OT: Improving American Soccer
Thoughts?
Require our top WC-level players to play overseas whether it be EPL, La Liga, Serie A. The MLS will never gain enough traction to where our players can stay home and be challenged enough to greatly improve upon their skills.
Look at the best soccer players in the world. None of them have body types like Desean Jackson or Dexter McCluster. The problem with U.S. Soccer is not athleticism. It's skill.
I don't think that's true. It's not just one or the other. On the top teams, their players are either more skilled or more athletic than ours. Sure, Messi is good because he's crazy skilled, not because he's an elite athlete. But for other players, it's absolutely an athleticism thing.
I don't follow soccer closely enough to name names, but I've been watching a lot of the WC and I can tell other teams have guys who are extremely athletic. We have some of those. But think if Clint Dempsey was as athletic as DeSean Jackson (or Jozy Altidore) and then think about how good he would be. Or if a guy like Besler was 6'3" and fast, instead of what he is.
Especially when it comes to defenders, if you have guys who can run really fast and jump really high, you have an advantage.
Well, of course no matter what the sport you'd always prefer to be more athletic.
The point is that simply being athletic is not at all good enough. Football/the NFL is the sport where unskilled freak athletes dominate. If you're big, fast, quick and can jump you can play d-end or safety or OL or whatever. You cannot survive only on athleticism in soccer. You can't be slow and unable to move quick laterally or to jump and defend. But if you have no first touch it doesn't matter if you're the best athlete in the world.
Yes, I agree with that. But it seems that the US either has guys who are great athletes or are skilled, and very few guys who are both. If our best athletes played soccer, then at least the guys who weren't super skilled were at least super athletic, and some of our guys aren't elite in either category.
The idea that soccer players are somehow significantly more skilled than football players is utterly ridiculous. There is a TON of technique required for EVERY posotion on the football field to play at an elite level, and if you aren't skilled, you are going to get owned.
Unskilled? Do you actually think NFL players are unskilled?
Of course it depends on how you define skill, but when you get down to it: Yes, I think there are unskilled athletes in the NFL. Not many, but there's a reason that the term "Skill position" exists. Sure there's a little skill in tackling a guy (more technique I'd argue), but it's not the same as dribbling a basketball, hitting a baseball, fielding a ground ball, striking a soccer ball, having a clean first touch.
skill
noun
: the ability to do something that comes from training, experience, or practice
I sure as hell hope our oline has a little more run blocking skills next year.
LOL
I think you're missing his point. He's not saying that NFL players are just skill-less hunks of muscle, but basically that of all the major sports, football has the easiest learning curve
Our white guys are unathletic and slow. You checked that box good.
Also going back to the middle class comment - I want to lay out for those who dont follow youth soccer how it works in the U.S. It works against the poor inner city kid.
In the U.S. you start play on a recreational team that one of the dad's coach. Most of these dads know little to nothing about soccer but at that point when you are 6-7-8 it is mostly about fun in the U.S. - no one is thinking 10 years out Generally in a league of say 10-12 teams you will have maybe 3-8 kids who really stand out as super elite. Then another 20 kids who are good and don't stand around picking grass or acting like a statue..
So that is say 25-30 kids out of maybe 110-140. Then you need the parents of those 25-30 kids to seek out a travel team (which is where better talented kids played against other better talented kids with a coach who has at least some background in soccer). Many of those parents have no idea about travel soccer unless a relative has played on a team - I've walked up to some of these parents even at under 10, under 11 age group and they had no idea what travel soccer was.
So of those 25-30 kids maybe 10-15 will move over to travel soccer at some point. It might not be the best 10-15. And it might be at age 11-12 instead of age 9. And those parents have to have means to participate. You can play recreational soccer for like $100-150 a year. A lot of travel teams require $2000-$4000+ a year.
Now do you think a Latino kid who is growing up in inner city Detroit and loves soccer way more than basketball is ever going to find the path to playing for a club team (that for those of you who live in Michigan is most likely located in Troy or Livonia or Novi)? It is about a 5% chance he ever makes it out of this system. Even a kid who plays in his backyard in Warren and doesn't play organized soccer in the rec league ... he may be the best kid in the city but never goes and plays organized soccer.
Which is to my greater point - there are probably a few thousand elite kids who get lost in our system and would never be identified by the way our system works. Meanwhile in Germnay and Brazil they have scores of people at the local level watching these 5-6-7-8 year olds, and funneling the best of them into their elite academies. And without knowing the specifics I am sure it doesn't matter one iota if you have a dollar in your pocket in those countries. Messi was so talented he was actually funnelled out of the country of Argentina and into Spain I believe around 11-12 years old by Barcelona.
