I have a few general thoughts on the US Youth Soccer player identification and development process. I speak from working 10 years as a coach in club soccer, and 4 years as Director of our local soccer club forming and managing ~60 travel soccer teams. 1. Agree that this is pay-to-play. There's a lot to unpack here, but one example is that we had a bunch of refugees who were really good players come to tryouts. A local community member who recognized their potential and wanted them to have an opportunity to develop and play, and also assimilate into our community - paid their tryout registration fees. At that point, I was faced with a difficult dilemma, I knew that many of these refugees likely couldn't cover the $1500-2500 fees (which are relatively low compared to development academies) to play, but I refused to let whether they could pay be a deciding factor where they were placed on a team. I got a lot of upset parents who felt their kids or kids of friends were being cut from teams for these refugees. 2. Parents are a huge issue. Aside from instances above, the general problem I found is that parents seek for kids to be "elite" in something, so they choose a sport and force the kids to paly it. They don't let kids try or play multiple sports, forcing their kids to choose a single sport to play at the age of 9-12. Which is somewhere between cruel and stupid. 3. Training wise, the biggest general issue I see that current training methods don't encourage or reward creativity. Teams and/or clubs push players to develop and traing a VERY specific way to ensure their "product" meets a communicated desired outcome, but that often reduces or even eliminates the ability for kids to develop problem-solving skills in fast-changing and dynamic situations. Our club tried to mitigate this and called this "coaching by joystick." What inspired our club to think differently how we train was when we had some extra turf time become available, and our Dir of Coaching just threw a ball out on the field and told the kids (ages 9-12) to set up the game and play. They literally had no idea how to set the game or divide teams since they were so conditioned to having their coaches and trainers do that for them. Sad, but all too common. You just don't see neighborhood kids just "playing" anymore, everything is highly structured.
Imo all kids regardless of position should be doing technical work with both feet from day dot people are so obsessed with winning youth tournaments and games they forget about the development of the players
yeah - I used to care deeply about the national team, follow all the youth squads, and have various theories and ideas about why we aren't where we "should" be. I kinda gave up on all that. I watch the matches, hope for the best, expect the worst, but won't allow myself to get sucked in. I go back to '90 - watched every game of that WC that was on TV (commercials and all) but I'm not as emotionally invested in internationals the way I used to be. My preference is to watch matches that I have no rooting interest in - just enjoy the competition and the sport of it. Maybe it's a coping mechanism? EDIT - I will say, I see a lot of parallels in the suburbad, "travel/elite" programs between soccer and baseball. I played baseball at a decently high level until I was 21, so it's a world I know. When my friends and coworkers ask me for advice helping their boys navigate youth baseball and which travel organization or coaches in the area are the best, I always default to the fact there are hundreds if not thousands of kids the same age right now in the dominican republic or venezuela or panama playing baseball on a dirt field with hand-me-down equipment - they don't pay thousands of dollars a year for "elite" coaching clinics or travel to tournaments 10 months out of the year. They play baseball every day - that's it. Ok . . . not sure where I was going with that, but I wrote it, so I'm gonna post it,
Great insights. The one that I'm most familiar with is #2 and I have a bit of a pet peeve about. It's not only the parents who try to force the kids to specialize early in a single sport, it's the coaches. My daughter was a competitive swimmer from age 9 to 22... she just "retired" last month (or so we think) having graduated from college. Most of her swimming was done with our local club team and the coach really discouraged them doing any other sport, during the 10 month season. I really really disagreed with this and tried to encourage her to do other sports. But then again I was not driven for her to become an elite swimmer, and none of us really felt that was in the cards. Ultimately my encouragement failed and she became a one-sport girl, with the exception of occasional running & biking... for recreation/fitness. Wenger was a big big fan of #3 (creative problem-solving) and I wonder what he would say about #2. Would he believe in multi-sport prodigies, or would he feel that you have to start early and dedicate to footy?
I think playing multilpe sports can give you unique ways to think about space and 1v1 play. Hockey was my first sport and its one of the reasons I used to force my Dad to help me learn to cross with both feet once I started playing left wing in football. To this day I still conceptualize wing play in football through the lens of wing play in Hockey. But yeah the application problems were prevelant in the 90s and 00s when I was playing youth football as was the pay to play. I was the beneficiary of that as when things were problematic at my club he drove me the next city over to tryout. But, most of our expat British coaches wanted highly vertical, wing focused football with as few touches in our half as possible and wingers carrying the ball over the halfway line, which suited us as most of us played Hockey first. I still remember the drills actually. It wasn't until I had a Ukrainian coach at 15 that I learned anything about the game that would resemble to the Wenger/Pep philosphy of ball retentionn, technical terms or technical work.
