MLS needs to start caring about the USMNT again

They are few and far between because of the structure of the game in this company. MLS has full control and competition isnt allowed.

 

my issue is this is all theoretical. it sounds nice. but i like practical results. look at how many HGP/academicians most MLS teams are turning out. it's negligible. about 3-4 teams produce most of the domestic U20s. dallas rsl nyrb etc.

as such, the decision to clear the path for MLS academies to primarily carry the development load, is premature. the theory is there. the practice is not. the NT then has show up the "development hole" the theory created. the NT can't wave a wand and come up with the players the academies failed to train up.

this is the risk in such absolute confidence. if there was at least some other path to development, then maybe that pipeline offsets any failures in the theoretical academy approach. or helps through the growing pains. but if you go all in on the academies, and clear most of the rest out of the way, they had better work.

to me it's telling of the mentality that we feel like there can't be any centralized alternative that competes with the decentralized private MLS teams to actually see who does their job right. we talk competition. but competition in some eyes seems more like clear public out of the game. not see who does the job best. a centralized team at least holds the MLS academies to account and some standard. we've just gone ahead and assumed the MLS academies are the best way, and destroyed most everything else that could debate that question. and then seem to be discovering a few years in that the contractor we gave the job to hasn't really had many actual construction jobs before. congratulations, you're their guinea pig.

kind of like, you can announce you want to change our players and our team, or you can do the years of hard work to actually accomplish that, starting age 10. we prefer the theory. so we prefer to make the announcement and then declare mission accomplished. even if little effort is actually put in to change players, or we in fact set up the system such that every little club team or academy has more say in whether the players change than the pipeline that wants them changed.

maybe over decadal time more MLS teams will see the value in academies and invest. but they legally have no requirement to the league but to do the bare minimum to get dibs. in the meantime you've turned the process over and said the invisible hand will sort it out. if the teams don't produce the players because they aren't really ready for the development job, we will feel that at the NT level.

 

I know I have already said it before but this is key.

the distances between games is huge. it makes all the logistics more complex, costly, time consuming and it leads to player burnout. It also reduces the time available for players to compete (formallly and informally) with other players of high quality.

 

I always struggle with your posts because you respond to people with an argument almost tangentially related.

I don't really care if US Soccer re-establises Bradenton again. Perhaps it's worth the money; perhaps not.

Bradenton, or any centralized US Soccer driven development path can not possibly ever reach the scale needed to actually create step-change level change in our development pipeline.

There's several different successful models of player development out there in the world, but the only one likely to work in the US in the next ten years is to have the largest portion of high level development driven by professional teams. And even that's hard for the US -- there's very few professional teams with the resources or financial incentive to invest!

The role of an additional centralized path for a select few is a matter of degree, not a large change. The role of clubs not tied to professional teams is important, but has been proven to be unsuccessful as the primary development arm.

At the end of the day, if you're running development in this country, you should know that you have to tap into the resources that come from professional teams -- both their operating revenue, player transfer revenue, and their facilities and coaching and their role in demonstrating a career path and creating local soccer culture.

The normal US Youth structure and Bradenton can't provide any of that. That's not to say they are useless.

But you need the professional youth development. That's why USSF is cozy with MLS, and why they should be cozy with USL as they build acadmies. MLS has billionaires who are willing to build facilities, hire coaches, etc.

Have all the owners of MLS committed? No. Is the number of committed owners rising? Yes. Are all the owners that are investing doing a good job? No. Will they learn? Let's hope so.

Right now, Dallas, NYRB, RSL, Galaxy (yes), Seattle, NYCFC, SKC, Philly all have actively productive youth academies. Miami and LAFC are all in from all accounts.

Some of those are new, some just started, and none except maybe Dallas are functioning at the level you'd want.

So yes, US Soccer needs to whip MLS into faster movement, needs to assist in them getting better, needs to work with USL to get them moving faster and ideally needs to make a structure where some of the revenue cascades down to the non-pro team structure.

But whether you have Bradenton or not, a strong professionally driven development system is necessary for a country the size of the United States, with the economy of the United States and the limited soccer culture the size of the United States.

