[Bushnell] A ‘broken’ system, nascent culture: Why the U.S. has never had a world-class men’s soccer

Agree, lack of competiveness in Concacaf is a part of the problem. We play same shitty teams year over year, after introduction of UEFA NL there were much less friendlies with euro sides.

 

Bubba, it's not one game, let's continue our publicly traded company analogy. Company with stock market ticker USMNT is in business launching rockets that eventually are supposed to reach Jupiter. Started slow - first we reach low earth orbit, then a bit further, hit the Moon in 2002, dropped back, crashed to the earth in 2018, then stuck to LEO again basically treading the water. The same old rusty obsolete rocket with new paint. Yes, It will keep us reaching low orbit, but it will never fly higher.

 

Hey, we can't even dominate our confederation anymore

 

Ok, let's consider treading water the last step before going to the bottom which will account for regression.

 

USSF isn't doing nothing. In fact, they're launching a number of initiatives that could help clubs find talent among the millions of affiliated and unaffiliated players all across the country.

First is “The U.S. Way,” a coaching curriculum and philosophy with detailed age-specific development frameworks that prioritize long-term technical and tactical growth over early winning or physical dominance. They can't force clubs to adopt it, but they'll evangelize for it, which is something. The goal is that, if adoption is high, there's going to be a better baseline of skills at various age groups, so that it's less likely you get a 12 year-old who can't kick or dribble, or whatever their milestones are.

Expanding the number of coaches via free and subsidized coaching modules and licenses up to "C". More accessible Grassroots licenses focused on age-appropriate, player-centered methods outlined in "the US Way". I have to imagine the lettered "C" and "D" licenses loosely correspond with European professional coaching licenses, but I honestly don't know.

Expanding talent identification by inventing holistic scouting criteria (part of the "US Way"), holding more youth national team camps and competitions, and holding camps at younger ages.

Shifting Youth Soccer age cutoffs to align with school years for the 2026-27 season. Basically, just about every kid should be playing with kids in his/her own grade.

Creating an electronic player registration system to support the FIFA Digital Player Passport and associated training compensation tracking for both domestic US teams and FIFA's Training Compensation Clearing House (if the player moves abroad).

Using collected video and AI to create player stats and load them into the player registration system so that scouts and clubs can more easily identify top players. I expect there are some privacy rules I'm not sure how they'll figure out, but I think the idea makes a lot of sense. The granularity of the data will depend on the uploader, so while MLS academies might track all kinds of advanced metrics, the local unaffiliated rec league might just track goals and assists. Point being, there will be gaps in the data, but this is about the only way you can get some random kid, in an unaffiliated league, in some random part of the US, some shred of visibility. If someone's scoring enough, and they've got videos, eventually someone will take notice.

Opened the new Arthur Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center in Georgia this year to serve as a centralized hub for national teams and development. Now they have basically 3 big "National Development Center"s. One in Atlanta. One in Kansas City. One in Carson, California. These are separate from "Talent ID" camps and US Soccer offices (e.g Chicago)

Working to structurally change college soccer with longer seasons and scheduling adjustments, to better support professional and national team pathways from the D1-D3 level.

If I missed anything big, let me know. As far as the ideas go, I'm pretty pleased. The execution is the important bit, I suppose.

 

That's why the Dutch KNVB doesnot have scores kept until a certain age and no table. So kids just have fun and learn to play.
Edit: see my post nr 157.

 

I think you can make a pretty good case that we've progressed a lot, especially in this WC. We had the most points since the 30s, the best GD, won the most games, and won a knockout game for only the second time since the 30s. The difference is that you can get a LOT better and still end up at the same point because the sample size is so small, unlike in a club season which has a lot more games and progression is much easier to determine.

Second, it's hard for ANY national team to get to the world class level. Look how many teams have won the World Cup. The last first time winners in the last 30 years were Spain and France, hardly doormats. The first-in advantage is just huge.

 

I'm not sure what people are expecting. There are a number of problems and most of them aren't going to get much better.

1) Soccer will become more popular through generational change, but it won't change that much over the next few years. I've been a soccer fan for over 30 years, and I have seen it change, but even if it changes by the same amount over the next 30 years, that still gets us nothing close to most countries.

2) We'll have more fathers who played professionally, and that will help, but again, this is such a slow process. The players need to get married, have kids, and then the kids need to grow up.

3) How many more professional academies do you think we'll have 10 years from now? A couple of more MLS teams, maybe the USSF springs for a Bradenton or two, so maybe 10-15% more players go through the academies. That's not going to make a big change.

4) Pay-to-play is here to stay. Money has to come from somewhere and the casual soccer family pays the bills. That ESPN piece is such a lazy article. How much money do you need to do what you think should be done? Who would pay for it?


Take away Freese's mistake and I think people wouldn't feel so bad about this would cup. We made incremental progress. I'm not expecting more in the next world cup or even in the world cup after that. But that's OK, I'm still going to be a fan!

 

Many people, parents included, have a hard time seeing past the "now". It goes along with the whole helicopter/snowplow parent, grade-inflated environment kids are in these days. And paying for the privilege makes people feel *more* entitled to get satisfaction. It'd be way easier to sell "no scores/winning/losing" if it were free, I think.

In the late 19th century, northeastern US colleges decided they preferred the "carrying" football code, a la rugby, over the Association football code. With pro sports not yet really being a thing, college football became a huge spectator draw. It was helped by the fact that many, many towns had a small college that could field a football team. When pro football got rolling in the 1920s, there was already this de facto minor league structure to build on. In fact, the college system is kind of akin to the various sporting clubs in Europe and elsewhere that became the pro clubs--colleges group themselves in divisions, by size/prowess, and nmost places had a college in town or nearby they could root for or aspire to play for. Of course, nascent pro soccer leagues in the USA collapsed about the same time, leading to a dearth of Association Football in the US for 65 or so years.

