actually it’s probably bill belichek — he’s a huge lacrosse fan. And likely a closet bigsoccer poster (haha).
Amen! With one exception, I would guess that the top 10 players I ever coached (High school Girls and U 19 travel girls), were multi-sport athletes. And I started coaching in an era, when a decent number of players started playing, anything other than recreation level, for the first time in high school. And some had never played at all. Want to get a good goalkeeper? Find the point guard or the shortstop on the equivalent age girls' team at the high school…
One of things I was reading about Michigan’s recruiting strategy for their national title game (where they had a number of lower ranked prospects really hit as players) is one of the thing the coaching staff was prioritizing in terms of high school athletes was multi sport athletes (among other things).
The accident of birth. Meanwhile, has hosting this edition sewn the seed for the 2050 team? https://nypost.com/2026/07/17/sport...gs-for-los-angeles-singles-during-tournament/ https://www.newsweek.com/world-cup-...ournament-has-boosted-hookups-dating-12178663
I believe North Carolina Youth Soccer and the Houston Dynamo have both employed Byer to implement his system in those markets. It's another thing that will that years to see any sort of payoff. There is no question that his theory and philosophy are sound. It's much less certain that his methods will work in the American market.
I coached for many years up to U18. The only player I coached that made it to MLS was a full time soccer player. Most of the kids on my premier travel teams played multiple sports growing up but once they got to U15 all the best players played soccer year round. School soccer in fall, indoor in winter, and premier travel in spring. Every one of them. I am a firm believer that exposing youth to mulitple sports is the best way to go. First off it keeps them from getting burned out (as an example my son was asked to be on the gymnastics travel team when he was 7....the kicker was the commiiment letter required him to play NO other sports). 7 years old and they wanted him full time for gymnastics. Joke. Now that said there is also no doubt in my mind that at some point you need to pick one. You just don't get enough time to hone your skills if you are splitting your time across multiple sports. And yes there are exceptions certainly. But by and large by the time a kid is 15 or so its time, IMO, to pick one. Now that is for kids that truly have the drive and mindset to be the absolute best they can. There is nothing wrong with playing multiple sports. My son played competitive soccer and hockey all through HS. But he was never going to be a pro in either sport and he loved them both. But I think we are kidding ourselves if we think most kids can play multiple sports at an advanced age and truly reach their best.
I think it's kind of silly to discredit the competition here. For one, some of those teams were better than the name. For two, if Messi wins it, he has already beaten England -- and been the best player on the field -- and he will likely need to beat Spain. Furthermore, find me a Ballon D'or winner who doesn't play 95%+ of their matches with a talent advantage ranging from large to ridiculous with club? It's actually one of the reasons I love the Ballon D'or's focus on winning. Because you know what, Harry Kane isn't a better player with Bayern than he was with Tottenham, IMO; it's just that there's no one in the Bundesliga anywhere near them in talent. So he cruises to massive numbers. (I'm not saying he's not a great player; I'm saying if you are going to criticize World Cup competition, let's get at why Harry Kane's numbers are so obscene this year.) Soccer doesn't have the discrete aspect of baseball to give us really good advanced stats, and with all these guys plying their trade in different leagues where the talent is always concentrated in a few teams (except the EPL, where it's a few more), it adds a massive complexity to evaluation. Rooting yourself in winning the important things is good. We saw Bellingham, Kane and Messi on the same field, with reasonably similar talent around them. It's only one game; that stinks, but it was also noticeable. I would also take this tweet more seriously if it weren't from a European.
I would argue back because it's more meaningful if you do it over and over again in high stakes, win or go home games then in the league where you can make up for bad games. The margin of error is miniscule in a tournament.