 

i don't see this as a big issue for this reason. ODP is localized until the top levels. local, state, region. only then national. similarly, DA is in regional league pods. you play the teams in your region on particular weekends. it is a lot of travel but the games are compacted into specific weekends. everyone goes to houston or dallas and plays part of the round robin that weekend. next time they gather, new city, more of the round robin. it's more equivalent to the big tournaments we would play, plano labor day, etc. i think only at the end does it nationalize, similar to mcguire cup or whatever anyway.

my concerns would be that the way it funnels could make scouting lazy. the equivalent of looking under the light for your keys because that's where you can see. i could see the college coaches and pro scouts scouting DA to death to the detriment of everything else. one of the valuable things we have in this country is sheer population and participation. i think we have development issues and i don't know if i want to entrust an annointed set of gatekeepers to funnel it heavily down.

and then MLS seems poor at developing players for their first teams. this academy system seems boutique, doesn't seem geared to produce in bulk. it seems geared as a showcase for the few that everyone would watch to the expense of watching anyone else play.

i also would be curious, and i simply don't know, if DA is earned each year or if instead this is basically a big name club carve up. do you earn the league each year, is there pro/rel, can good teams get in? or does this just ensure that every year in my region texans solar chelsea dynamo FCD SKC Rapids Rush will compete in a league even if that year they aren't the best teams. what if a select team is good but a one-off and not a name brand already in the league? what if a chosen club consistently sucks? i'd think it's a cool idea if it was something you earned into as a particular team from a particular age group, and it in fact constituted the x number best teams in the country willing to go to the travel expense. but if it's just we annoint a set of clubs the gatekeepers, and assume they bring the best, meh.

 

What I would say is that we don't want academy teams worried about sheer results in a pro/rel format. Results should be secondary. We still have the mentality in this country that winning at the youth levels is the goal. Its not. That the Solar was the best U17 team in the country because they won the u17 DA title. Meanwhile FCD promoted their best U17 to NTSC and then FCD. And he's getting playing time with the FCD first team. Ricardo Pepi. They promoted a bunch of others U17s to the NTSC team like Jonathan Gomez. Did we want FCD to keep all of those youngsters at the youth levels for the sake of results? Of course not. That's not the point.

What we'd heard is that MLS wants to break away from the DA altogether and form their own U20 league. [Kinda like the U20 Liga MX.]

I'm all for that. Let's not pretend anymore like FC Dallas and the Houston Texans are the same thing. One is a professional soccer club. The other is the boy scouts.

 

you are assuming your conclusion which is my concern when we are trying to develop players. i know we have handed them development based on the paper idea they are equivalent to european academies. i am not sold that they actually accomplish that role yet. this is one of my theories on our current NT situation, is having dismantled bradenton and shifted to academies, the academies are not actually ready yet. some produce very few first team players. some produce some NT players and such. but i think the majority are the first, either going through the motions or not ready yet.

we can treat them like they are all ready to step in. they are not. FCD is the exception. i tout their system to people. i tout it because no one else is in their league. you can't then run your development like everyone is FCD or you will have issues. everyone is not producing several first teamers plus people who go abroad. my dynamo have like 3 decent HGP in their whole history. who are like marginal to even start here. one made 2 NT camps but was cut twice.

you accumulate all those efforts, and if most teams are like ours, you don't have a pile of NT prospects produced by some quasi european academy, you have not much to work with. add to that roster rules that allow 8 foreigners and 3 DPs.

i wouldn't be surprised if MLS eventually separates out, as in much of europe, and pro academies play pro academies. i even think there is some of that now in the one league. does that really mean those teams are superior to traditional club? i think FCD is. i think the Dynamo are not. you look at the standings. you look at the pros produced (Holden, Shea, Quill, Torres, etc.), it probably is as good or better to play for the Houston Texans down here. the Texans would probably finish higher in the league, and be more competitive at Dallas Cup and the like. as long as that's true, boy scouts is not fair. they may in fact be amateurish in a sense you are hinting at, but i think you're assuming that many of these academies are something more than pro branded select. if their coaches are part timers, including people i know and played with, who, among other things, also coach traditional select and/or local college teams, and they don't reside on campus, and they practice x number days a week like select, and the differences are branding and whether they charge, then we're not beyond select yet.

