Perspective NT-eligible players who had gotten minutes in the Big 5 during the '09-'10 season. EPL: Dempsey, Donvan, Howard, Hahnemann, Holden, Freidel, Spector, Altidore, EJohnson B1: Cherundolo, Clark, Bradley, Williams, Zizzo, Jones Ligue 1: Bocanegra, Davies Stacked!! That '09 Confederations team was no fluke. And Gooch(Onyewu) was pulling up trees with a mid-major. Those injuries to Holden, Gooch, Davies, Jones, and EJohnson really hurt the '10 WC team. We had a nice path to the semis, too. Damn. So even today's numbers, encouraging they may be, don't make for an improvement over the best of the past. But Uruguayan-level numbers would.
2012-13 is still our peak (IMO), taking into account the quality of clubs and number of minutes played. Here's an equivalent list for that season of NT-eligible players who had gotten minutes in the Big 5. The bolded players all made at least 20 appearances in league play. EPL: Howard (Everton), Guzan (Aston Villa), Cameron (Stoke), Lichaj (Aston Villa), Edu (Stoke), Shea (Stoke), Dempsey (Tottenham) B1: Cherundolo (Hannover), Chandler (Nurnberg), Parkhurst (Augsburg), Williams (Hoffenheim), F. Johnson (Hoffenheim), Jones (Schalke) La Liga: Onyewu (Malaga) Serie A: Bradley (Roma) Plus Kljestan (Anderlecht) was a starter for a Champions League team, while Altidore (AZ) received Eredivisie Best XI honors that season.
we're acting like the majors and minors are strict exclusive hierarchies but in the spring the big league squad invites way more than the big league team to training. they usually bring in leading minor league prospects and free agents. though there may be some bias in favor of the incumbents, if someone hits .450 in spring training they either make the bigs immediately or are noted for use as the first injury or slump call up. since the leading minor leaguers get to play with the bigs, they can make their case on the "big league team" and be evaluated in controlled circumstances. if you don't invite the kids to camp, they have no chance. you pretend this is about merit but to me sealing off the team from II team guys or U20s/U19s or Euro starters or MLS surprises is anti-merit. you can justify it with the half-hearted pseudo-merit of "but look who he plays for," but that's evaluating his team, or his standing on that team, not the player himself. the player himself may be a high class talent simply being slow walked or stuck behind a world class star. JK took that approach. GB is more like some of you who are assuming inherent differences in being AAA. when the reality is that while there are some career filler types in AAA who are inferior, a 30 year old catcher kept there because he works well with young pitchers, for many that locus is a way station. also, we are kind of acting like all hierarchies are the same. a player stuck behind Neymar or Vela and left with the II team is not the same as a player stuck behind Taider in Montreal. to me the emphasis on club affiliation is a CYA conservative reflex against taking risks on talent. we routinely call in people who don't see a minute of time. who get cut. there is little real risk in bringing fresh faces into camp and comparing them directly to their competition. you do that and these abstracted concerns of how to compare x and y leagues or compare playing in the system of an elite club versus starting in MLS or the championship, evaporate. you compare the two of them on the same team against the same opponents. using club proxies is avoiding the comparison by deciding the result beforehand on paper. we did that historically for decades. reyna was with the NT fresh out of college before he signed a pro deal. etc. but as the pool professionalized over time we have veered towards rewarding career advancement. we have lost the basic institutional knowledge that some twellmans or coopers who do well in club don't turn out as NT guys. i get that in this era amateur morrises should be rare, but this club affiliation obsession is lazy and devalues the eye test. we now care so much about club names and who starts the eye test is secondary. trapp and brooks and bradley can suck all they want and ride starting jobs and reputation. we are basically all about rep now. to me the obsession with club teams tries to replace earning it in camp and games with analytics, and worse, provides an excuse to repeatedly ignore bad play "because in theory under a merit system this guy should be better." sorry but in yet another way -- like picking a formation ill suited to the players -- this is suboptimal in reality. this is let's play the formation we wish we could play with the players we think in theory on paper should be our best. what happened to practicality? this used to be a smart, pragmatic team. i want the 23 best players of any age who show best in games. you may think that should result from certain affiliations, but i want to actually see it. i think we've gotten better on the ball but dumber in about 20 ways in how we coach and select and organize and defend etc. this is 2020 professionalism with 1980s coaching. i am sure way back when that anyone on an elite team was thought hot sh*t. then we got enough professional players to actually test that, and discovered it wasn't true. we then played the guys who showed well, regardless. we learned from relaity. then we worked our way up the professional mountain and re-bought the old theories on elite teams. back to abstract worship. just like we don't need pragmatic formations any more, we have "graduated" to becoming more naive on selection as well.