I've been out of the loop for a while but last I checked, the D was pretty basic--the bare minimum a flat-out noob would need to pose as a coach. The C was okay for a bit more tactics and organization skill. You really didn't get into anything substantial, IMO, until the B... but at that point, they are assuming you are coaching experienced, top-level players. What is missing is the *pedagogical* approach... how to teach *kids*, not just soccer technique or tactics. United Soccer Coaches has some paths that IMO are much better. The former National Youth License (I'm not sure if the current National Youth Diploma is the same) that really focused on *how* to coach 5-12 year olds.. not tactics, not systems of play, but how to actually make practice enjoyable, useful and efficient for developing kids. AFAIK there's nothing even close on the USSF side and never has been.

 

How do you feel about the Player Passport Database and AI stat-tracking? Pay-to-play isn't going away, and the only way it starts to get less, rather than more expensive is if there's a constant stream of kids turning pro and accompanying solidarity and development payments that can subsidize the next generation of kids.

Even if we could lower the travel costs, you still need to pay for full-time coaching staff, rent refs, rent fields, and buy uniforms. It's not nothing. Rec is cheap because most people involved are volunteers, which keeps costs low.

Europe just has a density of professional clubs that we're just not going to get to, so I don't think we can hope for MLS or pro soccer in general to subsidize millions of kids who are playing organized ball (let alone all the millions of kids playing in unofficial leagues). We're just nowhere near that level.

I think we gotta get high school and college programs up to snuff. The former takes advantage of our existing sporting culture, and would be a nice way for soccer to be a part of "American culture". On the college front, they've got good facilities, there are a lot of programs already, and at the moment colleges are willing to shell out for money-losing athletics, so we should take advantage of that now. It may not last forever.

 

Mls is a closed system. To enter you have to pay the league/mls club owners a fee....approaching a whopping 500 million US$.

 

Nothing stopping USL though. The problem isn’t popular enough to support a Europe like ecosystem. And a closed system was the only way of getting MLS off the ground initially.

 

They should have put in a limit on the fee.
It's now ready to go over 500 million, but with every new club introduced the fee will rise and don't look surprised if it will be 700 million with new club number xx.

 

The fee is based on the general market value of the teams. If you artificially keep it low you reduce the value of the teams which no owner is going to do with their investment.

 

Anybody watch Mexico vs England? If you're going out in the round of 16, that's how you go out. As an old head, believe me, I despise giving El Tri any credit at all, but if you don't go out like that in a World Cup on home soil, I want to know what the hell happened. El Tri left it all on the field, we didn't. This is 1998 level confusion. Something went down.

We don't need this endless cycle of saying our best players play other sports, pay for play blah blah blah. We need a coach and an attitude that we haven't had since that dickhead Arena in 2002.

 

That's not holding back soccer in the US. It's actually the only thing allowing professional soccer to stay afloat.

In Europe, over a century of cultural and civic identity was poured into thousands of small local clubs. This creates clubs that will tolerate losses or breaking-even for decades. Local fan networks span generations, and that translates into support (volunteers, fan donations, local sponsorship, municipal funding for maintenance or improvements, etc.). There's a cultural norm that a town or village "deserves" a local club as a civic institution.

In the US, sports teams are expected to be viable commercial entities, or else must be backed by deep-pocketed owners who treat them as investments/assets. That doesn't preclude professional, semi-pro, and amateur teams from forming that are much smaller than MLS, but an instinctive support base just isn't necessarily there in the US like it is for a European club that's always been 5th tier for 95 years.

The US is massive. Creating a density similar to Europe's would require hundreds of communities across the country to organically support hundreds of teams for several generations, so that they become worth more than their balance sheets alone and are valued as local community assets rather than just business ventures.

What we have now is akin to independent minor league baseball: a handful of top teams (MLS) with some development arms, but below that, most clubs have to function as real businesses in a sport that doesn’t yet have the broad support to sustain hundreds of viable pro/semi-pro outfits. Without the cultural foundation or structural reality Europe has, we simply won’t get that density.

 

See it?
The growth in smaller markets is blocked by the fee not matching the market.
It's closed system nature, that determines the "value" of the clubs.
A club's value in Europe isnot going to be influenced by a new club entering the market.
Soccer popularity goes hand in hand with access to a club, a club you can see locals making it in the first team, so you can relate to it etc.

 

These are growing pains. As Lou Reed once wrote: Growing up in public sometimes you get caught with you pants down.
We went out of the tournament, just like Germany, Holland and closer to home Canada and Mexico. We played a vibrant, successful style vs Paraguay. Although this result perhaps raised everyone's expectations. We got out of the group and won the first knockout. Unfortunately, we reverted to the mean and looked the scared team that whimpered out of the Copa America.
Still, baby steps.

 

Aside from the obvious fact that you don't get better playing bad to mediocre teams, there's also got to be a psychological fatigue aspect to it for the players too. It can't be easy to get excited about getting on a plane for 8 hours to come play Guatemala in front of 10k people for the 10th time in the past 2 years, and that negative association will seep into more meaningful camps/windows.

 

If our players are so mentally fragile that they can't be inspired to play against a team that a win will put them in the World Cup, then we need to find players who actually WANT to compete against any and everyone.