Comparing US Soccer...(R)

Maybe you took our reputation too far and started thinking we are a "powerhouse"...and if you did, you are dead wrong. We are still getting better by the year. The upcoming youth is much more skilled than in past years due to better coaching and more influence from other countries other than just England. You will see the skill improvement soon enough, just have patience. Also, take notice that a lot of our players at the confed cup were very inexperienced, so they could have been unconfident to make dribbling runs.

Another reason for this would probably be...kids in the USA are lazy. They wouldnt practice 3 hours a day if it killed them otherwise. Kids in Japan are probably like other countries...they find what they love and put their soul in it. Maybe USA is just missing some soul in the game...but its coming...slowly but surely....

 

"Freddie Adu" was comparing Japan's players in general (although referring to the Confed Cup squad) to our A team players (mathis, donovan, beasley, etc), so to say our players were unexperienced and maybe not confident enough to do those things is not a legitimate answer.

and to NC_ODP, to say kids in this country are too lazy to go practice something they love (sports) in this country is a very ignorant comment. That could not be farther from the truth.

I agree with Freddie on this one, Japan was playing beautifully in that 2nd half against France (and the other 3 halves they have played so far). I can not see the US doing that with any lineup that we could put together, we simply dont have the skill or the coaching to do so.

 

1. they have a very organized league (the j-league) in which all the teams are REQUIRED to have youth teams. The j-leauge is producing great talent such as Nakamura (3 goals in confed cup) who has brazilian like skill on the ball.
2. the league has a brazilian influence (coaches, players) so the japanese players learn to play like brazilians from the coaches and from watching opponents and fellow players. Learning to play like brazilians means good skill with the ball (something U.S. players don't have yet)

the main one would have to be youth system. As much as college is producing good players for mls it can't compare to a good league youth system.

 

To add to the last post, some of the Brazilian players playing (or who had played) in the J League are quite a bit better than the Brazilian players we saw in MLS.

 

How long they started club youth teams? Was it just recently or it started all along at the beginning of J-league?

 

This thread asks a good question. Why hasn't the US developed the same amount of skill as some Asian countries? We started taking the game seriously about the same time. At this point, I cannot imagine a US team filled with players who have the same amount of skill and creativity as the Japanese team. The defenders, midfielders and forwards all had excellent on the ball skill, creativity, and the ability to connect on short and long passes. Why is that?

But, even weirder, I'm fairly confident we would beat Columbia just the same.

 

This questions requires a complex answer, not a simple one:

1. Bruce Arena does not play attractive futbol, but to win
2. Our nation as a whole does not promote skill but rather tactics and winning above playing well. Alot of this comes from the big coaching influence of Germany & England in the youth, NSCAA, USSF, pros, etc. Germany & England play disgusting futbol. If it weren't for their cosmpolitan leagues, oh my you wouldn't pay to see that. Now try watching the MLS and the US National Teams. Asides from scoring goals, there is RARELY if ever anytime where you are awed with the skill. This is also a reason why Arena will not give Adu a shot. HE wants him to WIN things, he like most of our coaches in this nation favor ATHLETICSIM/SKILL/GETTING STUCK IN over skill, technique and creativity.
3. Athletes are given more chances than skillful players

AS FOR JAPAN:
1. Japan has ACTIVELY sought to associate their football both on a league and national team basis with the Brazilian style of play for a decade or more. They have very little English/German coaching influence. A much more LATIN appraoch to the game.
2. Their most skilled and creative players are encouraged, not their most athletic.
3. They have a reserve team system.
4. Their last two coaches have been Brazilian (Zico) & French (Troussier). The finest scouts & breeders of talent you can say. Bruce Arena has to be almost FORCED to use a talented player over his favorites.

There are many more reasons but those are the major ones.

 

why?

2 very important reasons!!

1. the j-league started before mls,

and

2. PROFESSIONAL soccer is a more important sport in japan than it is in the u.s.a.

also, please remember gentlemen, that we have come a long way in developing something else - an understanding of how the game is played. so much so that we have been beating mexico more than we used to, and they have more skill than we do!

 

I think, in most countries, children play a lot of pick up games on the streets and small play grounds, and that is where you develope flair, dribble skills. In the US, children play in a very structure ways.

Another by-product of playing on "the streets" is that you develop lots and lots of passion for the game.

 

I don't know about this, I played lots of pickup basketball in high school and I wasn't even on a team. It's a popularity thing and actually having someone to do it with.

Also, as someone astutely pointed out, we teach the game all wrong here at the youth levels. I have heard U10 coaches telling kids to 'pass the ball', 'Don't hold it too long', blah, blah, blah, blah. That is so English. If a kid doesn't practice dribbling and playing one-twos, guess what he won't be able to do when he gets older?

A lot of the posters are right---we need to open ourselves totally to the Latino style of play, minus that pizza eating one in southern Europe. If we're going Northern European we should go Dutch, but even they have problems finding creative players sometimes....

Just chill though, the better players are coming up as we speak, if we can get a few more of them to develop we might be able to use them in 2006.

 

One thing I've noticed from all other teams is a much better sense of spacing on the field than the U.S. has. Any thoughts there?

