Sebastian Lletget at West Ham

Discussion in 'Yanks Abroad Academy' started by JohnR, Aug 11, 2006.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Dave Marino-Nachison

    Jun 9, 1999
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    I love the smell of a preposterously off-topic YA thread in the morning.
     
  2. Wahoo

    Wahoo New Member

    Aug 15, 2001
    Seattle, USA
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Agreed, lets get back on topic...
     
  3. bltleo

    bltleo Member+

    Jan 5, 2003
    GERMANY
    Club:
    FC Bayern München
    Nat'l Team:
    Germany
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial


    i like these jokes on Italians:). I was watching this France-Italy revenge game when France did beat Italy. Italian soccer is very special, but they also know how to win world cup:).
     
  4. aupsite's acht

    Jul 1, 2002
    Minneapolis
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Wow! I see a thread about a 13-year old kid getting a trial at West Ham, so of course, curiosity piqued, I open the thread to read all about the flavor-of-the-month great new hope for American Soccer!

    After 7 pages, I've heard about the issues facing kids that can't afford ODP, issues dealing with youth soccer in general, differences between Argentine and Mexican soccer, that whites are inferior athletes, that whites aren't inferior athletes, the issues with kids choosing national sides based on the parents heritage, ad the vacuum of quality coaches in the US of A.

    This is (very arguably) the most ridiculously strayed thread I've read (alright...could be quite a lot of aguments there). The only thing that's missing is a quality movie quote, so allow me.

    Rip Torn to John Candy: "You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. My boy Jimmy Cagney would DESTROY your Sylvester Stallone"

    Candy to Torn: "In a street fight, maybe."
     
  5. gnk

    gnk Member+

    Nov 1, 2000
    Rockville, MD
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    I think there is no argument now.
     
  6. JayDelight729

    JayDelight729 Member

    Jun 7, 2002
    Section 101
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Nice Apocalypse Now reference... repped.
     
  7. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    It kind of seems like folks are pointing out that your point is of dubious merit. I doubt anyone is proposing that demographics of our team should represent those of our country. Can you find someone who is?
     
  8. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    I think you may be missing the point of rep. :)
     
  9. superdave

    superdave Member+

    Jul 14, 1999
    VB, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    You're right.

    People are proposing that because whites are inferior athletes that a national team which is, statistically, "missing" only one white starter, and not 2 or 3 or 4, there's something wrong with the system.
     
  10. USvsIRELAND

    USvsIRELAND Member+

    Jul 19, 2004
    ATL
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Which is retarded.
     
  11. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    If you believe that, then it makes more sense to me to address that point. Are you defending our system as efficient enough?
     
  12. superdave

    superdave Member+

    Jul 14, 1999
    VB, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Um, if I answer a mod's question in a manner which adds to thread drift, is that a problem? :D

    Our system has a few inefficiencies that can't be escaped. First, our population is too spread out. Two, there's a tremendous cultural drive/expectation of going to college. You don't see separate high schools here to train kids for trades, that's too anti-egalitarian. And that interferes with early professional-intensity training. Three, there's not enough money to be made in producing workaday MLS starters.

    And some that can be corrected. There's too much emphasis on winning. People working in the youth system (I'm talking Fed people, the coaches and ODP scouts and so forth) don't get penalized for failure.

    My son is only 6, and, sadly, doesn't seem to have the native athletic ability of either his mother or even me, and so at this point there's zero chance he'll ever be in "the system." So alot of what I "know" about the system I know from reading posters here. Having said that, there seems to be a bias against marginal players who don't have the money, but the really great ones don't have nearly so much trouble. Further, the emphasis on winning benefits African-Americans, who statistically mature slightly earlier than Caucasians.

    OK, I sense everyone freaking out at this point. So let's have a little timeout.

    http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/110/4/e43

    Female puberty is easier to measure, so that's what I googled for. I can't think of a reason why there'd be a gender difference.

    I tried googling for males, but most of the stuff was porn, so I didn't go peaking around, being that I'm at work and all.

    OK, now that I've provided the link, are we all relaxed now? OK, let's proceed.

