Need more thinking players. We have plenty of physically gifted technical players. We have almost zero thoughtful players. Bradley is the closest thing we have and he is still learning. Ben lederman is getting it in la maSIA right now. God I hope he stays till he is at least 19. If he can stay there and become a professional 2022 could be awesome for the US with him at the age of 22...10 long years.
No. The athletes also turn into Landon Donovans and Geoff Camerons. There just isn't enough of them. Dwight Yorke and George Weah didn't have German resources backing them. In America it's unlikely either would have played soccer at an elite level.
We have really great physically gifted and technical players. As the leader of La Masia thinks the good football is here in US but the difference is thoughtful play. It is something that is missing.
i wasn't saying that was the problem, i was saying those are the kind of guys who (physically) could translate into soccer but that we aren't getting. Of course we have problems developing our players at a tactical level, but it's getting better, albeit slowly
Well, first of all, neither Yorke or Weah grew up in the US. If you compare each to the home prospects, you want to compare the US to the aforementioned players respective nations. If you compare them to the Germans, you compare their respective countries to Germany. I am comparing Germany to the US and the US eligible kids who grew up in Germany to the US eligible kids who grew up in the US. Second of all, while Donovan and Cameron are decent examples of athletic US prospects, they are not significant international stars with high transfer values - unlike the German starters and most of their backups - and Donovan's career owes a lot to the time he spent with Leverkusen in the late 90's anyway. Meanwhile, other super talented US athletes - Barrett, Franklin, Marshall, Sapong, Bunbury, Mapp, Arnaud, Wynne, Shea, Buddle, Bruin, Carr, Agudelo, Rogers, Findley - are nowhere that level and, even while one can expect a low percentage of talented athletes to acquire world class skills, the percentage of players acquiring world class skills in MLS is zero.
I wouldn't get to desperate about athletes. Mostly just because in the US we are used to looking at the "measurables" all the time. In soccer what trumps everything is technique and quickness of mind. You can have an athlete and a regular kid but if the athlete has never touched a ball yet there is no amount of training that will get him up to level with the other kid even ten years down the road. And, here's the kicker, the athlete may dominate at the u-9 level because he can run to the loose balls and kick pretty hard. The problem is ten years later he'll meet a foreign team which has no problems making quick passes around him and never loose the ball. In the end , the solution is to get the kids to practice skill very early on.
10,000 hours on the ball. I think you're right. But we're really team focused in a way that kind of hurts us for soccer. Our mental blueprint for team sports comes from American Football where it is important to have discipline and share the ball. Where in order to get ahead we need our athletes to turn into the guys that are able to keep the ball under duress and make accurate passes. Personally I think the accuracy of our passing is often overlooked, as in it's not always good enough.
we have players with skill and that are physical. we dont have players who can think on the field quickly enough to make use of those other two factors. beckham and henry have said many times...you have a physical and technical league that has no clue about tactical play. (well not no clue but is behind) this is the issue. a player who is 4 steps ahead. who knows how to defend without using their physical talents. just positioning themselves with the other 11 guys to cancel out the other team. these things we are behind in and when we catch up we will notice the physical abilities and technical abilities that our players already have.
Maybe our players would be a little better at thinking out there if they weren't being screamed instructions from the sidelines their entire youth career. IOW, it ain't the players that's the big problem, at least not at first.
I didn't learn a thing. Honestly, all he said was the kids get scouted and brought here and they try to build their mental strength and their work ethic. What's one thing a lot of coaches have said about USMNT players? They're industrious and have a never say die attitude. The guy goes on to say that you can't necessarily transplant a system and expect it to work. He also mentions there's many FCB training systems in the US. Not sure how many prospects they've created over the past decade but I don't remember anyone on the national team coming from a FCB affiliated system.
I guess it all depends on what those instructions are. If it's "boot it", it is probably not conducive to the players development. Out of curiosity, here's a list of the Gen Ad players. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Adidas#2012 Let's skip 2012 all together under the "too early to tell" category - the last 4 years of these "best and the brightest", you get 3-4 marginal NT prospects like Bruin, Shea and Gonzales out of 40+ prospects and that covers ages from ~ 19 to about 25. By comparison, the "gold standard" type rosters like Brazil have over a dozen international quality stars in that age group - Neymar, Leandro Damiao, Gabriel, Marcelo (yes, only 24), Rafael, Lucas Moura, Sandro, Oscar, Ganso, Pato, Philippe Coutinho, Bruni Uvini, Danilo, Romelu, Alex Teixeira, Douglas Costa, Luiz Adriano, Willian. Talk about "read'em and weep".
I think that's an oversimplification. Skills are acquired, for the most part, before a player even gets to college. Thats where your familiarity with the ball and the game are cultivated. Like any other learning enterprise (languages, mathematics, etc), the bulk of the conceptual and mechanical work is done when the brain is using its burgeoning resources to form synapses. We learn most efficiently when we are in our formative years. A major problem in the past has been that there is no soccer culture here. Soccer culture would include heavy television coverage of professional leagues, adequate collegiate and developmental support, heroes for children to imitate at the park, other children to play with at the park, etc. A 13-year old kid who has has never seen what a 4-3-3 is except for when his coach draws it on a board is going to be at a disadvantage compared to someone who has grown up watching European soccer and has a bit of context in which to visualize his role. He might even have a "hero of the 4-3-3" at his position who he can use to aspire to and imitate. The soccer culture is coming in America. It has grown steadily over the past 30 years. People who yearn for a tangible American style of play will get it when that soccer culture has become deep-set and reached some success.