Spacing is an essential element of just about all team sports - basketball, hockey, lacrosse, etc.

I would expect it to not be such a glaringly obvious weakness for the U.S.

 

Since when is Convey a skill player? I hope the lovefest with this kid ends soon because I've yet to see anything special out of him.

 

I'll toss my vote in with the idea that our kids simply don't play with the ball enough. Go to any major soccer playing country in the world and those kids will have a ball at their feet from the time they learn to walk. You can't go anywhere without seeing a kid kicking around a ball. Years and years of several hours a day with the ball does amazing things for skill levels. Now, group together thousands and thousands of kids who all have this level of familiarity with the ball and the standouts are gonna be impressive.

Coaching helps greatly, yes. However, you have to consider that, especially at very young ages, kids just don't spend enough time with the ball in an organized environment, they MUST do more ball work in some way than a few hours a week at practice if they want to play with any degree of skill.

I think comparing the time spent playing and how that time is spent for kids in Japan and the US would be an interesting way to try to see if these factors are very different. Anybody know enough about Japan to say?

 

Japan's two most popular sports are Sumo and Baseball, and then Auto Racing fits in there somewhere, so they're a bit in the same boat as us. But I personally think we're better than they are. Yes they've had better results this tournament, but they've brought their very best players, and played in a significantly easier group than we have.

 

I agree with Voros in his estimation that we are further along than the Japanese. If you had the opportunity to see the Japan Argentina friendly last month you wouldn't be inclined to bang the Japan drum. They were horribly outclassed while fielding a team of J-Leaguers.

That said, Japanese tend to stress the idea of perfection of individual skill. The Korean striker Ahn noted after his season in the J-League that Japanese players have good technical skills while they tend to lack the ability for physical play ... which in many regards is the opposite of the Korean National Team and to some extent the US.

 

I wonder how much, as The Wanderer brought up, the structured youth soccer environment, with (youth, high school, college) coaches teaching conditioning first, positioning second, passing third, and dribbling fourth affects our NAT players.

I remember maybe one or two drills a week focusing on ball control, the rest of the time we ran, passed, learned to play as a unit, all that important stuff but very few one-on-one drills.

Righthalf is spot on with this as well - you learn dribbling skills on your own free time, because you have a passion for the game. Street 'ballers are a prime example of this.

 

Yes, but let's be fair, very few U10 teams have players showing the potential to be the next world-class player. Those who do tend not to discourage the player who is dribbling circles around opponents.

 

Awww poor Wanderer, blaming the nasty 'kick and rush' English for ruining U10 footballer.

Here's a hint, stop employing coaches who can't get a half decent job over here because they're crap.

Oh and English kids are generally told to "pass and move", if you want to know what that means then watch the second half of Turkey V Brazil today, it's what Turkey were doing.

 

Umm, in all due respect, i believe you are wrong...the point has been made the the JFA has been actively trying to emulate the Brazilain style of play. We have not, nor are we likely to in the foreseable future. So don;''t expect to see much change by the time MLS reaches it's 12 year (or wherever the J-League is currently). Too bad for us in my opinion. I've been to J-League games, to me they are more entertaining than the MLS and definately at a higher skill level.
-Secondly, I am not sure what you mean by "professionlism" as in the club, the system or the players? I think any MLS player will act as professional as any player in any other league.

 

I do not believe that the States should emulate the JFA and embrace the Brazilian style. The Rep. of Korea has taken a more "northern European" approach, if you will, with Hiddink as the architect of their program, and enjoyed success while playing entertaining football.

More importantly, the U.S. doesn't need to "import" any style. That's because all of the styles of world football are, quite literally, in the country's DNA.

The experience of the United States, an English speaking country with soccer hotbeds populated by Germans (St. Louis and Philly), Portuguese (Fall River), Italians and Scots-Irish (West Hudson and New York) and Hispanics (L.A. and D.C.), suggests that a hybrid style blended from all these strands would be most appropriate for us.

It worked for jazz and rock 'n' roll. Why not for football?

 

Never discount South Carolina teams.

 

Importing Brazilians

Japan also essentially imports brazilians to staff their manufacturing and otherwise shiitework jobs. I believe Japan has one of the largest populations of Brazilians outside of Brazil. We may, in fact, have more brazilians and 'creative' south americans than Japan, but they all live together there and it rubs off on the rest of the players in the youth systems. Also, I visited a japanese soccer school when I was at Japorea and I saw something totally different than what you see here. I saw little kids actually listening to their coaches. I saw coaches actually teaching their players how to be creative. I think our culture limits our ability to develop creative players and then to assemble the creative players we do have into a team. we'll keep getting better and we'll take all the glory one day. And we'll do it OUR WAY!

 

Its what we normally do, but we neglected the "move" part in this tournament. We had moments of it, but not enough.

This Brazilian/Latin flair oggling is getting annoying. There is more than one way to skin a cat, or in this case play soccer. The fact fact is that we played crap soccer by our own standards, as we play slowly, simply and staticly doomed us, not the players skill level.

 

I don't want to emulate anything Portugese. That country peaked in what?? 1520 AD?