Vancouver I think has a residency. there was some talk of Houston hiring full time coaches. until they start to look like a real european academy, we can pretend they are the equivalent, but they're not. and, worse, we can clear the path of any other development approaches, make the leagues set teams, get rid of any centralization, but those org chart moves don't mean the academies are actually ready to step into the void and do their job. it means we can operate a xerox machine without realizing how our system is not the same.

FCD senior team is a pro club. the team has branding, sells merch, sells tickets, coach is a salaried full time employee, players make money. in europe the academies are paid for under that same umbrella, their coaches are again full time employees, the team may reside at the academy,

i am not sold that most of the academies are professionalized in a meaningful way much more than traditional select. it's still part time coaches, who may even coach traditional select, it's not the best soccer minds paid full time getting the development jobs, which seem almost more like a path to college coaching. when they put the resources in, and it looks the same, i think we should treat it the same, but it's not.

all you have to do is look down the league standings to see the select and academies mixed in together. at which point it should have a pro/rel element. i get that in europe the pro teams often have their own reserve and youth leagues, to ensure their presence. i also get that has nothing to do with them being inherently elite, but rather that this is a closed shop that ensures the pro teams their place, where they can develop kids without worrying how the team actually does. the incentives are right for that there because they are churning out first teamers. we aren't. i don't know if i want to coddle the academies and act like they are doing fine and should be secure in their role. i think they should be up against regional teams or national teams in residency or other forms of player development, and may the best strategy win. that might then motivate them off their a$$es.

 

I don't know too much about how ODP was set up other than they consistently avoided/missed a large number of very good latino players.

What I know is from my experience as a parent (I am old enough so that my personal experience and knowledge from my younger years are completely obsolete).

My son, at his highest level played in the second level of tier one (I know different leagues have differenty levels (bronze, silver etc). (They had tier one Champions league adn tier one Europa league, tier two etc...he played in the Europa league). There were several other leagues with different classifications ECNL and there were also academy teams that were above him.

From my experience, the higher the level, the more spread out the teams. My son was playing against teams that included san fernando valley teams to the north all the way to San Diego to the south and out to NORCO in the east. ON game days, (1-2 games per weekend), a short day would include waking up at 6:30 and returning home 2:00 (that is for a 10:00 game that is relatively close) most days were longer, For a game in San Diego, he might have to spend the night at a hotel or spend up to 6-8 hours on the road depending upon traffic, construction, accidents etc. (now we are talking about a 10-12 hour day at minimum. Do that 1-2 times in a weekend for a period of years and it takes a toll on both kids and parents.

My overall point is that dedicating yourself to soccer from a young age (which is what any top player needs to do) is made more difficult by logistical issues that can lead to burnout. Even without the issues listed above, players would be giving up a great deal of their "life as an adolescent or teen" but it is exacerbated by the extreme distances that result from a lack of talent density. This density has improved but is still a very significant issue.

 

ODP you try out for locally, if you make that they send you to try out for state, if you make that you start participating in state vs state training events and games. At least where I lived, the attendance zone for the ODP trials was small. Basically the same as our select league chunk of the state. You then can go up to regional and then national teams. Same process, try out at one time, they pick who they want, then training begins. Unlike the NT, you don't just jump up to a huge national level. You have to get noticed by a series of coaches. At the lowest level it's just local. Smaller than your state for soccer.

The issue to me is not the scope of geography, it's whether we pay any attention to school sports and/or off-brand leagues.*** The leagues within US soccer get watched. I am not sure if mere HS or the hidden hispanic leagues do. Why? Well, at least here, it was a blue ribbon set of the select coaches running tryouts and picking the local selections to go up to ODP state. Who do you think they focus on? They know me and the select kids. They probably even have their theories how they stack up before the trials.

