I always wonder if American players would be better if the soccer road to success went through high school recognition rather than through club and academies. Why can't soccer be like basketball football and baseball, where kids get scouted in their high schools? We wouldn't need pay to play anymore. Every poor kid in the USA would be able to enter the system.
Alexi Lalas got a pretty clear answer from the MLSPU: The recent transfer of @cpulisic_10 again brings up the issue of solidarity payments and training compensation. I asked @MLSPlayersUnion Executive Director Bob Foose to reiterate why the MLSPA continues to oppose these mechanisms. Here's his response: pic.twitter.com/tMZaX583M7— Alexi Lalas (@AlexiLalas) January 4, 2019
I think that’s a rather self-serving and specious argument. Basically, the argument boils down to: every penny paid to a club is one penny less paid to a player, and that argument is absolutely contrary to what we have seen in pretty much every other soccer-playing country.
Yeah, that reason sounded a little selfish. But I thought it was a reasonable concern that other countries/clubs might be unwilling to pay a solidarity payment, and therefore player doesn't get signed. The very last sentence of the MLSPU statement is true too. The money goes to the wrong club(s). In the USA, how would you even identify which youth club should be paid when so many kids transfer clubs so often? E.g., AYSO should get paid for probably half the pro players.
The answer is because you can't work backwards to make the school model work for a recent league like MLS. The school model was formed out of availability and need. Collegiate sports were essentially the highest level of football and basketball for a very long time. As a result, those collegiate sports continue to thrive despite being supplanted by professional leagues. And because the pro leagues need players, the colleges need players, and so high schools remain the de facto source of those players. Basketball has changed a lot with the worldwide spread of the sport, which reduces the reliance on the school system for players, but football has not. Essentially, the current system worked well enough and the NFL and NBA had no interest in spending money on developing their own players which perpetuates high schools being the main originating source. Collegiate and pro soccer do not share the same history as the other sports, and the sport's general popularity in the US came via AYSO, where parents paid to put their kids in a purely recreational league to keep them busy. Because you didn't have that "natural" establishment of a pipeline from high schools to professional leagues early on, high schools never became the primary source of scouting potential college players or pros. As much as I don't like the current system, I'm not sure things would be any better with high schools being the place where kids make their name. Private schools by and large do better than public schools in sports (in California, at least) since they get to hand pick their students and recruit players, leaving lower income families in the same position they are in now. My personal issue with the pay for play model isn't that wealthy parents can pay so their kid can pretend to be on track for a pro career. My issue is that it excludes players via economics and not for talent reasons. I don't think there's any way to fix that at this point, other than to have pro teams subsidize kids in their academies, and we've already heard from Garber that he doesn't like how much money MLS teams are spending on their academies (he didn't phrase it quite like that, but it was pretty clear what he meant).
This is the part I don’t understand. Why can’t USSoccer work backward? I know the club and travel team system has infiltrated the big 4 sports, but HS teams are still important. Surely some smart person can figure out how to reverse pay to play to benefit many more soccer players.
This instructional video on the 2-7-2 formation may make your head spin. Fascinating. Thiago Motta, coach of Paris Saint-Germain’s U19s squad, recently made news when it was reported that he had stated that a 2-7-2 formation was the future of football. @AFHStewart explains Thiago Motta's 2-7-2 formation:https://t.co/NBiDgls8CZ#WhiteboardFootball pic.twitter.com/8Ii9lQ4kRf— Tifo Football (@TifoFootball_) January 4, 2019
The reason you can't move backwards is because the ship has already sailed. For profit club teams became the norm for collegiate and pro players in the US before the sport became popular enough in the school system where it was common to have soccer teams. Heck, my 8th grade year was the first that my junior high had soccer as an option and that was in 2000. The soccer program at the high school was older, but not by that much. And this is in an area with a large Mexican American population and a thriving AYSO. Because club teams get players before high school, many option out of playing for their school altogether, or don't really put much effort into it. Then you're restricted by the league your team plays in, which can vary a lot, as it did when I was in high school. There's just too much ground to make up and high schools aren't spending big money on their soccer programs. It's the same reason club teams have been supplanting high schools in other sports, too, although it's been terrible for baseball, I'd argue. Football is largely still reliant on HS for cultural, monetary and infrastructure reasons.
