Again, I didn't say that. I used the wording of title of this thread. I said MLS hadn't created players that were clearly better than players like Ramos and Reyna. The players I can see an argument for being clearly better than them that have a link to MLS are Donovan, Dempsey, Altidore, and Bradley. All of them improved and had influences outside MLS. All of them except Dempsey had or would had offers abroad by the time they were 18. I'd guess Donovan developed at least as much if not more in his 25ish games with Leverkusen II as Bradley did in his 30ish and Altidores 40ish games with the metrostars/Red Bulls. Was it the popularity of soccer that MLS created or that of world cups or father who was a coach or culture of the community they grew up in. I guess I'm a little skeptical of how much the popularity of MLS has done improve the quality of players entering the league (I think that is the argument). If it was a huge contributor, why would all of our top youth players heading abroad as soon as they can? Why in the past has every player besides LD and Pope left as soon as they can? The popularity of the World Cup well exceeds MLS and I think with the access, a lot of kids spend more time watching European club games instead. It will be interesting to see what happens and how Americans respond to Pulisic if he continues on the trajectory he is on. I think it might be shocking how "popular" he becomes and mainstream it becomes. Most of our top youth talents now and a majority of our top talents in the past are due to coming from soccer families. What impact has MLS had on guys like Pulisic, Perez, and Akale? Pulisic's parents were college/MINOR league professional players. Akale's dad is a coach and neither grew up in an MLS market. Perez is a little different as he spent some time with the Galaxy, but most of it came from the family. What about Hyndman? He trained as a young teenager with Dallas, but did that have some significant impact on his development. The point being this (perceived) jump we are seeing in youth talent is from soccer being embedded in families in their second or third generation. We hopefully will see more in the future where MLS was really behind it, but at this point it is limited. Supposedly Ferreira's kid is quite talented... That would be something tangible to point at, like Nagbe and Manneh, where MLS would clearly be responsible. That would be extremely positive and might make the answer to a thread in 5 to 10 years a unanimous yes.
If one looks at the 1st Rd picks over the years, MLS development is an unmitigated disaster. The Tchermans took a few hundred kids born to the US servicemen and local women and developed half of the US national team out of them. MLS signs hundreds of kids each year and "develops" Gyazi Zardes.
I guess we'll respectfully disagree. I just think you're jumping through hoops trying to separate any player of quality from MLS. Soccer and USMNT just benefits with the continued existence of MLS. They can and will do better with youth development.
Let's not forget the USA was the first country to have an organized soccer cup outside the British Islands. We were one of the original soccer powers at the start of the 20th century. Making #3 in the 1930 World Cup was no accident. Doing well is sort of like reclaiming our birth right. We were playing soccer when most of today's powers had not discovered the sport yet.
A good chunk of the players that went to Europe got noticed through MLS. The dip in form now is mostly due a certain Euro coach that is the worst we've had in decades. The big thing on the negative side is that England - the most natural stepping stone for US players based on language and culture got a lot less accessible. The money the started to flow into the EPL allowed them to buy the best from around the world. More importantly England tightened up rules so players that once could easily get in on appeals were shut out. The other factor is that player development takes places largely before kids are even teens. Messi went to Barca as a young teen because he was a special player. He didn't become a special player because he went to Barcelona as a young teen. The lack of top end quality coming out of MLS is primarily a function of what has gone into MLS. Now would Freddy Adu have done better outside of MLS. Probably. But, probably not that much better. Freddy was that same height and weight at 25 as he was at 14. So while the hype train wouldn't have existed, his maturity advantage would have dissipated no matter whose academy he ended up in.
Speaking of LigaMX - it has been taking some of you our best Mexican American players and has about a team or two playing in their first or second divisions. And these are just the kids that have made it. For every that that appears on Yanks-abroad there about 5 others that have gone and never made it. I haven't noticed very many of these kids being transformed into world class players coming out of there have you?
Well stated. One other thing that many have missed is how the league has helped develop the coaching. Prior to MLS Arena was a college coach. Bradley was a college coach. Through MLS, both these guys developed into coaches far superior than our current clown. Younger coaches like Kries, Berhalter, Porter, Marsch, Pareja. You have a guy like Jeff Cook, with UEFA Pro License going from coaching college kids to U16 and young pro's at Bethlehem. While most of the heavy lifting is done by the time a kid is a teen, it helps to have people polishing them that know what they are doing. Those that don't understand the importance of this are clueless.