and to be clear, while the snobs think that bradley is somehow an exception to their theory, "MLS," his continued starting in fact reflects abstraction winning out. he is living off of formerly being "Captain" and "Roma" just the same as people at "Wolfsburg" now are dining off it. it's the same "paper-based reputation" argument. to discover the paper lies you have to call in someone else and play them. i think yueill is overrated but a few minutes of his time basically definitively shows the rep theories are BS. but if the "rep" card decides it beforehand, and all i ever see is trapp and bradley, who knows? to me once a relatively prosaic player outshines my supposed veteran hero i shouldn't be saying, "i have my new man," but rather questioning how many other players i have overlooked. half the problem here is that it's not bradley is better than trapp, but yueill is better than bradley, but adams is better than yueill, but _____ is better than adams, and we keep doing that until we have the performance proven equivalents of pulisic around the field. i get you want to decide all this beforehand in some childish resume-measuring contest but decades of USMNT experience say that doesn't work. to be blunt, we have had enough big club failures where even getting into this "can we prove one club is better than another" sub-argument is kind of a waste of time. you're trying to prove a lower rung on a logic ladder when we already know the ladder practically doesn't deliver the best players. not unlike snobs re-backing players like yedlin who consistently screw up. what you have is a tool and that tool is best saved for players without NT track records which replace the proxies.
No, which is probably why some of us have been having a discussion in this thread that has little to nothing to do with the purpose of the thread.
I enjoyed the side conversations before the window opened but now I hope we can focus on actual news! maybe @IndividualEleven has some more updates...
I guess I would have preferred he venture out elsewhere in Europe, but was far from a slam dunk to have success most places because he fits the slower pace of the US well, and at least he'll be available for Olympic qualifying now. Heck, they should add him to January camp. So there are potential back doors back to Europe for him.
i am all for people trying europe at 18 but if you have 14 first team games in 4 years and are now 22, you are at risk of your career disappearing. to me if hyndman/zelalem/parks go all the way to age 25 perseverating then you will get one shot at MLS coming back and if it fails or the trial doesn't convince you are now USL bait or done in soccer. likewise, his U20 teammates are moving in to the NT and he got one chance and back to the wilderness.
I agree with this... it’s time for him to actually become a professional. He’s not developing anymore. He’s emerging into his prime years and if it’s not now, it’s never. I’d say if he comes in and dominates MLS... he’ll get other offers.
believe it is for Winter, although feels like they might only see Johnson as a short term solution. They have like 2 fullbacks who are currently unfit and might not be fit until like end of February/March. HSV has been linked with either loaning a fullback for Winter or if they get Johnson an already 32 year old to help out. supposedly Johnson wants out but the question is whether he wants to play any 2BL. so he's currently a candidate for HSV.
Tenorio and Stejskal are reporting that Parks will make a TAM-level salary with NYCFC: Parks, 22, spent last season on loan with NYCFC, where he played in 22 games with 14 starts. The U.S. international has signed a long-term contract to return to New York for the Cityzens. The deal will be above the 2019 targeted allocation money threshold. https://theathletic.com/1507395/202...oves-by-nycfc-portland-houston-atlanta-miami/ My understanding is that a TAM-level salary should be at least 500K? If so, then Parks and Hyndman have made comparable moves in their returns to MLS. I'd say Lletget is a comparable player to these two. He entered MLS in 2015 on a $110K salary, and even his new contract in 2018 only boosted that to $300K. Times have changed in MLS.