The sentence on junior high matches my experience, but we only had track and basketball in middle school, no baseball or football either. But high school's with no soccer teams? By no later than the early 80s every high school in south Florida had a soccer team and it seemed, from my college friends who mostly came from the NE, the same was true there. As for changing the system, i don't think it makes sense. You need good coaches, and middle schools and high schools really can't do that. Again referring to S. Fl., the coaches had to be teachers at the school. That is not a system you can build on. Pay-to-play but with solidarity fees going into "scholarships" portioned out by regional soccer participation numbers? Something like that sounds promising. And systems designed to minimize travel, rather than the current, ridiculous "drive 400 miles for a tourney, even though you drove past hundreds of good teams to get there" nonsense, which just drains the wallets of the parents... Grrr. But just pouring solidarity money to random teams won't help.
How many sponsorships will it cost him? Those he has, and those he won't get now? Sponsorship deals have behavior clauses them. Like you shouldn't be a foul-mouthed drunk.
The guy is at the end of his career and he made boatloads of money already. I don't think he has to worry all that much about current or future sponsorship deals.
Ok, how much is a reputation worth? How much would have paid not to have his mugshot spread for the entire world to see?
Even the 80s puts soccer so far behind other sports in high school that it's pretty irrelevant. Unfortunately, there's just no real way to fix the current problem. MLS teams aren't looking to spend more on player development, so unless we get a lot more teams, the number of players served by those academies is already capped out. It sucks because it means that the player pool is going to be more or less the same as its been the whole time. While MLS can supplement or replace players by bringing in internationals (which is perfectly fine by me, honestly), the national team program will continue to flounder because the potential pool of players just isn't big enough. I don't see a bright future for US Soccer, frankly. We just have to wait for another coincidental grouping of very good players to come up at the same time, since it's unlikely they'll be "produced" by the current system.
unless there are details I'm unaware of, this sounds pretty minor & trivial beyond the gossipy TMZ omg factor.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/06/us/wayne-rooney-arrest-intoxication/index.html https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/46777318 https://www.washingtonpost.com/spor...ication/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.810b605d7f99 CNN, BBC, WAPO..... Little bit more than TMZ level.
Being reported on by CNN and BBC doesn't elevate a non-story into a story just because of the platform. It's click-bait. It's only being reported on because he's famous. The number of drunken disorderly arrests made in a week probably create a list so long that we'd all die before we could finish reading it. So long as the guy didn't commit a serious violent crime or something, it's pretty unimportant. And it's not like Rooney is a stranger to off the field actions being reported on. The league will probably have a chat with him
Is that really the problem? Croatia has 4 million people. That puts the number of males ~ 2 million and the total of people in the potential player pool (ages 15-32, roughly) at ~500k. Iceland can't have a pool of much more than 50k. Our problem is we don't develop the talent we have. This requires fields and people who care about soccer to play on them, and then coaches and a scouting funnel to high-level soccer. The number one thing missing in the US, in my opinion, is really caring about playing. There is a field across the street from my work which sits empty many afternoons. There are a couple of kids who kick the ball around sometimes; two of them joined a pickup game I was in a few months ago, and they were great! But they usually are just the two of them and they don't have anyone to play a game with. In a safe, pretty-high-density suburb, with a nice field, and no other field anywhere near: two kids. If those kids were getting pick up games when they wanted then they would be the source of the next generation of stars, whether they became the stars themselves, or pushed others to be better than them. And I don't know how money affects that. These kids are in the "definitely can pay" end of the pay-to-play spectrum. I think the thing that would help it most, honestly, would be the Quakes getting good. MLS getting popular. I think MLS getting stronger (and USL too) is what will get soccer more popular, which is sort of chicken and egg, but I think it works slowly with either one driving.