Ask yourself how does it compare to NCAA? Well without the NCAA we'd have virtually no players in the 90's. Your blinded by your bias into making incredibly stupid arguments.
NCAA is worse for the USMNT than MLS. Tons and tons worse because, for the most part, it produces 23 year old ne'er-do-wells. The real pros system is pretty much identical everywhere across the globe. Kids go to a youth academy where they're given instruction on how to become pros. Then, there's a winnowing process where a small percentage of the best players passes from U-15 to U-17 to U-19. At U-19, there are probably about 10% of the U-15's left. The academies teach five to six days per week, with games on a weekend. The further up the chain a prospect evolves, the more intense his competition gets. In the US, the system in other major sports is similar but takes place via high schools and then NCAA. Baseball and hockey also have minor leagues (the NHL and the NBA also scout in Europe). MLS, technically speaking, follows the same model as everyone else. The devil, as Ross Perot was fond of saying, is in the detail. The European and South American academies instill a certain level of the basic skill. MLS fails to do so. This failure is evident through the repeatedly dismal performances of the US U-17, U-20 and U-23 teams. In an occasional outlier, these teams get a sprinkling of the foreign born and/or foreign trained starlets and outperform its average. Strip any US teams of any talent brought up/trained outside of the US and the national team will sink to the level below of what it was in 1994. And, if you expect anything more from the Wondolowski, Zusi, Rimando type of talent, look no further than the CONCACAF Champions League, where the bloated MLS squads get destroyed by the far more prudently built and smartly coached Mexicans. So, add up the failures of the youth teams and failures MLS clubs and you get a very dismal overall picture. You can deny it or, like top MLS brass, blame these continuous CCL and U-17/20/23 debacles on Klinsmann but, by doing so, you will absolve the blame from where it really belongs.
Some players left for competition but most leave for money and opportunity. When money got pretty good many came back. Europe is different than a decade ago. The money has got a lot bigger and the difference between the haves and the have nots has increased as well. Reyna, Obrien and Cherundolo are really the two top flight players with no real ties to MLS (save guys that started in Europe like Dooley). That's about it really.
The argument isn't whether a bunch of professionally trained UEFA licensed coaches would do a better job of coaching US players than our existing coaches. It is instead whether we would be better off with or without our existing coaches and league. Similarly, Africa would be better off if they had a bunch of colleges system like the US. Your argument is because their education systems aren't as good, they would be better off without what they have. Its a moronic position. Similarly, without the NCAA as flawed as it is, US doesn't have any real national team players in the 90's that aren't from outside the US. That is the reality and only someone without a clue would argue otherwise.
I thought it was common knowledge Mexican teams generally have larger wage budgets than MLS teams especially when you account for extreme outliers. Our Youth players that come from liga mex are also pretty mediocre. Your basically arguing that having a larger professional soccer playing pool of players is bad for the national team. I think there is a weak speculative argument that MLS may have hurt the team in the short term, but I don't get how anyone doesn't see that USMNT path to breaking into an elite team is through MLS not sucking at developing players. Outsourcing player development won't produce enough players to be elite. *Note not a single eastern european team advanced out of the group stages in 2014.