In terms of wear and tear on kids, my primary concerns would be (1) field choices and (2) teams that play leagues both days of the weekend. My favorite tournaments were like Dallas Cup or USA Cup where you played once a day. The 3 games a day or 6 a weekend was nuts, but if you have that a few times a year, you'll live. What I thought was insane was when we had games all over SE Texas in both Saturday and Sunday leagues, and like I didn't see my friends for like 2 years except when I got home. One day a weekend, fine. But I think 2 days every weekend is socially isolating and probably has a physical toll. I played multiple sports and when I feel broken down now I wonder how much was the cumulative beating I took.

There are also specific parks, including one used a lot in Houston, which are hard as a rock or pitted, and horrible choices. I tore up my knee at one of them as an adult. I watched a guy break a femur the ground was so hard. I remembered recently I had knee pains when I played there as a kid. I can't imagine the 2 are unconnected. I am sure that was allowed as someone's "home" field for their area. There should be standards.

I would agree about a financial toll for regional travel with how the development league is set up. I would wonder who can afford that routinely. That would have to push this even further country club. I would wonder how much of that the pro academies cover. I would assume the select kids are paying through the nose and I could barely afford select as it was. But money aside, I got a kick out of traveling all over the place and thought it was good preparation for independent living and college, either as student or athlete. We made a plane trip and a few road tournament trips every year in select. We made several plane or bus trips a year in college. That to me would be more about whose dime is this all on and do good players miss out for finances.

***Kind of like, if you create a development league with the supposed "best teams," but they don't actually get promoted or relegated on performance, it funnels you down to a smaller set of players, and does not assure they are in fact from the best teams in that area. It assures you showcase "certain clubs." These are not the same thing. Some years or seasons a good club has a lousy team, or something political going on.

Kind of like even with a lousy MLS academy I am sure kids are tempted to go there for the gatekeeper role. The fact the teams turned into gatekeepers are attractive for their position in the process doesn't mean they are well run. I always think of Salcedo out there barely doing much with everyone who went to UCLA, like how do you not win everything with Feilhaber, and then caught up eventually in this admissions scandal.

 

That is the part that I am talking about and that I think is made far more difficult by travel distances. If all/most of the games were within 1 hr drive time (except for special tournaments end of season etc) than that would minimize the social cost to the players. Not seeing your friends....

I know that the amount of time required to become a top level player is always going to be high but if travel times and distances were less it would be somewhat easier to manage and players would be able to have a little more of a life outside of soccer.

 

not sure I understand. How should I take this?
quaint in what way?

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/quaint
Quaint: Attractive because of being unusual and especially old fashined.
Quaint can also be used to show that you do not approve of someting, especially an opinion, bellief or way of behaving because it is strange or old-fashioned.

 

personally the flaw i see is that these youth development cherrypick leagues reward teams when what you really want is players. my experience those players may not be on the youth development sides. i can think of at least one elite player who came from local and went MLS who spent all but his senior year on a midtable local team and went to a HS with a horrifying varsity team. he did play his senior year with a more competitive local team that would now be in the development league. but by that point he was already national pool, without having played for a good team at all. for talent ID it suffices that they even play in a top local league.

i feel like the development league concept is more rewarding to the parents of second tier players on good teams who get a showcase. i can't believe this actually shows the elite prospect that much better. i think the theory is they get more competition but those kids are usually already in NT camps or maybe even going to international tournaments. U17 world cup and Dallas Cup are more of a test than a regional round robin.

no, i would spend the effort on broad scouting as opposed to setting up a competition for "teams" that assumes the good players only fall on such teams. in my experience this is not necessarily true.

i also worry that the emphasis on such a league would encourage the precisely wrong impression that all you need falls within those borders and you need not scout broadly. "it's all here." so you artificially narrow your search and miss kids.

now, if you wanted a compromise, maybe they could play this league one of the seasons. fall ball. but i think the year round thing encourages the notion that you fenced in the good players when you corralled most of the good teams.

also, last thought, but a lot of these leagues seem set up where MLS academies and certain elite clubs are automatically in. so i am not even sure if it is truly the best teams so much as a controlled showcase where most of the slots are consumed by traditional club powers and MLS/USL. i might buy "best" more if every league didn't seem like a reshuffle of the same set of teams. the best teams in my area vary age group to age group. but i believe 2 particular teams, one MLS academy, the other the prominent club, consume our spots.

