruction and less time on the field than international counterparts.
The thing about soccer is that the critical period for learning essential skills is earlier on in your lifetime than it is in basketball or really any other North American sport. If you're not getting high-level instruction when you're like 10,11 years old, you're not going to become a star down the road. It's not like that for basketball. You hear all the time of guys who never played until they hit a growth spurt in eighth grade and gave it a try. That kind of thing doesn't happen for elite soccer players.
but those guys that hit the growth spurt and become good basketball players are always (or almost) really tall, defensive specialist, shot blockers. Center or rim-protector is the one position in basketball for which physical ability can make up for a relative lack of skill. Shooters and ball-handlers have to have spent hours and hours and hours practicing, much like the elite soccer players.
The comparable soccer position, as noted above, is goal keeper, which is more reliant on size, jumping ability, reaction speed, etc. I bet there are elite keepers that started playing later in life.
could also be a 7 footer who can just head the ball towards the goal all day, but now that you mention it, those guys are taken by the nba so never mind!
So, here is something for everyone to ponder...
Why is our women's team superior in the wolrd compared to our men's? How is this differnt, coming from the same program (in theory)?
Because the rest of the world does not give a shit about women's soccer and their players have been way behind in their development.
It's almost a mirror-image of the USMNT situation.
If you remember in the movie "Bend it like Beckham" which was not that long ago, the female star of the movie, who lived in England, was seeking a scholarship to a US college to play soccer because there were no good developmental opportunities in her own counrty. The very country that invented the sport.
The number os women playing soccer globally is miniscule compared to men and the difference in developmental infrastructure is even greater. Until very recently, there were no European clubs that featured women's soccer.
The US is one of the first nations to have women playing competitive team sports and had an existing infrastructure (recreational and college women's athletics) within which skills could be developed.
because women's rights, much less valuing women doesn't exist in half the world. While the USMNT couldn't beat iran in a world cup match, imagine a female iranian team...they can't even get in the stadiums
it's no coincidence the main competition is places like china and japan
is more difficult. Even the best golfers rarely ever do it. The best baseball players get hits more than 30% of the time. There are lots more examples. Hitting a baseball is very difficult, so are a lot of things in sports. Being the best at something is harder than actually doing anything one time. Greatness is relative.
Athletic people are good at sports. Athleticism is also not just fast or jumps high. It's coordination, spatial awareness, etc. Didn't you ever have the friend who was good at every sport? It's like how Harbaugh looks for QBs that were also stars of their baseball squad or what not. Look at Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders, etc.
Maybe Lebron would suck at soccer. Maybe his athleticism wouldn't translate. But when our best athletes are almost all choosing to focus on basketball, football, baseball, hell even hockey in the north, over soccer, it's ludicrious to suggest that that isn't a disadvantage for the US vs. nations where it's soccer and then everything else.
The funny thing is that the single most used word to describe US teams on the world stage is "athleticism." Which means that our players are known for being able to run a game to death and dominate in the air, and, at times, overcome more skilled teams with physical ability.
The other word that's used is "naive," as in having little understanding of how to react and adjust to the game on their own. And that's because the one thing we lack, more than other nations, is touch, the ability to control the ball, relieve pressure, and organize an attack. Better athletes, at this point, is not the problem. It's their development in youth soccer that too often (and this is getting better) emphasizes athleticism as the path to winning, rather than the development of the skills of touch, control, and thought, that most coaches think have to be in place by 10 or 12.
Everyone in this thread is equating athlete with essentially 40 times and verticals. Being good, or even wordclass, at a sport has a lot more to do with the other aspects of athleticism that are harder to measure. These traits, which people refer to as kinesthetic intelligence (as I referred to in another post), is what makes one person good at every sport they pick up, whether it's ping pong, golf, soccer, or basketball.
So we aren't just missing out on freak athletes, like say a Russell Westbrook, we're missing out on the bulk of the entire talent pool whether they are freak athletes, masterly skilled players (Curry) or all-around playmakers who seem better than they should be (Steve Nash types).
I'm not arguing that we need more Zardeses. I'm saying there our country size does not reflect our soccer talent pool compared to other countries because our best athletes (not just in raw measureables) play other sports.