I tend to lean towards the idea soccer in general is coming far more popular, or at least serious compared to the orange slice culture and it's in large part due to all the high level soccer on tv. I compare it to the NBA and basketball in general and its rise globally. More and more grow up dreaming of playing in the NBA, just as more and more Americans grow up dreaming of playing in top Euro leagues. The current mid to late 20s generation is different than the up and coming generation where the former lacks both quality and the ambition to play overseas compared to this next generation. And worryingly for MLS but positively for our NT program, our elite young talent is intent of bypassing the league altogether in increasing numbers. They want to go to the "big time". Just considering our 16-19 yr old talent who's signed overseas, Hyndman, De La Torre, Barbir, Gooch, Akale, Perez, Haji, Olosunde, Lennon, Zelalem, Fossey, Doughty, Sonora, Canouse, Gruno, Parfitt, Obinwa, among others then we have guys like Carleton and Taitague who are buying time until heading abroad, among others, it's clear more and more are gunning for Europe ASAP. And Pulisic is only going to increase that as more kids will want to be the next Pulisic as well as Europe is going to scout the US even more looking for the next Pulisic. We're still an untapped market. BTW, as mentioned before, MLS' system is going to increasingly hurt its ability to sign our top young talents due to the player movement restrictions and the unwillingness to play youth and and develop the more creative types instead of the athletic/physical types. Pulisic I'd hope will make MLS look inward and enact changes as if he didn't go abroad, his option would be to sign as a HG for Philly or go to college. The former likely sees him on loan to some crap USL team or rotting on the bench for Philly and the latter sucks as an option too. And that system is anti-development. It's cool of you're a Miazga who lives near NYRB or Acosta in the Dallas area but that cuts out the options for many/most. One of the most concerning issues for this thread and topic is MLS' system is anti-development. Single entity, anti-development. Player movement controls, anti-development. The league philosophy of picking athletes/physicality over creativity/skill, anti-development. Top heavy DP model, anti-development and reeks havoc on any semblance of balance throughout rosters which kills the system and tempo you can deploy. Hell, MLS even handpicks which NCAA underclassmen are draft eligible, which also is anti-development. The lack of tiers within MLS where everyone just has to make the playoffs to make a Cup run, which negates inter-league loans is also anti-development. There is no "moving up" the MLS tiers to a bigger club. There is no Fabian impressing as Hoffenheim and getting a move to Gladbach or a Yedlin loan to a low table Sunderland element in MLS. None of that is to say we won't see successes but the system at large does far less for this landscape than it should/could.
The above is all meaningless in this "debate"... we are talking about the MNT... not the youth National Teams. This statement is missing the point, and impossible to prove. The question is... "After 20 years has MLS made the USMNT better?" There are many ways MLS can help, and one of the ways it can help is by exposing talent to the Euro clubs... so the young talent can be "trained Outside the US". There are countless players that have gone through MLS to Europe. This is not a knock against MLS this is a net positive of MLS helping the USMNT. All these players have benefited from MLS to help make the leap to Euro... Clint Mathis Jeff Agoos Josh Wolff Demarcus Beasley Tonny Sanneh Tim Howard Carlos Bocanegra Clint Dempsey Eddie Johnson Ben Olsen Jonathan Spector (Played youth with Chicago Fire) Michael Bradley Clint Dempsey Herculez Gomez (spent time in Mexico) Stuart Holden (spent some time as a youth in Euro, but did not play senior game until MLS) Jonathan Bornstein (in Mexico now) Ricardo Clark Jozy Altidore Brad Guzan Maurice Edu Robbie Findley Clarence Goodson Marcus Hahnemann Deandre Yedlin Omar Gonzalez (in Mexico now) Geoff Cameron Emerson Hyndman (spent some youth time in MLS) Perry Kitchen Matt Miazga Paul Arriola (in Mexico now) Eric Palmer Brown These guys were MLS lifers... Pablo Mastroeni (MLS lifer) Eddie Pope (MLS lifer) Brian Ching (MLS lifer) Jimmy Conrad (MLS lifer) Landon Donovan (Basically a MLS lifer) These guys are currently in MLS... Danny Acosta Steve Birnbaum Gyasi Zardes Darlington Nagbe Matt Besler Kyle Beckerman Chris Wondolowski Graham Zusi Other players will skip MLS altogether... there are lots of youth guys doing this very thing. Both paths to becoming a professional can help the USMNT. Europe will work well for some: Pulisic and Ruben, and MLS will work well for others: Miazga or Nagbe. And we went over this already, It took a MLS team to win this thing (the Cup at least) Liga MX did not start taking the MLS seriously in this tourney until the past 4 or 5 years. Liga MX use to play their second teams against MLS... they don't anymore. Prior to MLS the US soccer structure never came close to winning this thing (admittedly, I did not look at the results prior to 1985.)