 

it's a similar fallacy to club snobs who think good club = good player. when in reality that player might have been a mistake, he may sit, he may be worse than players playing a level down or abroad, and he may be the beneficiary of the right passport. there could be players in that same league of a far better standard. there could be other players in less prestige leagues who would outplay him if allowed in.

and yes, the fact many players in that league are a high standard should encourage scouting there, but the failure rate renders it fallible. as does the success of the best players in lower leagues. that suggests the club status heuristic is inconsistent. if the tool doesn't work efficiently and accurately it's not that useful, and is arguably lazy. the hard work of scouting is still necessary as the tool doesn't accurately sort.

for example, yedlin vs cannon. cannon is not a putz, he was YNT and FCD academy like mckennie. cannon has interest abroad and if he pulled the lever would suddenly become due the same hollow worship. meanwhile yedlin had a couple rough NT outings lately and used a release clause for too few club appearances -- but he has the "Newcastle" stamp of approval. if he ends up in MLS, and cannon abroad, do the snob polarities reverse? surely you see where this is a bit silly, a bit status quo defensive, and assuming what one is supposed to scout and figure for themselves.

 

you're in some ways re-creating how they historically did ODP. open tryouts for chunks of the state. make that, up to state pool. make that team, up to regional pool. make that team, up to national pool. already was done. maybe still is done for all i know.

my point is more if you asked the kids in the league they would have told you of him. we tried him out but he asked his brother be brought aboard as well. we balked. but we went around picking up the best players on weaker teams who made league games closer than they should be. i had to guard the kid, i did my job, but he could beat others, sort of guy you would beat his team 5-3 -- because they were disorganized -- but he might have the 3. anyhow, the select league kids knew who could play on the other teams, and over time we would chase them. i don't know if i like the pretense that anyone any good is already on the strong teams. that wasn't 100% my experience.

my team back then would have been development level, couple state titles, always in the tournament. we already for travel tournaments would have been playing these regional teams. all you're doing is cutting them adrift of local play and basically turning these regional tournaments you could already scout into their whole season. i think this expands the grip these teams have on getting scouted for college and professional play. i think it arbitrarily sets them out from the players you really have to scout to find, the kids on weaker teams, or the kids in HS or leagues outside our system. basically the ones who can't afford club. and regionalizing travel on that level of showcased team only makes the financial burden worse. it was a burden on my parents just running around texas and the odd out of state event. i don't even know how we'd have hacked colorado, missouri, oklahoma, just for league ball, much less tournaments.

and to me the thing is the kids getting focus in development league already had that focus. you're already talking about the kids you'd see in ODP and dallas cup or regionals or nationals or the like. this just locks them into some superleague where they can't be on the one lousy age group they have once in a while.

to me the apparatus already exists for ODP and the good teams. i want to be reaching down into the stuff i don;t know, finding them, pull them up into ODP and vision of the better clubs. or figure out ways to make all this cheap or free. i feel like the "combines" already exist in one form or another, and the question is can i find diamonds in the rough to improve the cumulative quality at them. that to me is more scouting than making the rich richer. pulling up people like the ones we'd see in HS ball where it's like who is this kid and they'd drive us nuts for a half but we'd win over the game because they were raw and not fit and disorganized. but you'd see they were as good for those 45 minutes as your average club player, and without much coaching at all.

the hispanic leagues are a big example in houston. tons of kids and young adults, outside the USSF/USYSA umbrella, and my limited experience guesting in those leagues, some were good. fair amount of trash, totally disorganized as a team***, but a few exceptional players completely outside of any league/playoff/state/ODP system we scout and reward. if we don't look, we don't find, and since they are outside of USSF, they are not in the development league consideration at all, and only getting looked at if someone scouted a non USSF league and brought them over.