The quality of youth instruction is of course important as well, but that wasn't the argument at hand here.
The quality of youth instruction is central to the argument. If you put Russell Westbrook and Adrian Peterson into the developmental infrastructures that existed in their time as kids, you would not get Messi with greater speed and strength, you'd get faster, stronger versions of Gyasi Zardez.
And the US would probably be slightly more successful in a kind of brute force way, but they'd never consistently compete with the top 8 soccer nations in the world, because they wouldn't be able to keep the ball.
Not to bag on Zardes. He was one of the only players out there who didn't look terrified the other night and was actually willing to try to go forward. He probably played our only effective pass of the game, the one that put Yedlin through down the wing.
You're warping my argument.
People in this thread are essentially saying that NBA stars are only good because of freak athleticism and their skills wouldn't translate to soccer, which may be somewhat true in cases like a Russell Westbrook. There are many NBA athletes or NCAA Div 1 basketball players that did not make it based off freak athleticism. They made it because they are freaskishly good at everything else that makes one good at sports. Things like endurance, coordination, understanding of the game, quick thinking, honed a particular skill, basically all of the things people are listing as being so unique to soccer.
So no, you're not just missing out on a couple Zardes 2.0's, you miss out on every type of player when kids aren't exposed to soccer to begin with. Of course, you need coaching to then develop that talent, but once again, that's a separate issue for US soccer.
It'll be interesting to see what happens in the next decade, because today, exposure is not the main problem. The vast majority of young kids today are exposed to soccer widely, likely as their first team sport (baseball's weirdly complicated, little kids just can't get the basketball up to the hoop and can't dribble consistently). In many leagues, there are mechanisms for identifying the most talented kids in the recreational leagues and encouraging them to enter a more intensive academy with 3 practices a week (one issue here is certainly the way this creates a class divide in coaching access).
Soccer is now, at least at my kids' school, about tied with basketball and football in terms of sports kids watch on tv. There are far more soccer kits than there are football jerseys and basketball jersies in the hallway. Everyday after school, they play soccer, in huge variations, from 20 v 20 pickup games to weird little all-guys for themselves 6 kid games.
Some of this, no doubt, is a manifestation of living in NYC. But I don't think exposure's the problem. The problem is now a development structure that requires parents to have the money to pay $2-3k per year for their kids to get good coaching in the crucial developmental years when touch and control is developed and when talent is identified. If there's going to be a continuted barrier to development in the next decades of American soccer, it's going to be a barrier that's more about class than it is about exposure.
I don't disagree with any of this, but I think it's important to note that youth soccer, while very big in suburbia, is still not penetrating equally across all socio-economic divides. You mentioning the $2-3 k a year being a perfect example.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/jun/01/us-soccer-diversi…
So I do think it is an opportunity problem for big chunks of our population.
The socio-economics argument is valid in the states, but I wonder why it isn't in the rest of the world? Look at just about every South American country who deals with greater income inequality and an all around lower standard of living.
Clubs foot the bill for development because of the possibilities of huge returns on player transfers if/when one of their players attracts big club interest. Clubs like Ajax, Feyernoord and Southampton have made transfer dollars from youth academy player development part of their overall financial strategies. It also means they invest a lot in scouting and are fairly ruthless at cutting kids that aren't developing out of their academies.
I'm not as clear how the transfer market works in South America, but my impression is that the originating clubs get percentages back when players as players are transferred throughout their career.
This is not an opportunity problem AT ALL.
The reason that so many countries, big and small, rich and poor, can be good at soccer across all socio-economic status' is that soccer is a very cheap sport to play as long as you have people to play with.
All you need is a ball, and even that can be improvised with stuffed sock or any other subsitute that poor countries and neighborhoods use.
In fact, most poor communities in the US are where professional athletes come from because it is just about the only opportunity they have. Kids spend hours and hours shooting hoops or (maybe not as much anymore) playing hit and catch with the ball and glove.
The only reason soccer costs so much to play, as you mention, is that you have to be on a club team and travel to actually find competition. There aren't pick up games going on all over the place like in other countries and for other sports.
