(10-11-2017 07:36 AM)Banter Wrote: (10-10-2017 11:19 PM)InspectorHound Wrote: (10-10-2017 09:45 PM)BeerCat Wrote: Yeah Arena needs to be fired asap. Probably Gulati also. Missing the World Cup should be unforgivable at this point.
And someone needs to kidnap Pulisic and make him play in MLS. I know the competition doesn't compare but the US needs him to be the face of US soccer.
The reason he's as good as he is is because he escaped the regressive MLS development system for Europe as young as possible.
Relying on MLS for talent has left the national team stagnating, and now missing out on the World Cup. If we want to be the best internationally, our players have to play regularly against the best clubs in the world.
To blame the MLS for the state of US Soccer is just wrong. The MLS has been nothing but a boon to the USMNT and soccer in this country. There are things the MLS could do better, but that is a different discussion.
The problems are systematic within US sports culture, and it really hurts soccer the most. To have a chance in soccer in the US you have to have money. Thats completely opposite of the rest of the world. Development should be handled by teams, and not pay to play club teams.
Youth academies in England start around age 9. Scouts identify potential talent, and those kids then go to a youth center for a trial. If they are signed they train with the club, and hope to make it through the academy. Take Ajax for example. They sign kids at age 7. Every day buses go and pick these kids up during the school day, they are tutored, and then they train with professional certified coaches. The only cost to the family is a 12 euro a year insurance fee. Everything else is covered by the club.
American's are forced to pay large sums for semi competitive soccer, and play for coaches nowhere as skilled at developing talent. Some are volunteer parents, and really will never develop real talent. Kids then can go play in college where the teams are made up of kids who lack the touches and or skill that European u16 teams posses.
If an American player follows the "normal" path of development he is turning pro around 21-23 after graduating from college, and getting drafted into the MLS, and that is 5 years after most European players have become pro's and spent the last 5 years training like a pro.
Its no shock that nations with the population of Texas turn out far more elite talent than the USA. They have the infrastructure, and spend the money to do so, while we continue with a club soccer system that turns away the best talent because it is far too expensive to play.
We could be turning out the best talent in the world if we had the infastructure to do so, but instead the best athletes often choose football, or basketball, because those are the only sports where you can succeed by playing in the school system without paying an absurd amount of money.
To give a more direct bit of evidence for this in order to better characterize how much the pay to play scheme is screwing over talent development:
The team I played for in the late 90's and Early 00's was Adidas Premier (later The Internationals) out of Cleveland. At the time it was $300/season, which was a lot back then, but something that the players could scrounge up, and even when they couldn't as with Kiki Willis (the best HS soccer player I have ever seen) they waived it entirely because Adidas funded the program. Of the starting 11, 9 of us ended up playing in college and two are playing professionally...5 of those players I know for a fact (myself and Darlington Nagbe included) could not afford the dues that are required now: $2100/season. To be clear, the reliance on the college game is another nail in the coffin, and luckily it appears that the upcoming generation is avoiding that. I played in college (as with many of my former teammates) because it was a way to get a reduced price degree, not because we saw a way to play professionally. You look at players like Jordan Morris who wasted years of development playing for a college rather than going directly into the pro ranks, and now you know why he has been passed by others who haven't.
Soccer has been marked as a profit center by clubs because it was typically larger in well-off suburbs in the 70's-90's, but in doing so, it has limited the Federation's ability to properly evaluate and develop talent in the State Federations, which should be free to play and grant opportunities for tryouts to anyone willing. I believe the Olympic Development Program in Ohio is now over $5,000/year...which is a barrier for entry for so many people we will never be able to find the talent that I know is out there.
MLS has nothing to do with the misgivings of the the USMNT IMO. The players who came back because of the designated player system (Altidore, Howard, Bradley, Bedoya, etc.) are at fault because they became lazy, and the USSF are at fault because while they should be able removing barriers for entry, they are actually putting them up. MLS has done more for access, identification, and development of talent in the last 5 years than USSF has, and thats what the USSF's job is.
We have a lost generation of soccer players that was propagated because of minimized access and a lack of academies at the time of development, that basically made the players within a certain age group obsolete. Seriously, look at our player pool and find me one person between ages 24-28 (the athletic prime for soccer players), who were born in the US and developed in the US who are worth a damn. I know for a fact you can't. The only people who contribute from that age group are Brooks (a German who only stepped foot in the US on holidays) and Wood (who moved over to Germany at age 15). Luckily it appears our U-20 and U17 talent has risen...but oddly enough, the impact players on those teams are avoiding the American system like the plague (Weah, Sargent, Lennon, McKennie, De La Torre, Zelalem, CCV, EPB, Olusonde, Dest, Isaiah Young, Haji Wright, etc.).
It starts and ends with the fact that USSF are worried about profits more than development, and that has completely limited the player pool for an entire generation that should be in their primes at the moment.