***when i hear snobs bemoan american organization, it's giggle inducing, because i don't know how many teams i beat on organization as much as anything else. this is prized in germany and italy but out of fashion here. there is great value in players who understand a team game and how to play their position. i was useful well into my broken down 30s because i understood how to play team and individual defense. when i watch yedlin, dest, robinson, it's like who taught them how to play wingback?? they're wing mids or perhaps even wide forwards in our silly system...... anyhow, my point was, there is value in organization, discipline, and understanding of a team game, and it's exaggerated that those players can't improvise or show skill.

 

i think a key thing is try to get the hispanic leagues within USSF

if you do that then maybe their winners play in the tournament system within the states, the quasi-little league system, which has lower rungs and not just elite select

the scout can then make a stop by the lower rung games and check out the hispanic league kids as well as whatever else is on offer

i don't think most people realize it but MX is scouting our border state leagues and tournaments looking for eligible players, and because those leagues are kind of closed off in their own world, you wouldn't necessarily know who is there to find, or who is checking them out

and unlike us they don't have it drilled in their heads that as a USSF employee i should mostly stick to USSF teams

this was briefly mentioned re Efrain Alvarez and Jonathan Gonzalez

---

i mean, if you look at this historically, there are a lot of prominent amateur teams in the NE with names reflecting immigration processes, perhaps even started in immigrant leagues

but obviously at some point they were brought within the umbrella because they are in USOC

 

to me i feel like a lot of the "combine" apparatus you'd be setting out has been done

if you really wanted to grow the sport my guess what it needs is reduced or zero cost

i didn't pay to play HS

we were mostly select but had a sprinkling of kids outside the big clubs or even the normal system

and then all sorts of new kids on other schools outside the soccer club hotbeds like where i grew up

i think there are slight inroads on this with the academies at zero cost

but if you wanted to retain kids and truly have something closer to the best players on the best teams, you need to reduce select cost

i played fairly high level select but that cost every dime we had

he's talking about the travel, just running around texas plus a plane trip or two, took a summer job, i can't even imagine this regional stuff

at which point does it start to become a rich kid's sport, at least within traditional select
---

and then the thing is based on what i see only a few club academies have their crap together, FCD for an example

and Dallas started out with a strong youth system to begin with

so you can suck kids into the academies and the MLS/USL teams get dibs, but i'm not sold that "works" as actual development yet

too many players in Dynamo academy who were YNT yesterday and today can't even make the first team

 

From the very beginning MLS has had money making as its primary goal. That means that they throw money at nearly useless (as far as USMT development goes) people and programs like bringing in over the hill players rather than directing their energies toward improving "simple" things like refereeing or developing true depth.

I am NOT opposed to MLS making money but that can be done without the waste we currently see.

I do not think that MLS is good for the USA national team program except that they, sometimes but not as often as it should, provide an environment for the development of young players to the point where they can get a trial in actually good leagues.

That is MLS' only function is to behave as a semi-dysfunctional farm system for mostly European leagues.

I wish MLS was good for USA soccer but they seem to do as much harm as good as not one current MLS player is good enough for national team duty for the USMNT.

Right now players are best off getting out of MLS as soon as possible if the have any ambition toward USMNT duty.

There are no reasonable changes MLS could make, other than changing almost everything, that would be beneficial to the USMNT. I do not believe anyone at MLS is even bright enough to see just how bad the play in the league is or how much poor refereeing and poor coaching make the league worse so they take no steps to actually improve anything.

I managed to watch about 10-15 MLS matches this year and not one was a good match but one, maybe two, were at least a bit of fun. The absurdly bad passing and refereeing made the matches work on a comedic level. It was like watching some of the best of the Keystone Cops. I expected the teams to arrive in "clown cars" to complete the image. A couple of the players might have been better if wearing size 85 shoes.

Right not the USMNT will be better off if they are totally ignored by MLS.

BTW: I suspect that we will over preform in the next world cup and a lot of folks will say we are truly getting good but actually, shortly after that WC, we will revert to being, just barely, being the best of CONCACAF. Our ambitions should be higher than that.

 

Jay Berhalter hasn't worked for US Soccer for nearly 2 years now.....

 

Sssshhhhhhhhh!!! Don't stop him -- he is on a roll.