Some good stuff in here on our development shortcomings. http://www.pennlive.com/sports/index.ssf/2016/06/christian_pulisic_us_soccer.html
Repeating the obvious...MLS has improved the size of our talent pool. MLS has also raised the given skill level of our crappiest USMNT player at any given time. The weakest link on the current team is improved in comparison to the 1998 WQ team for example. We shall refer to this as the (Mike) Burns Quotient. We haven't really had any high quality players develop at the offense impact positions (FWD, AM, LW, RW) in several years. We have had quality players but not high quality players. IMO the Beckham rule may have been good financially for MLS, and necessary as a condition for massive league expansion. But I think that the Beckham rule may have a long term negative effect on the national team. Most of the foreigners brought into MLS seem to play the attacking positions listed above. This decreases the options for the USA coach. Of course Klinsmann is a eurosnob anyway so it really doesn't matter with him. But he won 't always be our coach. We need to realize that WC 2026 is only 10 years away and it we host it and want to make an impact some fundamental changes need to occur in MLS. If I were commissioner, I would institute a "line rule." The means that every line or position group on the field (forward line, midfield line, defensive line) can only have one foreigner per positon group at any given time. The remaining players would have to be eligible to play for the USMNT. The exception would be any team based in Canada. They could have Canada nationals instead of US citizens if they so choose. It will never happen. The level of play will dip initially. Long term it would help the USMNT though.
More on our landscape/development issues. https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...rsity-problem-world-football?CMP=share_btn_tw Glad more and more are talking about it. The MLS backed media won't touch it.
That's fine. I wouldnt call it jumping through, but we can agree to disagree on that as well. I'd say I'm trying understand when and where MLS is good at helping develop players. So some have observed players plateauing after a couple years (I would agree), while some players have seemed to take decent size jumps after going abroad. The league was an opportunity for physically mature teenagers like Altidore and Bradley, but some smaller guys got much less playing time. Even Donovan seemed to benefit from loan spells. Yes, they do and will continue to benefit. I believe so as well.
How do little kids in Germany or Brazil or Spain start playing organized soccer at age 5 or 6? I can't believe every little kid league is run from a wealthy corporation. I think we all know that popularity of the professional game in small geographical countries in Europe cover a lot of the map of potential players who subsidize much of it, but it can't be all of it. The US just doesn't have the reach of rich professional clubs who can cover the entire population of little kids who want to play. MLS can but most 2nd and third division clubs have to watch every penny just to field a first team and can't worry about fielding a reserve, U21, U19, U17.............U8. The money has to come from somewhere. This is why its so important to have well run financially viable 2nd and 3rd division clubs in smaller towns which cover the entire geography of the US who can spend money on free play for little kids based on skill and quality and not just the ability to pay. We don't have financially viable clubs beyond 25-30 in our entire country. How does Pro/Rel fix that? It doesn't. All it does is potentially falsely prop up a team that has no right to play in MLS the ability to do so for a season. The game hasn't organically reached its tentacles far enough throughout the country to now link them all together. Just not yet. The infrastructure and money spent between teams and leagues are just not close. The reason why the FA started was an even playing field of many amateur teams in close proximity wanted to compete. That's not the case in the US and we can't go back. Sorry but that train has left the station and left some behind.
All of those things matter to some extent. That is what some folks are arguing has been an offset to some of its positives. We're the guys that came back in 96 better off, the same or worse? If a mcbride had stayed in Europe and become successful would that have opened up doors for players sooner? What about Altidore and Bradley or Besler and Zusi? That's three and would have probably been four if not for Davies accident and think that the number will be double or triple that in 5 years.
by the way - and this may have already been noted, by I sure as hell can't be arsed to look - to those who have blindly asserted that having a professional league is better than not having a profession league, regardless of its quality, could you please explain why having the NASL around during the 70s did the square route of fuckall for our national team?
Fair point... I'd throw out that it did probably have an influence on some of the players on national team players in the 90s. I'm hoping we are starting to see a similar thing with kids coming up now.
A point often ignored by the extremely pro-MLS legion is that strength of league and quality of development are two entirely different things. Many argue a better MLS means a better NT and better players. It's simply not true. Our best WC squad ever came when MLS was complete shit. What lends to that is much of the improvement of MLS comes from foreign imports and MLS leans more towards the EPL than the Bund or Ligue 1 or Ered as it's not developing much talent itself. Doesn't really know how either given the high rate of stalling out we see. In the end, I don't care much how good MLS is or how high it ranks. I'd much prefer a concentration on development and better coaching and hit a ceiling of around 10th globally and pump out African/South American type talent and sell them overseas to continue climbing rather than pumping so many resources into foreigners. The system right now pushes elite talents overseas while reserving much of the financial resources for foreigners while skimping on coaching. That is not a blueprint for a good development league.