I’m not really sure where I should start, so I’ll start at the beginning, I started coaching competitive soccer teams before youth sports leagues started expanding their seasons. Soccer and football were in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring. I started with boys and I always had baseball players on my roster, so I never started training until July. The energy level when we started training again was always high, they were excited to be back. I’m not sure who started expanding their seasons first, forcing kids to choose one sport, but I think it was primarily coach driven. I’m sure some coaches truly believed that kids had a better chance to succeed at a sport if they played essentially year round and they sold parents on this vision, but especially in soccer and I assume in other sports as well, there are what I refer to as “gypsy coaches”, coaches who make their livings solely by coaching youth teams. So there is a financial incentive for them to push year round sports. I spent the last two thirds of my coaching career coaching girls teams. They are much more likely than the boys to play multiple sports. I had volleyball, basketball, and lacrosse players on my teams, but the push for year round soccer for them is nearly as great as it is for the boys. I can vouch from personnel experience that we are burning some of these players out. I coached my oldest daughter in her first year of competitive soccer and then turned her over to other coaches. By the time she entered high school her club team was playing playing 9 months a year, only pausing for the high school season. She was good enough that she played four years of varsity soccer in high school, so in those four years she was playing 50 to 60 games a year, something most pros don’t do. By the time she got to college, she was burned out and didn’t play. Re training methods that encourage creativity, I devoted a third of nearly every training session to games, small sided games, keep away games, one or two touch games, shooting games or games whose rules rewarded combination play.
I'll add that our local soccer club also promoted that we allowed for multi-sport athletes. Here in MN our High school soccer is in the fall (Aug - early Oct) and spring/summer. (Mar-early July). So we communicated that we expected >80% attendance during those seasons. So sports like Baseball are difficult to do since it runs simultaneously to spring/summer soccer here. Since winters are pretty cold here, and indoor domes are relatively new over the last 1-2 decades, hockey, basketball, and wrestling have always been high participation sports from Nov. into early spring. Our soccer club teams train almost year around, but we only asked asked for ~50% participation for multi-sport athletes during the winter months. As a coach and director, a high percentage of our best soccer players were multi-sport athletes. I don't think that's a coincidence. FWIW, multi-sport athletes also tended to be the most coachable players on teams I coached as well.
As an addendum, talking about which players are the most coachable, I found girls much more coachable than boys. Even in game situations you could ask them to try a new skill and they’d generally give it their best shot, with boys sometimes I wouldn’t see it until the next year.
Age can certainly be a factor, but generally speaking I'd agree that girls are far more coachable than boys.
Welp, I tipped a Turkey upset. Went for a 2-1 win. Least I got the amount of goals scored in the match correct.
The US has a ********ed up version of capitalism driving youth development. The parents that have decently talented kids and the money to pay coaches end up on the field. You have to have both to get seen at these costly travel tournaments. That’s why it is still very much a middle class sport. The parents are driving the demand for these tournaments with their most realistic target being a college scholarship somewhere.* If we had elite clubs driving the process, it would looks like Spain, Germany, etc. and the clubs would the the ones demanding talented players and the player’s talent would be all that mattered rather than the kid’s ability to pay $1000/season. Just compare it to prep basketball and football. The private schools/elite schools are figuring out how to get the talented kids to their schools. The next step, colleges, do the same. Then the pro teams fight for the best college talent. At each level, the institution invests in the talent to make their organization better and more profitable. Soccer in the US is bottom up where parents pay more to get their kids into better travel programs but a coach can’t make a kid faster and jump higher than the other kids with more natural talent. That is my rant and why I won’t be pushing my daughter into travel soccer. If she’s good enough, someone will pay for her to do it. I’m also enjoying a gorgeous view of Capitol Reef National Park out of my hotel window, so I have to ruin the good time by ranting on the internet like Reese Bobby would. * putting those travel soccer expenses into an S&P 500 for 13 years will probably yield a bigger college payoff, TBH.
It’s more than just soccer paying their youth coaches and traveling to expensive tournaments. All the year round youth sports programs a very expensive. Unfortunately, at least in soccer, college coaches are complicit in this too. They don’t scout high school games, they scout youth tournaments and Olympic Development Programs, which are fed by competitive youth clubs. Certainly on average you will get a better return investing in the S&P 500. Its the rare kid that gets a full ride and even in big programs as many as half or more might not even play in college.
athletic running an article on how sneijder thinks donyell malen could become the breakout star for the dutch team this euro . . . . ouch, athletic. why do you have to hurt me like that?
Italy were amazing love insigne and the left back combination they can win the lot imo Mancini has changed the way his team Plays and it looks great
I thought Jon Champion and Taylor Twellman did a great job with the Italy Turkey match, and will be doing the Belgium match later today.