Great analysis. I've enjoyed reading your posts in this thread. This system for identifying and grooming talent is a big factor, I think, in the U.S.'s continued soccer mediocrity.
I think this systemic argument is more convincing than the sheer numbers/popularity argument. Consider Portugal, which has about 10 miillion people, one thirtieth of the U.S. population, or Uruguay, which has a population of about 3 million, one hundredth of the U.S. population. Even if only one in 30 or one in a hundred American kids choses soccer, we should still have a sufficient pool of bodies to produce at least one or two world-class players. Numbers alone don't tell the story.
Your explanation here is compelling, though, and I think that until we have "scores of people at the local level watching 5-6-7-8 year olds," we won't churn out elite talent. We have this system in place for football and basketball, where kids make verbal pledges to college programs at age 12 and get hand-picked for semi-professional AAU teams younger than that. There's no elite basketball player shooting hoops by himself in his backyard in Warren.
So, then, it seems to me that it's a money issue. Until American soccer fans represent an eocnomically influential lobby, the system won't change. Hell, we have "bagmen" deployed illegally all over the goddam country to scour the ends of the contiguous U.S. for good football players. We have baseball scouts sweating their asses off in podunk Dominican and Venezuelan towns rooting out talent. No stone goes unturned. We have the shady uncles of standout basketball kids making it their de facto vocation to get their nephews discovered. There's just no incentive at present to put those kind of resources into mining soccer talent.
We need an AAU structure for soccer.
We have this system in place for football and basketball, where kids make verbal pledges to college programs at age 12 and get hand-picked for semi-professional AAU teams younger than that
Kind of . . . but AAU coaches are mostly a bunch of hacks with little real coaching skill. In basketball, you can get away with crappy coaching for a long time. Even in the NBA Draft, there are tons of projects who don't have much developed skill, and may or may not finally develop their skills in the pros.
Soccer doesn't function like that. Elite soccer players get intensive, serious coaching at a young age. The AAU method of getting the best players in town and basically not coaching them at all on fundamentals won't turn them into stars.
You are likely dead on in your analysis, but all I hear you describing is AAU basketball on steroids. Is that really something the US should aim for? Aren't we (the collective sports fan we) always discussing how currupt the AAU basketball system has become with its handlers and "scouts" taking advantage of young, typically black, typically on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, basketball players? Do we, as a society, really want another form of that to serve our inherent need to dominate all of sport? I mean, you describe Messi being shipped from Argentina to Barcelona as a feather in the cap of soccer development in these other countries. To some extent, I guess the US imports plenty of talented young people for the same reasons, but I hope we can agree that the stakeholers really only did that so they could profit off a soccer wunderkind at some point in the future.
I'm likely bias (or simply not bias towards soccer I suppose) because I never played the sport, but why on earth should we move towards a soccer development system that takes young athletes out of a normal childhood and a typical education, all for the slight possibility that this program churns out a few elite players every few years in order to bump us up a few spots in the FIFA world rankings in 2030? That may work in poor or third world countries in Latin America or Africa, because the alternative isn't a typical education, it's some form of blue collar work, or much worse. However, in the US, there are real alternatives outside of playing for a Premier League team for the 99.9% of young soccer players that aren't good enough. Given that, especially for the American kids whose situations closer resemble those in Brazil/Africa instead of the upper middle class, our collective focus should be more on education and "real" opportunities instead of developing a world class soccer pipeline to make us all feel better about America's dominance of all athletic competition.
I suppose I just made an argument against any sort of travel/club youth sports teams (be it baseball, basketball, hockey, etc.), but our brand/level of youth involvement doesn't appear to come close to soccer in a lot of other countries we seem to aspire to (except maybe hockey - those travel team schedules are crazy).
/rant over
First, good post. We have a daughter who is 11 and what you say about the rec and travel/competitive soccer in the US is spot on.
Question though - if the kids from lower income families cannot afford to have their children plays competitive/travel soccer, how do the children from the lower income families in other countries afford to send their children to the soccer academies?
The clubs pick up the costs, with the idea that they can cash in if one in 50 players ends up garnering a sizable transfer fee. The other element is that they do some pretty intensive weeding out of young players who aren't progressing to their liking.
Good description in an article from the Times magazine four years ago:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=a…
1. Soccer will never pass football or basketball. ever
2. The biggest hope for U.S. soccer fans is the influx of latino immigrants in the next 50 years and how they might grow the sport.
1. Nobody ever says this. It's annoying that whenever soccer growth is discussed someone has to, almost defensively, say it will never be bigger than football or basketball. Correct, it will never be bigger than basketball. Football may be in danger for other reasons, though. Not saying soccer would be more popular (I'd rather watch a NFL game than an MLS game), but the sport is under some heat from cash-strapped school districts and concussion worries.
