People keep saying get rid of so-called "pay for play" but who will pay the bills or these clubs then? I mean us soccer fans were beating are chest for years that theres need to be an academy system well an academy system is expensive. Hell most sports are expensive there just mostly subsides buy the taxpayers .
Yeah, I can't see an easy fix for this one. Unlike a place like Iceland or almost any other European country, a central academy system is not viable in the U.S. because of our geographical size. Plus, we have already tried that with Bradenton and it had mixed results. MLS clubs have made an effort to establish academies for youth development in recent times, so we will see how effective they are in the next few years. Sadly, like basketball and football, the only real way to end pay to play is for the sport to become popular enough that there is a real monetary incentive to develop the best young players.
and those academies are costing the owners MILLIONs . Why do you think they have there development systems in taxpayer funded education institutions?
Exactly, the money is just not there from any one source. That's honestly why I think our best development moving forward will be from European clubs because they have the infrastructure and resources to develop youngsters. Honestly, I view US Soccer similar to basketball in Canada. There is a ton of talent in Canada, but the coaching and opportunities for players is abysmal. However, Canada is improving its basketball program faster than the US is improving its soccer program.
Transfer fees pay the bills for youth academies. You develop a player, that's a valuable asset you can cash in. MLS is built to eliminate transfer fees. Therein lies the problem. One potential avenue for growth might be USL or other lower-tier sides developing youth and selling to MLS in volume. That's tough though for small teams without much in the way of startup capital. MLS has the money, but not the incentive. Other actors in the system have the incentive, but not the money (and other barriers to liquidity in player value as well). It's a tough one.
Some financial help could come from Public school funding in the form of Public charter schools. It could not be for the sole purpose of establishing a soccer academy, but it could be something you did if you were educating the kids too. Who you play games against would be tricky in smaller areas, so you would likely still have considerable travel expenses, but at least in larger urban areas you could appeal to an unserved market. If you had a high percentage of ESL students then so much the better. If you did a good job of producing high test scores, then the funding for the education side would continue. It would not pay for all the extra soccer stuff, but it would cover some of it. There is money in a "not for profit" school, or they would not be popping up all over the country. Unfortunately there would be great deal of time, planning, and expertise required to pull off such a project. People with those capabilities are making big money and seldom inclined to undertake such an enormous project gratis.
I think part of it we can look at pay for play for what it often is. A chance to milk money out of parents vicariously living through their kids in the hopes of playing in college. It benefits the clubs and USSF through their fees but doesn't advance quality with respect to the cost.
I saw this in the WaPo this morning. People are trying to get past "Pay-to-Play", but a lot more needs to be done. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...accessibility-problem/?utm_term=.e789c659b56a
Having read around in the past few weeks, and not being an expert by any means, my feeling is we need to focus on better youth coaching rather than more players. Although i should say, by better coaching, I also mean, in some ways, less (overbearing) coaching.
“Pay for play” is one of the biggest red herring complaints in US soccer. There’s always going to be a cost. If you want to put money toward something in youth development across the country, lower the cost of coaching badges. We need quality coaching more than we need to expand youth participation.
Pay to play will always hinder us but, it will be basically impossible to get rid of. It is even an issue in more popular sports like Basketball and Baseball.
I'm like you -- not an expert in this topic by any means. A couple of thoughts I've read from others over the past couple weeks include: 1 - your point about better coaching 2 - less emphasis on travel and more on "playing up" 3 - maybe if MLS were not organized as a single-entity, the individual clubs would have more incentive to develop youth
US Soccer goes into their coffers where they are claiming they've gotten big windfalls for in the past and they fund regional football centers in areas that aren't being serviced by MLS and their affiliates. Speaking of which, I think you go to MLS and convince them for their own interests, and the national team's, which in turn also has a knock-on effect for them (since that's where popularity of the sport in this country is going to be mainly tied to), that they need an academy for every MLS team + a minor league club that they strategically locate about 100-200 miles away so they can scout and provide opportunities to the players in their area. After USS finds out these locations, they plop down their regional playing centers. Kids could play each other there or travel a bit to compete with the closest regional center's. Maybe at the end you have a mini tournament to crown the best playing center nationally. Players develop from these experiences and can get noticed by MLS or overseas. All the entities involved have an incentive to find and develop talent on the cheap and for depth of their pools, so there should be no problem in having expenses for players paid. If there is, then they are tremendously short-sighted.
American business entities being shortsighted about short term profits verse long term benefits? Say it ain't so...
US Soccer’s $100 million surplus is a good place to start in setting up scouts for inner cities and rural areas that would have less access to academies. No one is arguing there is not a lot of untapped talent that is playing “unorganized” soccer out there. But no one is doing anything about it.
AAU basketball teams have lucrative deals with shoe companies. It's enough for greedy coaches to take some off the top and still provide scholarships. Of course that's it's own bucket of worms.
Only some of the elite AAU programs have shoe sponsorships the rest have to make by like Club Soccer teams do. And I think the fact that almost all of the recent basketball phenoms are either upper middle class kids or the sons of former NBA players shows that pay to play is starting to have an effect there too.
$1.5K to several thousand a year is a red herring? The DFB spent hundreds of millions to 'teach the teachers' and lower the cost.
I am by no means well educated on this pay for play but I have some questions for the experts. I always read that there is talent out there in areas where no one scouts. So if a talent is found, lets say a 13-16 boy, in an area where an Academy is several hours away, how exactly is that kid supposed to join the academy? Does the parent just hand him over to the club? Does the parents have to move with the kid? Who pays for all of the travel fees, food etc? Does the club have to come to the kids hometown to train him? How does it all work in scenarios where a kid lives in a area where no one scouts?
In a country with basically one national sport, the size of 1/25th of the US and with 1/6th the population* *(Guesses) And yes. Youth participation isn’t the issue. Proper coaching at the younger age groups is. You could make every league free tomorrow, but now you have a few thousand more kids being coached by people who have no idea what they’re doing who think “First Touch” was their prom theme. Or if you want to look at it another way, if you increase the supply of quality coaching, you decrease the need for players to need to play for one of the “elite” travelling or select clubs, because the playing field is a more level, and players at all levels are now being coached correctly and the quality of play rises.
It's a red herring in that it distracts from the fixable problems. Everyone keeps saying eliminate pay for play yet I never see anyone come up with (1) a dollar amount for what it would take and (2) a plausible source for those dollars. And that's because to actually do that would show that you can't get rid of pay for play in this country. The fact that Germany spent "hundreds of million" on coaching education shows how large the problem is. Since we are starting from a lower level than Germany and are a large country, then we would need several hundreds of millions just for coaching and there isn't that much money around.