Which brings us back to the point. If more people (especially good athletes) played soccer, the country would have a lot more good players. Rich kids in the suburbs playing for a couple hours a week between piano lessons, tennis lessons and homework isn't going to produce skilled players.
For cultural reasons, I don't think all of a sudden a bunch of kids are suddenly going to start playing lots and lots of soccer in the US instead of basketball or football or even lacrosse or whatever, even though that would be the best thing to happen to the USMNT. The alternative, which would help, would be to pour resources into the kids that do want to play to make sure they can find enough time, competition and instruction to be better through emersive academies, etc. But currently, not enough good athletes play soccer for it to happen more organically like it does in a lot of countries.
it's too rooted in the expensive travel team. I just saw a decent discussion between Lalas and some talking head whose name escapes me. Lalas would not buy the argument that it's too concentrated in suburbia and that they need more participation from the urban slums, but it's obvious he's wrong. He's so in denial that he still thinks he wasn't being a homer when picked the US to win this game
Sports takes off from the ground up. Once you have a soccer field in every hamlet and a dirt field in every urban alleyway, you'll have the coaching and investment. Blaming klinsmann because kids who grow up in tough environments go into other sports **because it's their only option** is stupid. He's given what he has to work with
http://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2015/10/16/13/30/151016-academy-to-laun…
It looks like they're addressing this issue now. So we're about 10 years away then? If soccer had a successful developemental program like they do for hockey it would help. I guess in soccer it's important to start this as early as possible.
Why is it 100% coaching and 0% talent? Who is creating this dichotomy? I'm not arguing against the importance of coaching and better youth soccer instruction, but it is impossible to argue against numbers.
If you have X number of kids and half of them are never exposed to soccer or were gently pushed toward other sports, you just cut your talent pool in half. For a country like Argentina, you don't have to even consider whether the kids will get a fair shake at showing their mettle on a soccer field. In the US, there's a good chance that a great soccer player got so little exposure that their talents were never developed/recognized. Whether or not that player is LeBron James or Adrian Peterson is not the point. The point is our theoretical talent base is much much bigger than our practical one.
So when someone says, how can the US have so many people and be so mediocre at soccer, well, part of the reason is that our population misrepresents our practical talent pool.
If you have X number of kids and half of them are never exposed to soccer or were gently pushed toward other sports, you just cut your talent pool in half.
There are more youth soccer players in America than in nearly every other country in the world. I don't have a link, but I saw not long ago that only Brazil, Germany and I think one other country had more than us as of the most recent data.
Even if a somewhat higher proportion of American young athletes go on to play other sports than in other countries, our potential talent pool is still huge. The argument that our team isn't good because "our athletes don't play" just doesn't hold water.
Rather than believe that we're just unlucky and that somehow all the kids destined for soccer greatness don't play it here, it may be more sensible to examine what we actually do with those youth players. The way soccer players are developed in the United States is very different from how it works in many other countries. We don't stress the kind of intensive indvidual skill development that European and South American youth academies do. We prefer little travel teams coached by parents with few qualifications.
the reality is, as other people, have mentioned a totally different culture. If you are in FC Barcelona's academy you live there, onsite (same with a lot of the bigger clubs). Your academic education as well as soccer training takes place there and they start the kids at extremely young ages. So yeah, part of it is coaching - those kids at Barcelona's soccer academy are getting top notch instruction. At the same time there are only about 300 kids there and that is from the ages of 7-18. So they take a select amount of kids and they live soccer.
I'm guessing the instruction the kids receive at these academies is significantly better than the instruction a spanish kid is receiving playing on some team in his home town.
If you're say Spain and you have Barcelona and Real Madrid churning out just one or two really good players for each age, you know your national roster is going to be solid year in and year out. Spain's 2010 WC roster was dotted with players from the Barcelona and Real Madrid youth academies. There just isn't anything like that in the US right now when it comes to soccer.
If soccer were the most popular sport, then athleticism would not be all that our best athletes have as they would have been playing soccer all their lives.
Coaching and scouting.
Scouts in the US value size and speed. It is a good thing that is slowly changing.
We need coaches like Cruyff who understand the game at a different level. Need coaches like him who would give someone like Guardiola a player without ideal "measurables" a chance to succeed.