2. No. Latinos are not the only ones that enjoy soccer. But since we're stereotyping, Latinos tend to fall into the lower end of the socioeconomic scale and thus are subject to the restraints that alum96 describes.
The US has grown the sport plenty in the last 30 years. It'll continue to grow in the next 50 years with or without your supposed "latino influx."
It's not stereotyping. In Latin countries soccer is the # 1 sport, if we get a influx in Japanese people that would help baseball, if we got an influx of Russians that would help ice hockey etc. Since the U.S.A. is bound to have more people from Central America and Mexico move here in the next 50 years according to census data, that would be big for soccer. I'm not sure why all the hostility for my post on the fact that it would never pass basketball or football. It's the truth. Our culture has been based on baseball, basketball, football for 150 years. I like soccer too, but it's never passing those sports except for maybe baseball in about 70 years.
I thought it was clear: My hostility from the fact that whenever soccer growth is discussed, people need to chime in with the obvious: it ain't going to be more popular than football or basketball. Nobody is saying soccer will be more popular than basketball or football.
I think in 50 years football might not exist in its current form. That's another, but related, subject.
I'm annoyed that every world cup we have to have this argument about "soccer arriving" because people who hate soccer defensively start screaming that it will never be bigger than basketball even though nobody is claiming that.
Basketball and Football haven't been around for 150 years
Football was invented in 1869 so that's 150 years. Basketball is about 100 years.
Those sports didn't become national obsessions the minute they were invented. For a long time, baseball was the only sport people really followed, and then gradually college football followed. Pro football and basketball were small-time until the second half of the 20th century.
Jurgen Klinsman
1) MLS is a sub par league that relative few watch, that offers no American childhood idols to emulate and no big money for potential stars. If you are a good lefty pitcher, or throw 95 mph you can make $100,000s minimum. If you are the best soccer player in your state you may make $50k/year in the MLS.
2) Travel teams not only are expensive (limiting numbers), they pidgeon hole kids early on into positions and play unimaginative soccer (which is why we have so few good strikers), and require kids to play one sport (theirs, cross training anyone?) early on and more importantly practice 3x /week for 1.5 hours (not enough). Foreign kids who play in parks for 4.5 hours per DAY have much superior skills, learn creativity playing in small spaces (see Canadian pond hockey) without being over coached by coaches who vlaue wins more than skill development.
MLS is a sub par league that relative few watch, that offers no American childhood idols to emulate and no big money for potential stars.
Actually, several players on the national team play on MLS teams. There is a salary cap, but each franchise is allowed one "designated player" who can be paid any amount. And attendance figures for the league are pretty respectable - there are only around 7-10 leagues worldwide that outdraw MLS.
It's not at the level of the elite European leagues and possibly never will be, but this is a far cry from 20 years ago, when there was literally no professional outdoor soccer league in the U.S.
Not true. Each team is allowed to have two DP slots and has the option to buy a third slot for a one time fee.
I think its much less about getting the athletes involved and more about getting kids to stick with soccer over a longer time. When I was growing up mostly everybody played rec soccer in my city until like 3rd grade or so when travel soccer starts, then kids started moving on to football/basketball/hockey or just stopped soccer all together (like me).
Everybody wanted to be the next Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Yzerman, nobody wanted to be who ever was playing soccer back then because nobody could watch it on tv, nobody bother following it since most kids dads didnt watch it. Soccer just wasnt something kids thought much about. I think simply having more games on tv and developing more people in to casual fans will be the real key. When college soccer teams have to build bigger stadiums because they have too many fans, when most cities get MLS teams, when joe schmoe off the street can talk about dempseys last game like they can about stafford or flacco or matt ryan or romo. Then we will be really competing at the highest level and be able to field a team with depth and star players because the kids will have grown up caring about soccer
I don't think there is really a "top-down" solution. Soccer just has to become more a part of our national culture at the grassroots level. If it is, the money and coaching and everything else will follow. Little by little, it's happening, although it's definitely a gradual process. We're never going to be as soccer-obsessed as most other countries, because we have other sporting options, but it's going to become a legitimate major sport here alongside the current big four.
Not to be the "This" guy, but This^^.
The hyper-scouting and development in sports is relatively new. Like in the last 25 years. Before that, kids played a bunch of sports for fun and weren't formally developed until high school, college and some minor leagues.
The hyper-scouting and development followed the sports that were already popular. They did not impose themselves on unknown sports to try ti grow those sports from the top down.
Having played and followed soccer in the US since the '80s, I can tell you that the sport is light years ahead of where it was 25 years ago in terms of it being part of American culture. It is no longer thought of as a "foreign sport" by anyone less than 30 years old.