I take it you guys are in America? I like that you guys have the resources to follow those exemplary players. When I was in the equivalent of an academy as a youth, we got our only education from our coaches. All of my coaches were from other countries (Brazil, Nigeria, Morocco, Czechloslovakia, Mexico, etc.). We got second-hand knowledge. You guys are blessed to have a world of information at your hands. Local Dallasites today can watch Garreth Bale in the morning and go watch Brek Shea in person in the evening. They can compare and contrast what similar players do, what they do in each league, which teams use which systems, etc. That wasn't possible 20 years ago.
I noticed a bunch of discussion about comparisons with the big 4 earlier, I'm going to do some back of the napkin math comparing soccer with football. Looking at college scholarships (and yes, I know these are the maximum numbers schools are allowed to have, some schools like the Ivy League don't offer any scholarships) 203 division 1 NCAA men's soccer programs * 9.9 scholarships per team = 2010 scholarships 120 FBS (aka 1-A) NCAA football programs * 85 scholarships per team = 10200 scholarships 122 FCS (aka I-AA) NCAA football programs * 63 scholarships per team = 7686 scholarships 17868 scholarships total division 1 football scholarships vs. 2010 soccer scholarships. Now let's look at the pros. NFL roster size 53 * 32 teams = 1696 total roster spots (the vast majority of which are Americans) MLS roster size 30 * 19 teams = 570 total roster spots (significant percentage are foreigners) There certainly is a lot more money and prestige currently in the NFL than MLS as some have argued here, but there's also just immensely more opportunities in football in this country period. There's a massive infrastructure that feeds players from pop warner to high school to college to the NFL. Obviously I'm hopefully about the soccer potential of the coming generation of Americans. The coming generation has more favorable cultural demographics towards soccer, can watch more soccer on TV than ever, has high youth soccer participation rates, and is coached by an older generation that actually has some experience with the game. But there still is way less opportunity here than there is for football. So it's no surprise that potential soccer players are choosing other sports, or that a lot of elite soccer players go to Europe or Mexico.
I think the opportunity is sufficient for the amount of top talent. I'm a teacher at a German elite sport school (no soccer, Hannover 96 works with another school). Many of our students take scholarships in the US; German or State Youth Champions in Track and Field, Swimming, Rowing, Judo,... One of my former students was a rather mediocre (at elite level) hurdle sprinter, until he quit intense training; he always used to play soccer as a second sport for Armina Hannover's youth teams, the second club in town, their first team plays in the 6th tier Landesliga. His second, just-for-fun-sport soccer got him a nice full college scholarship; it would have taken him years to break into Arminia's first team in the Landesliga, as he told me, and he wouldn't have gotten any money there. Former #20 of his age group in Germany in 100 m hurdles, something like #10.000 in his age group in soccer; that qualifies for a full scholarship. He said he's playing with guys from Mexico, Spain, England, Italy, the Netherlands and some Americans. One might argue in many ways; as long as the #10.000 from somewhere else seems better than homegrown talent, it's not a question of opportunity at the top level. Maybe it's important for the "play youth soccer to get a scholarship" group; but they won't become important for the NT anyway.
The "play youth soccer to get a scholarship" forms a not insignificant part of the US pool. Clint Dempsey(Tottenham), Steve Cherundolo(Hannover), Geoff Cameron(Stoke), Brad Guzan(Aston Villa) all attended college. The larger point is that the incentive for talented athletes to move out of soccer takes place before college.
There are certainly more opportunities in global soccer than in the NFL. There are probably a dozen or so jobs paying in excess of $2M per team (some pay a lot more), so that's about 500 high paying gigs in the NFL. There are way more than that in soccer. And that's without the need to get up to 320 lbs.
Yep! Folks forget that there's plenty of opportunity to make tons of money playing soccer for American kids, but just like the rest of the American sports they have to be among the better players in the best leagues in the world to do so.
A quick wiki search reveals Sweden has the 4th highest paying hockey league in the world, behind the NHL, the KHL and the Czech Extraliga (which, hey, is right next to Slovakia!) But I'll grant the premise that if you want the real big bucks, you've got to go abroad. But that's no different than athletes for any sport in Sweden, so it doesn't disadvantage hockey there. A player making the league minimum in the MLB, NBA, NHL or NFL players makes more than any American in MLS other than Landon Donovan. Obviously there is a global marketplace for soccer talent. And we can see by the number of players moving to Europe and Mexico that Americans are taking advantage of that. But my point was to highlight how there is an institutional and cultural push for most ambitious athletes in the United States to play for the big 4 (well, big 3 really, outside of New England and Minnesota). Thousands of more scholarships, as well as many more professional roster spots, doesn't just mean there's more incentive for players to play these sports. It also means that each and every year, those sports have a much larger pool of former pros and college athletes from which to draw potential coaches, for the highest levels all the way to youth teams. That's not to soccer's situation isn't improving. For instance, I'm excited that MLS is increasingly hiring coaches that played in the league (i.e. Heaps, Kreis, Marsch, Olsen). After all, the knowledge of one generation helps train the next. I really was just highlighting an area where the gap is still very wide. Exactly.