Pro Soccer clubs and National Teams regularly scout talent as young as 16. You see it in Argentina, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, England, Holland, Russia, France, and yes, the USA. These kids are paid by their club teams and receive training all year round. So it is no wonder that when they are 22, they are years ahead of American 22 yr olds coming out of the student/athlete NCAA system. Don't be confused by the college football to NFL transition. That is NOT how soccer works. Even the NBA recruits high schoolers. NCAA soccer is slowly becoming an extracurricular activity instead of being seen as the path to pro soccer. Just wait until European clubs start heavily recruiting players in the USA. That will be the final nail in the coffin. And then when pro soccer takes off in the USA, it will swallow up NCAA soccer.
Uh. Everybody already knows this. It's not a new or profound insight. Oh and they scout a lot younger then 16. And the Liverpool Academy is far from what i'd use a a model of youth development considering even Liverpudlians point out the fact that it hasn't produced a decent first team player since Gerrard in 98. Maybe Barcelona, Arsenal, or Ajax. But Liverpool's Academy has produced shit for years. For their sake maybe Danny Pacheco, Martin Kelly, and some others will come through.
Define "swallow." Say you're the parent of a promising 12-year-old American soccer player. You have two choices: 1) Send your kid to an MLS or European residential academy. There they'll train him in soccer and give him barely enough academics to meet minimum state standards. In eight years, depending on how fast and how big he grows, whether he's injured once or more during training, and the simple unpredictability of judging talent in 12-year-olds, he might be good enough to turn pro. If he isn't, if he washes out at some point, then you're paying for college, since his eligibility is shot. Turning pro, of course, meaning turning pro and playing out most of his career--not necessarily hitting it big or playing in one of the leagues where salaries are high enough that he won't be left looking for a second career at 35 with no college degree. Or: 2) Send your kid to local non-residential programs, Bradenton, or another program that will preserve his college eligibility, so that he can play in the NCAA for at least a year or two and, if he isn't good enough to go pro at that point, can still get his degree and get a job after graduation. Are you that confident that your 12-year-old is the next Landon Donovan? Enough parents will always say no to fill the ranks of college soccer no matter how many academies come calling.
I saw an interesting stat in this season's Athlon Baseball Preview. How many baseball players who played at the major league level in 2009 actually graduated from college? The answer is 25. Only 25 out of over a thousand. (And not a single guy you'd really ever heard of.) For some reason..............people don't struggle with the notion of baseball players not attending college (as many of them head there straight from high school), but we continue to have this NCAA/pro discussion with soccer in this country. The difference of course is that minor league baseball players make a hell of a lot more money than soccer players. You can "not make it" in baseball in this country by not making it to the major league baseball.........and still have a good career/make money.
Guys that sign out of HS and or 1-2 years of college, tend to get decent money, especially if they have an agent that's not a retard. Of course, there is money to spend because baseball is popular.
Well, let's be honest. NCAA versus Liverpool academy is an inane topic. The Liverpool academy blows, as anyone from Liverpool will tell you. (Especially us Everton fans who actually, you know, have produced premier league caliber players in the past decade). In the United States, the academy/youth development structure right now is just in it's infancy. It's pretty risky for a kid/parents to choose to forgo college in favor of MLS. And by that I don't mean GenAd players, for whom those bases are covered. I'm talking about the other 99.9% of youth soccer players in this country.
Dman it guys, can we get an (R) please? I taped this match and was going to watch it when I got home from work. Now that I know that 'pool crapped all over the NCAA, what's the point?
but around half went to college for 3 years. The majority of Minor League baseball players don't have a large salary, but some prospects get extremely large signing bonuses. The #1 pick in the draft, Strasburg, last year signed for more money than any prospect ever attended college for 3 years. Actually 6 out of the top 10 were drafted out of college. MLS should probably shoot for the MLB hybrid system where going to college or directly pro are both viable ways to make it into MLS. Its been argued a million times that this country is too large for pro teams to handle development alone, and having more than one track ensures less players slip through the cracks.
I don't understand why it is that certain debates just draw so many people into making the same elementary mistake, but this one's a classic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_Draft One of the things that's constantly overlooked in this type of debate is that college is valuable to the pros sometimes even if it isn't great development, because it is free information. Most 18 year od HS players never play against guys older than themselves, and the talent in that age group is really spread out, so that the prospects don't play each other that much. A lot of times, when you put those kids into college, against guys who are older, and on/against teams where the worst players are far better than what they've had before, even where it doesn't tend to build ability, it tends to reveal it. As pointed out, many get huge signing bonuses. Which is, in a way, a good position for the player to be in because he knows how he's really being rated. The pro organization can talk a good game, but if they don't show the money, you know they don't really mean it, and a lot of those guys go to college. (Bad in another way, which is that the player is tempted to go blow it on some fancy car or something. The vast majority of those who never reach the majors don't leave baseball financially secure for this reason.)