    At age 13, hitting puberty 3 months earlier as a race makes a big difference. We all know about the birthday bias, right? Well, if, in aggregate, blacks hit puberty 3 months earlier, that's a 1/4 year added birthday bias.

    Then I would add that blacks are more urban than whites, and it's easier to hook up with a good club coach in the LA or Atlanta metro areas than in Casper Wyoming. Probably a small factor, but a factor nonetheless.

    So I would imagine that the very best thing to be is a black, middle class kid from Chicago, Dallas, or LA. The worst thing to be is a white, poor kid from Couer d'Alene.

    It certainly is undeniable that

    a) blacks are, statistically, waaay overrepresented in the Nats pool.
    b) blacks are, statistically, waaay overrepresented in non-middle classness.

    So there's something going on favoring blacks. Is it raw athleticism? Is it so many athletic role models causing them, in aggregate, to focus more energy on sports? Is it better access to high level coaching in major cities? Is it early puberty getting them on travel teams? Do those doing the weeding out have the same bias toward the black athlete that many posting around here do, which helps get more black kids in the system? I don't know.

    I do know that the notion that minorities are underrepresented is statistical nonsense.

    PS...yeah, I know I didn't talk about Hispanics. Well, they seem to show up at about the numbers one would expect, so what is there to say?
     
  13. dark knight

    dark knight Super Moderator
    Staff Member

    Dec 15, 1999
    Club:
    Leicester City FC
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    I think your post is interesting until you get to the over-represented stuff again - that's where you just lose me. No one talks about representation on the Dream Team or in the Baseball Classic do they? If folks keep arguing that they think that minorities are statistically under-represented, I'd understand why you bring it up, but I don't think it's what folks are saying. What I think they are saying is that if the best athletes were soccer players, the demographics of the National Team might be similar to the Dream Team. You can argue that that's wrong headed or objectionable thinking, but this talk of representation just makes no sense to me. It's not about representation, it's about finding the best possible players whether they're Hmong, little green martians or otherwise. And I think some have argued that the positive results reflected by the "waay over-representation" shows where the emphasis of recruiting should be focused.

    Sorry wahoo for contributing to the drift. But given superdave's determination on other recurring topics it seemed important to address this. :)
     
  14. sidefootsitter

    sidefootsitter Member+

    Oct 14, 2004
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    The NFL has a different racial breakdown that the NBA and, even within the NFL, different positions tend to go either mostly black (WRs, RBs, CBs) or heavily, though no longer exclusively, white (QBs, Cs).

    One can wonder if the racial features benefit one race at one position and another race in a different one. For example, most of the Brazilian goalkeepers have historically been white or of white/Latin mix (Felix, Leão, Tafarel, Marcos) even though a dominating portion of the team's strikers were of African descent (Garrincha, Pele, Jairzinho, Romario, Ronaldo, Adriano) while the playmaking midfielders/"QBs" (Gerson, Tostão, Clodoaldo, Zico, Falcão, Socrates, Alemão, Juninho, Kaka) were again heavily white.
     
  15. scoachd1

    scoachd1 Member+

    Jun 2, 2004
    Southern California
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Although I recall a study that supported the differences in age of puberty among boys, the only thing that I could find in my files was a paper by Val Abbassi From the Department of Pediatric Endocrinology and Metabolism, Georgetown University Children's Medical Center, Washington, DC that stated the age differences in reaching puberty between black girls and white girls doesn't hold true with boys.

    The pubertal growth characteristics evaluated in various studies include age at takeoff, height at takeoff, age at peak height velocity, peak height velocity, duration of puberty, and the contribution of the pubertal height gain to final height.