I'm a big Olympic weightlifting fan and I was watching a video of a US based coach talking about how he visited either Bulgaria or one other Eastern European country who developed tons of world record holders and he was talking about how Americans wanted to know what their training methods were so they, the American lifters (non professionals) could mimic them. And he pointed out the methods were designed to create World Record holders, and thus took massive risks with training frequency and intensity and a willingness for athletes to get injured. He pointed out for every World Record holder they produced there were probably 10 athletes who had to "retire" due to serious injuries from lifting at the pace and intensity the program required. Thus, this program was in no way a good program for an average lifter to attempt. 1% will get to World Record level, 40% will tear their shoulder up so much they'll never have full mobility ever again.
Regarding training for technical development, a lot of our leagues are created by churches and local organizations building a field or 2 on their property and organizing teams and games. Their priorities are not and never will be technical development and such. And there's nothing wrong with that. The idea that every organization, league, or team needs to be on the same page just isn't going to happen. We don't have the massive professional infrastructure that European and South American countries have and we never will. I live in Richmond Va. There's 1 million people here and we have 1 USL level club that gets 5000 fans. Any city this big in Europe has multiple professional teams that all get thousands of fans.
Maybe because gymnasts are practicing 16 hours at age of 7-8 and 30+ hours at age of 12? How many sports do you think Argentinians, Spaniards, etc. participate in? You either want soccer to become your career or not. Probably it will not become anyway, but if you want a chance that's what you do. That's also why we don't have many basketball players switching to soccer, that's their life from childhood.
But Spaniards, Argentinians and other power countries citizens all have professional teams within almost walking distance of their homes. Serious question: What's the largest population town in England that does not have a professional soccer team that plays in League 2 or higher?
Don't know or care. We have Donovans living in So Cal, we have Dempseys with crazy dedication from the whole families, etc. What we don't have that's the system that would allow to make a proper selection out of millions of 10-12 years old kids. Not like I know how it should be done.
Yeah. You want to be completely ignorant to how our development system doesn't have nearly the infrastructure the world powers have so you can continue to complain about how our development system sucks and should be "just as good" as those countries with 10 times the development infrastructure. Thanks for admitting you're not serious about what you're talking about. Dempsey had to drive 2 hours to get to a really good club team. Pretty sure there are 0 kids in Western Europe who need to drive more than 30 minutes to get to a top notch, professional based club with youth teams. England has 92 teams from League 2-EPL with 58 million people. So we'd need something like 400 professional clubs to have the same club infrastructure. Which isn't happening.... ever. *Studies taken from the mens game* In England, there are around 1.5 million boys playing organised youth football, but only about 180 of them will ever sign a professional contract with a Premier League club - that’s just 0.012%. Of the youth players in academy systems (roughly 12,500 boys aged 8-18 in the professional system), only a tiny fraction make it all the way. Around 50% of academy players are released before they even turn 16. Among the players who do earn a scholarship at age 16, as many as 98% are no longer playing in the top five tiers of English football by the time they’re 18. Even among academy players, only 4% go on to play professional football, according to a University of Essex study. And for many academy graduates, getting into the first-team squad is another massive step: only 1 in 200 of youth academy players makes a first team appearance.
Spain are #FIFAWorldCup Champions. 🏆 pic.twitter.com/mWLw5iis2C— FIFA World Cup (@FIFAWorldCup) July 19, 2026
What makes you think that's the case? How do you think we wouldn't identify Donovan or Dempsey today when we did 20 years ago? This idea that there are super talented kids just sitting around parks waiting to be discovered is kinda silly. The parent of any kid with that kind of talent is constantly putting them into situations to get sponsorships or noticed by coaches, from youth clinics, camps, well-scouted youth tournament so on. This isn't the movies where a scout discovers some baseball prodigy playing shoeless on a farm somewhere. Donovan's mom was a teacher who knew jack about soccer and managed to get him sponsorships to play.
There was somebody on here years ago who was obsessed with the idea that we were missing out on our next great player because we weren't scouting Hmong refugee kids playing street ball. There's always going to be some new Prester John for these weirdos.
The only player to score against Spain at the World Cup:Charles De Ketelaere 🇧🇪 pic.twitter.com/0YSLGvBZ66— Italian Football TV (@IFTVofficial) July 20, 2026