No age checking imaging is perfect. "Normal" kids mature within 2 standard deviations of the mean. In teenagers that normal bubble could be 5 years wide. The bigger problem related to age determination is a lack of birth records in some of these countries. Kids that have come into the US largely have a birth date 1/1/... Assigned to them by an official. The date and specifically the year is merely guessed at. However, I agree we have little support at this time to argue that the Ghanians were over aged. But it doesn't matter. The real point is that it is clear that the USA U17s played very poor soccer, could not rise to success and that information, while far from conclusive as to the fate of woso in the future, is indeed concerning. Clearly this failure (to quote TC) should require some response. The only comment that I saw from Ellis (after she was blocked by the press police from commenting when directly asked) was that the u17 result supports her position that we need to focus more on technical development in our youth programs (ok then pick more technical players into the pools) and that she believed that the good old boy had chosen SOME (emphasis added) of the best players in the US.
Ellis' position on the U17 has to be she and Heinrichs utterly failed in their development duties. Instead we get the quote about the problem being the 9-13 age group isnt technical enough. I guess what she is saying is garbage in garbage out but in my opinion youth players bring much more into the US programs than they take out of them.
And they still can't dominate with all that testosterone- widely know as a performance enhancing drug?
Poll results haven't changed in a while: Top 5: 31% Top 10 (6-10): 62% 11-15: 0% Below top 15: 8% (1 respondent) After the group stages of the U20 with the US advancing to the quarter-finals to face Mexico, I'd say, whether we're clinging to a top 5 position or not, the US has struggled to remain a top U17 to U20 team and seems to have fallen a step behind. I think Nigeria is probably the best team to not make the knockout stage and was in a tough group with Spain and Japan (and Canada). The US also wasn't clearly superior to Ghana in their group stage game, if at all.
Not necessarily. In boy's/men's soccer they have some serious $$ incentive to win and export talent. In girls'/women's, there's no such carrot, and there may be decades'/centuries' worth of societal counter-pressures that discourage the thought. i.e. greed (not conspiracy) adequately explains one, but not the other. Prefer the simpler explanation: greed is peer-to-peer, but conspiracy requires distributed consensus Have some faith in your fellow humans -- to be lazy, short-sighted, and selfish More deeply, it could be a legitimate mismatch between societal habits -- and so a root cause on one side could well be pervasive and cause it throughout. Western society is records-intensive; some societies simply aren't. (I'm thinking here of many islander, rainforest, and desert nomad societies, which tend to lack a cheap, persistent storage medium -- e.g. environment too harsh for paper to persist over centuries, or paper too bulky to lug around.) So we can reasonably expect ourselves to document a birthdate and have a written record thereof persist over an entire human lifespan(!) -- but that's us. When we encounter a different mindset, we demand their written record, they ask us to sing our family's namesong and dance our caste rank dance, and -- both sides make a best guess. I don't believe for a second that there's any secret cabal of data wizards hiding in a back room somewhere, carefully poring over lists of promising 22-year-old women and computing years to subtract from their actual ages. From observation, we'd have to conclude that such a cabal, if they did exist, must be really bad at their job.
Actually, the USA and Germany U-20's have each won the WWC 3 times (that's roughly every other cycle). Only the USA U-17's have not done well, and Germany has not done much better at that level. I mention Germany because they are typically held to a very high standard, much like the USA.
After watching the first knock out match. I would rank the US 20s behind Spain who have now been eliminated. Similarly I would rank them behind Nigeria. I also think Ghana had a slight edge over our kids.
The thing with all the age cheating in Nigeria and Ghana is that there are also huge incentives to expose age cheating. For every Nigerian boy on an underage national team, there are 1000 more kids with enough talent to potentially make a pro team somewhere (be it in Africa, Europe or the Thai 3rd division). These kids, their parents and their supporters have huge incentives to snitch whenever they find out about age cheating because the age cheats take team spots from other kids. A lot of people keep quiet because they either don't have the connections to blow the whistle or they figure they may benefit from age cheating at some future time. However, there were enough bitter players who got screwed by age cheating to blow the whole thing up. The reason we found out about age-cheating in the first place was due to chatter/media within Africa itself. As for women's soccer, there definitely aren't the same incentive-structures in Africa as with men's soccer. So with regards to age cheating, you have to ask: A) are the stakes high enough to cheat in women's soccer...and... B) if the stakes are high enough to cheat, then are they high enough for anyone to bother blowing the whistle.