As it grows into the mainstream, the attention will follow. Buy low, sell high. If I were pulling Dustin Hoffman aside by the pool today, I would tell him: "Soccer".
Actually, I really like that idea. Its gonna be quite some (if ever) time before the MLS really takes off as a talent rich league. I think bringing in a team to NYC or LA from the EPL would REALLY spark some year around interest in the sport. I would certainly be watching those matches. I don't watch very much EPL right now for the simple fact that I have no rooting interest. I don't watch the MLS because its just not top tier talent. Right now the sport is gaining popularity, but its only once every 4 years (for the majority of us) we really sit down and enjoy some quality play. When we can get a leaugue or team with top tier talent playing top tier soccer, money will come. When money comes, coaches come and more effective orginization for the youth is put in place. More kids will have fathers sitting down with them watching matches. I think it all comes with popularity here, the rest will follow.
breeds better growth. If we were really wise we'd narrow down the talent pool quicker so our teenage players are playing against the best in our country.
This might require developing English or European style soccer adademies so kids can develop their soccer skills against the best while receiving a good education.
Will US Soccer get better? Yes it will. But it's not going to happen overnight. It'll take years, likely generations, before we're competitive on a global level. And even then, will we ever be as good as the likes of Brazil, Germany or Spain? In all likelihood, that will never happen. I honestly believe that would require an enormous cultural shift in our society. Most countries really invest in one sport. Soccer. We heavily invest in 4, and soccer is not one of them. Soccer is just not a priority for Americans. We would much rather watch football than futbol. Sure as hell know I would. If the interest isn't there, the level of competition suffers, as well as the level of coaching. The truly gifted ones likely go płay abroad. Bottom line: we just have too many options, and most countries have just one.
There's a reason the Olympic US men's basketball team usually makes quick work of everyone it plays. Because we have the best coaches and best players in the world. There's a reason that the best players in the world come here to play in the NBA. Just like the best soccer players in the world would probably want to go play in Europe (right?)
We will get better, and soccer's perception here is changing. But very, very slowly. And soccer will never overtake football as this country's #1 sport. Most of us on this board will likely be old and withered or dead before the US can seriously talk about winning World Cups.
If it will take "generations before we are competitive on a global level", then how are we ranked 13th in the world right now? We are competitive, we're just not an elite team, and you're right, we won't be any time soon.
Right now the teams of the Bundesliga are developing more "American" international level talent than any program based in the US.
If we want to be an elite soccer country, the culture needs to change. And that's just not happening.
Dude, the culture is changing right before our eyes. The U.S. has participated in seven consecutive World Cups (after never qualfiying from 1954 to 1986), there is a professional outdoor soccer league that averages 18K fans per game and is expanding, U.S. World Cup games are drawing 15 million spectators, and Premier League games can be easily watched on TV. Heck, there is a semipro team in Detroit drawing 3K a game.
Soccer doesn't have to replace the other sports; it's not automatically a zero-sum game. It's growing in popularity and yet the others are doing fine.
(BTW, many would disagree about the U.S. having the best basketball coaches. European players often come into the NBA with a better-developed array of skills than their American counterparts. European players come here not because the coaching is better, but because the money is better.)
I've read that what would help most of all is if kids from a relatively early age are indoctrinated into the sport and show strong and consistent levels of commitment to honing their skills and then going to academies in which those skills can be further honed.
I've also read that here it's more of a middle to upper middle class sport and in order to get the best you have to cast a large net for talent getting kids from inner cities could yield good results in that as well.
That makes sense and I agree, but how do you get kids interested enough into having that level of commitment too the games and how do you help the kids from bad neighborhoods steer towards soccer rather then play basketball or football ?
My thought is that what if the B1G Network put more emphasis on the soccer rather then just football, basketball, hockey, or lacrosse. I sincerely doubt anyone will ever consider the MLS to be relevant or help make the sport popular. Hell I know more WNBA teams names and players then MLS.
Rather then that what if kids and young adults saw Michigan or Michigan State or Ohio And Penn State really get behind and cultivate the sport could grow interest from the kids and the parents as a safer route then football ?
I'd could get behind the Wolverines soccer team before I could get behind a MLS soccer club based in Detroit or say Grand Rapids or something because I have a strong emotional investment with the school and teams. I think most other alums and fans that in certain regions where the sport is popular could feel the same.
This way kids in the area could be brought playing soccer for brands and teams they know and our the sport where it's popular could potentially in the conditions could match an SEC level of commitment in soccer the way kids down south have to american football.
Sorry for the long winded post, just had a lot on my mind as to why the sports not popular and how it could be.
You're right. Any baseball game without a brawl is a waste of my time.