I have never claimed I have any special knowledge about player development. The majority of my views are based on common sense. What have stated is that you have proved that you are clueless. MLS hasnt proven that they know what they are doing and their focus has consistently been on creating perceptions that far outpace their actual accomplishments. This is why I am skeptical. The fact that the process takes so long is why I think it is imperative that they get it right now or we will be in the same spot 5 to 10 years from now. My lack of knowledge (and lack of success of MLS) is why advocate looking for people who have a track record developing players to learn. 3 to 5? Really? Did you actually read the articles you posted? This is iteration is complety youth coaches and technical directors. Why are you just counting the first team? Why are you not including the USL teams and academies. If you do that, the numbers increase by factor of 3. Take NYRB for example... 4 first team coaches, 3 USL coaches, 4 academy coaches and 1 technical director (this number seems low as I'd assume there are more than 4 teams from u13 to u19 and also would think they have assistant coaches). So I would think 2 out of 12+ in six years isnt great progress. In another 12 years, half of the coaches will have gone through the program. I'd guess the majority of coaches at French clubs have gone through their federations training. This also isnt just first division coaches, but down many levels. Ledezma was coached by Ruud Van Nistelrooy with PSVs u19s. Of course players dont always make the best coaches, but he at least grew up in that system. Also, before getting that job, he apprenticed at PSV to finish his UEFA Pro License, was the Netherlands assistant under Guus Hiddink for two years, spent a couple years as the forwards coach of multiple youth teams before taking over as head coach of the u19s. These are types of coaches that are our competition. Does the RSL u19 coach having training anywhere close to that? It isnt vagaries. It is incredibly obvious to anyone paying attention. How do you not understand what it is? The players spell it out with every interview they give. Those kids got so many things from that experience and MLS clubs should be attempting to replicate it many times over. One of the most important things these kids got was exposure to the culture. What do Pulisic and Mckennie attribute the most important contributor to their success? Being exposed to the culture at a young age? What is the impact? It changed their views of the game. In their case, they were 10 or younger and they kept pace with the competition around the world. Where as the good, but flawed FCD program as enabled 18 year olds to find out how far they behind. Every academy team should have should be sending groups of kids abroad to teams who philosophies match there own. The kids should be getting this experience at 12 or younger and have additional opportunities if they continue to grow as expected.
Sounds like MLS is enabling a player to not need to improve an apparent deficiency. Come back to MLS and you wont have to fight to adapt to the faster pace while you make good money and become soft.
You mean a player transferring permanently from Europe to MLS in their 20s and then receiving offers to return to Europe later down the line? It's happened every now and then: Brian McBride, Brad Friedel, Joe-Max Moore, Cory Gibbs, Landon Donovan, Stuart Holden, Giancarlo Gonzalez, Carlos Gruzeo, Zach Steffen.
Obviously, in most of those cases though, national team performances had a lot to do with getting those offers to return and it's not always easy to isolate what role their MLS performances played in that.