I believe that with baseball players.........if they decide to go the NCAA route.........they're required to stay there 3 years. Is that right? So the vast majority of ball players don't graduate (only 25 in all of major league baseball), but a ton of them were in college for three years. The discussion about the Liverpool/Euro academy is silly. First off, of course, there are child labor laws. So the idea that Euro academies are going to come ransack American teenagers and bring them over to Europe is far off. (This is why Gyau and Renken are hanging out in Vancouver right now instead of heading over to Germany, for instance).
I'm merely pointing out that there's a big difference--and one that routinely gets glossed over in discussions like these--between entering college and staying there 4 years to graduate. The 'free information' factor applies mostly to your freshman year, which is why this: Is not true. The NBA forces kids to go to college (or if you're Brandon Jennings, Europe) for a year before entering the draft. They do this among other reasons because it vastly reduces the error rate (and in the NBA, errors are expensive). You could call it the 'Kwame Brown rule' since he was the type of player that brought it on. But as far as graduating goes, that's a whole different animal. One of the advantages of college soccer, from the player's point of view, is that you're a free agent the entire time. You can walk away any time you want. You can choose to, for instance, stay until your natural progression as a player takes you to the point that European teams would be interested in you, which is what Charlie Davies, Robbie Rogers, Marcus Tracy, et al did. (That path has its own flaws, but that's a digression at this point.) Point being, you can get yourself a hat-trick on Tuesday, decide you've become good enough, and drop out of school and turn pro Wednesday. College has no hold on you. For the foreseeable future, you can expect a lot more guys to go the Danny Mwanga route than the Jack McInerny one, because there's something in that route for everyone, unless you're just an absolutely phenominal talent to the point that one year out of your pro career may end up costing you seven figures. This is especially true if the NCAA ditches it's vicarious professionalization rule and the much larger pool of 'pretty good pro prospects' can gain from playing on the team with the relative handful of 'can't missers' who'll get paid before 18.
This is correct. The NCAA route is the proper route for 99.9% of American youth soccer players at the moment. The elite prospects like Altidore, Adu, Bradley, Howard, Gil, etc. are a completely different matter. We're still trying to figure out what a whole group of our talented U-17's from the last U17 World Cup are doing. As far as I know guys like Stefan Jerome and Carlos Martinez are still trying to figure it out. They didn't enter the MLS draft, and didn't sign on with an NCAA institution.......so I guess they're looking to latch on to a pro team. But it's been pretty silent with a bunch of those guys recently.
Carlos Martinez turned 18 on January 21. Stefan Jerome will turn 18 on August 11. Martinez has allegedly trained with Tigres and Boca Juniors. We'll see what happens with him. I suspect Jerome will be on his way abroad when he turned 18. At the moment it's quiet...but that doesn't mean there isn't anything going on behind the scenes.
Yes, this is how it works. A lot of guys go pro out of HS, but there are always plenty of good prospects to be had from the college ranks, too (about 50/50). Some guys just want to go to college and others blossom from age 18-20 and become pro prospects while in college. Other guys are considered minor prospects, so they go to college to try to boost their stock and/or hedge their bets. The vast majority of good college prospects leave after their junior year. At that point they need to get going with their pro career and they have a lot more leverage (they can threaten to go back to school). Every year teams draft a number of college seniors, but 95% are signed to standard minor league contracts with very cheap signing bonuses (peanuts). Occasionally there's a bigger-time college senior -- perhaps one who held out the year before. It's not the best analogy to soccer because of the three-year rule. Nonetheless, even in a sport as lucrative as baseball, you'll see a lot of guys going to college to hedge their bets. College is always going to be a part of the sports development system in the US, no matter which one you are talking about.
people don't get mad about baseball players not going to college because baseball followers are well away that in recent decades college has been inadequate preparation for the major leagues for the bulk of players. At some point they go to the minors. In the same vain college soccer is inadequate to make the highest level of soccer, La Liga and the EPL, for the bulk of players. MLS is a minor league. It's not bad. But its just like MLB's minor league. Major League baseball is the highest level on the planet in it's sport. MLS, obviously, is not. So college may be ok for MLS but not to make it to the highest level of the sport. Now obviously there are exceptions but clearly most college players don't go on to success in at the highest level of the game, spain and La liga. The added problem though is, like many american team sports, They aren't all looking for 22 year old proven starters. Elite soccer leagues are. You can graduate at 21, spend 4 years in the minors, and get you're first chances at 25. That's a tough road if you want to play in the elite soccer leagues. it works fine in MLS especially if you don't want to play anywhere else. Regardless i have no time for college soccer unless it's watching UCSB fans on youtube carry goalposts around and throw them off cliffs. But, one, there academy system, in England, has been wildly criticized as not producing quality english players. And they cost money to produce and fund. MLS doesn't have money. it has almost no ties to the community other then occasional token clinics. Hell half the people running MLS and U.S. know f'all about what skills make a good player and aren't competent to discuss football tactics so i hardly trust them to develop players. Most think if a guy's is big, strong, and fast he's gonna be great.