    Age at takeoff is sex-dependent and also quite variable even in the same sex. In general, the age at takeoff is 2 years younger in girls. The age at takeoff could not be determined for the girls in HES cycle III, which examined youths 12 to 17 years of age, because of the cross-sectional nature of the study and the fact that many of the girls already were in puberty.9 However, the mean ages at various stages of puberty in the boys in this study10 were similar to the mean ages reported by Tanner and Whitehouse in British children.11 In HES cycle III, there was no difference in various stages of pubertal development between black boys and white boys.10 Black girls, however, were consistently more advanced in pubertal stage than were white girls.9 The ages at takeoff in the white boys (10.45 ± 1.47 years) and the white girls (9.25 ± 1.15 years) in the Harvard Six-cities Study were ~1.5 years (boys) and 1 year (girls) less than those in the British children in the Harpenden study, all of whom were white (Table 3). It should be noted that the data in Table 3 do not include data on black children. In the Harvard Six-cities Study, as in HES cycle III, there was a significant difference between black girls and white girls at every stage of pubertal development
    .3
     
  16. Wahoo

    Wahoo New Member

    Aug 15, 2001
    Seattle, USA
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    While some of this is interesting, and worthy of debate...

    Is a thread for a 13 year old getting a trial at West Ham really the place?
     
  17. superdave

    superdave Member+

    Jul 14, 1999
    VB, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    You should card Dark Knight for this.

    Surprising there's no gender difference, but there you have it.

    Damn, it was such a good theory, too. I hate when the facts ruin that.
     
  18. Maximum Optimal

    Maximum Optimal Member+

    Jul 10, 2001
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    To quote a recent president: "Facts are stupid things."
     
  19. JohnR

    JohnR Member+

    Jun 23, 2000
    Chicago, IL
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Strange ... I just googled and found three consecutive studies that showed African-American boys hitting puberty earlier than other kids. But whatever.

    At any rate, I've seen dozens of Regional and National youth ODP players in action, and Sebastian is the only one who truly does something different on the soccer field. All others are just early developers physically dominating little kids, or guys who were in the right place at the right time. They're fine players ... but not finer than dozens or 100s who weren't selected.
     
  20. appoo

    appoo Member+

    Jul 30, 2001
    USA
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    John, you know how the kids trial went?
     
  21. JohnR

    JohnR Member+

    Jun 23, 2000
    Chicago, IL
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    They offered him a spot at West Ham's academy. It's not clear if he'll make the move yet, after all he's pretty young. If he waits, I'm pretty sure that West Ham or somebody else will be happy to accommodate him. As I wrote, you don't have to be Jose Mourinho to figure out that the young man has game. Took me about 10 minutes, just casually watching a match. At which point I said to my wife, "OK this guy is different."
     
  22. rossgreen

    rossgreen Member

    Jul 16, 2006
    Austin
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    This is a great chance for him. West Ham's Academy has produced the likes of Joe Cole, Anton Ferdinand, Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, and Michael Carrick. A pretty nice resume of English talent, I must say.
     
  23. appoo

    appoo Member+

    Jul 30, 2001
    USA
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial


    thanks for the update!

    Does he have any European connections? I know it's early to think about but getting that work permit is a tough thing, and the sooner he starts the prcoess the better.

    He's a forward? With a lot of skill I'm guessing?
     
  24. JohnR

    JohnR Member+

    Jun 23, 2000
    Chicago, IL
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    Plays center mid at club level. Classic #10. Pristine technique, lots of tricks, plays very fast for a (now) 14 year old, uses his teammates well in combination play. (He turned 14 this month.)

    Athleticism might be a concern. When I saw him he was one of the oldest, most physically mature players on the field, but did not seem superfast. I mean yes he was plenty quick and yes his game isn't about running past people a la a teenage Eddie Johnson, but still I would expect a future pro to look danged fast in that setting. My suspicion is that our team (that's how I saw Sebastian, his club team was playing my son's U14 team) has several kids who will be faster as adults than Sebastian.

    Not a killer concern, of course, because there is always room for the less-fast player with other attributes, but as we all know the game continues to go in the direction of the athletes. Most professional jobs will go to guys who are either very fast, or powerful center back/center forward types. That is just the reality of the situation.

    Plus, my impression of his quickness might be wrong. He didn't have to go all out to smoke our guys!
     
  25. appoo

    appoo Member+

    Jul 30, 2001
    USA
    Re: 13 Year Old Yank gets West Ham Trial

    I thought this was a pretty interesting post.

    How does this kid compare to other top Argentine talents at his age group?
     

Share This Page