I think 2019 shows that loans for American players back to MLS can be a high risk/high reward situation. 3 notable American players entered MLS on loan in 2019 - Keaton Parks, Emerson Hyndman, and Kenny Saief. Parks and Hyndman had successful enough loans with NYCFC and Atlanta for the clubs to sign them to contracts, while Saief disappeared after a promising early start due to injuries/acrimony and is in limbo back at Anderlecht. One factor that may have hurt Saief - Cincinnati was paying his full salary with the loan (750K for half a season), so when things went catastrophically wrong they cast him off quickly. Meanwhile, Atlanta and NYCFC must have split costs with the parent clubs, because Hyndman ($180K for half a season) and Parks ($165K) were smaller MLS salary hits. Hyndman starts at $800K and Parks at least $500K in their new contracts. I'm curious how their new salaries compare to Bournemouth and Benfica. Even if it's still a pay cut, these numbers are much more competitive from a league perspective than a decade ago. 500K is a significant number because I estimate that only 30 or so US players earned that salary last season in MLS, even counting players like Meram and Alonso. All eligible players at this level have at least 1 US cap. My takeaway is that there is hope for US players who go the academy route, even if they fall just short of full professional breakthroughs with big European clubs. They can look at Hyndman and Parks and see that MLS is a suitable second option if things go wrong. Additionally, they can look at Lletget and see that there is a path to the US national team.
i just want to note (with zero interest in any surrounding discussion/argument) that saief's inability to play due to injury was probably a factor as well...
Saief was injured. But then he was healthy again and the interim manager preferred other players. I posted major snippets of this Athletic article back in June 2019 in the Saief YA thread. Kenny Saief didn’t understand. Going into FCC’s game at Orlando City [on May 19], the team was without midfielders Roland Lamah, Allan Cruz, Leonardo Bertone and Fatai Alashe because of injuries or, in Lamah’s case, a family issue. The Anderlecht loanee had been dealing with some tightness in his hamstring that he attributed to not being used to so many flights, particularly during a three-game road trip earlier this month. However, Saief trained the entire week leading up to that Orlando match and said he feels fit enough to be contributing more regularly. Yet still, Saief was on the bench to open the game. FC Cincinnati ended up crashing to a 5-1 loss, and Saief believes he could have done more to help. He entered the game in the 65th minute, by which time the team was already down three goals. It wasn’t an isolated incident; Saief hasn’t played more than those 25 minutes over the past two games since interim coach Yoann Damet replaced Alan Koch. “I felt the past week I trained every day, which (some of) the other guys didn’t train the full days, and it’s not fair,” Saief said. “I think the staff should have let me start above them, but I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Whoever plays we should support them.” ... Asked specifically why Saief didn’t start Sunday, Damet indicated he’s just not seeing what he needs to out of the player. “We are managing the team,” Damet said. “ I have some priorities too in terms of the way I want to play in terms of the mentality of the team, in terms of what I’m looking for in and out of possession. So that’s part of the reason he didn’t start last week.” Saief started off his MLS tenure well despite joining FCC the week after the season opener. He assisted Lamah’s late equalizer to secure a 1-1 draw at Atlanta in his debut off the bench the week he joined, and also had a goal and an assist in a 2-0 win at New England on March 24. But since then, FCC has struggled while going 1-7-1 and Saief has obviously grown frustrated with the results, displaying negative body language on the field and all but confirming his feelings in comments to the media. He didn’t play at all in Damet’s first game as acting manager, a 2-1 win over Montreal on May 11. “That’s the coaches’ decision,” Saief said when asked if there are other reasons besides fitness as to why he isn’t playing as much. “I will try to work hard and hopefully I will play the next game.” https://theathletic.com/994600/2019...ted-by-lack-of-starts-amid-cincinnatis-slide/ Clearly, Cincinnati had made the decision to cut ties with Saief by then.
#DCU have rejected an initial bid for Russell Canouse from 2. Bundesliga side Dynamo Dresden, sources tell me. I spoke with Canouse on Sunday. He's eager to prove himself abroad. His comments and many more details on the offer are @TheAthleticSCCR: https://t.co/Hy7YIAEDd3— Pablo Iglesias Maurer (@MLSist) January 6, 2020 Hmm
Since I keep talking about MLS and player salaries, Maurer notes that Canouse is on a club-friendly 250K a year deal, which is "through the next season" with a club option. If DC United continues to use Canouse as a fullback, then I think he should aim to transfer because (1) fullbacks don't get paid in MLS and (2) it's difficult to see a path to the national team at fullback.