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

High school kids gravitate to where the money and attention is. For decades, that was only basketball and football.

college soccer gets zero attention.

 

I'm not sure how Japan are 'way of ahead us'. Japan have 22 players in the top Top-5 leagues of Europe. The US now have 30, which also represents impressive growth compared to the numbers of previous decades. But yes, structural and financial factors slow the progress.

 

At the risk of being called a Pollyanna, I'll agree with Clint. I'm sick of discussions that frame us as deficient or failing. We're part of the prosperous upper middle class of world soccer. We should all be so deficient!

As for the article: yeah, duh. It would be good if kids played on their own at a young age, and it would be good if there were stronger developmentally-oriented youth soccer setups. It might drive Europhiles crazy, but the only viable solution to these things is MLS and patience.

 

Japan isn't some levels ahead of us.
They've never won a knockout round game at a World Cup.

Ever.

Not even when they hosted.

Mexico has never won a knockout round game at a World Cup that they didn't host.

There's the elite of the elite band, and we're not part of it. But that doesn't mean we "suck at soccer." It doesn't mean our system is broken. Nobody would say Colombia or Turkey or South Korea or Ivory Coast are broken, and they don't make the knockout rounds like we do.

It's this nonsensical inferiority complex that's part of the problem.

Nations that have made the knockout rounds at 4 of the last 6 World Cups. Only 14.
[As we did in 2002, 2010, 2014, and 2022.] Of course, we want to make it farther at the World Cup. But that ain't easy. We've made enormous strides over the last 30 years. Stay on target..................the right people are investing and building.

• Brazil

• Mexico

• Argentina

• England

• France

• Germany

• Netherlands

• Spain

• Portugal

• Switzerland

• Uruguay

• Belgium

• United States

• Japan

 

Since 90, we've missed one WC. Some of the names on that list have also missed WC's. We are in the mix. Will we win a WC, maybe. When, who knows. You have to be in it to win it and we are in. I guess we are a better footballing country than Italy.

 

I am a subscriber to The Athletic but I didn’t read the article, because of the headline.

The goal isn’t to produce a world class star. Liberia had a Ballon d’Or winner and never made a World Cup. How many nations have or have recently had a player who would be the greatest American player of all time, like Poland and SoKo?

The goal is to produce a world class team. It’s better to have 11 players as good as Pulisic than be Canada with a healthy Davies. If someone wants to write an article about why we don’t have that, I’d read it…but it would probably be a boring recitation of how America is moving forward two increments at a time while everyone outside the superpowers are moving forward one increment at a time, and oh yeah, the superpowers aren’t going anywhere.

 

I think one telling stat from that article that got way too little attention is that 80% of the top 100 players in the world come from 10 countries: the eight WC winners, Netherlands, and Portugal. Very few countries have won a WC and because there really isn't a lot of parity in world soccer. Going from where the US was in 1990 to where they were in 2002 is a hell of a lot easier than going from there to playing in a final. The article raised a lot of valid points but glossed over just how hard it is to get over that last hump. IMO, while culture plays a part in it, a big part is the massive head start that so many of the countries at the top had.

 

I partially agree. The problem is leaning on athleticism too early (say 11 or 12 years old) can have bad effects. A lot of the greats become that because they arrive into adolescence late, develop technical solutions and then become athletic standouts at full maturity. The reverse is common for a lot of busts, they become dominant because of early adolescence, develop a dependency on their early physical advantage and then become busts because the rest of the group catches up and even passes them athletically.

 

its over thirty years since the 94 world cup. i remember project 2010. i've heard some analysis that youth sports, especially soccer, are just getting too pricey. pariticipation in soccer has actually gone down some, and kids are more interested in individual sports like tennis or golf. i said this awhile ago; in 1990's my colombian wife would watch and say, the usa looks like they don't know what to do with the ball. i still see that. this is just never going to be our game; my best friend, a football fan, and football only, asks to this day why anyone would watch soccer. i tell him all games are actually silly, they are kids games in reality, and people also ask why anyone would waste time fishing, which he and i do a lot. he said, maybe they have a point, lol. people are fanatics about chess, about poker, billiards, bowling, whatever. curling ffs. its just that a lot more are into soccer. i no longer expect the usmnt to do much, after 40 years of following. but i can still enjoy a game. and the fishing lately has sucked....

 

...and by people who can READ the game as it's being played. The last warmup match with Germany was a clear indication of that. Not that the US played poorly, but you could see from the way that they played, most of the German players were 1-2 plays ahead of the US, both on defense as well as offence.

 

I think part of the equation will improve after this WC. After 94 soccer exploded in the US comparatively. Soccer has grown since then and kids wear all kinds of soccer jerseys all over something that was extremely rare in the past. It will explode again after this and perhaps we will starts seeing a lot more groups of kids playing in the streets ala basketball where kids learn to be creative.

 

I agree that it is a vague term, and that it has been used to shrug one's shoulders and effectively say 'well that's just the way it is.' But the things you go on to describe are culture, or at least a piece of it. I think pro teams that have enough fans to afford youth development, and to show the kids that there is a career here, are also key, and a product of culture.

Seems to me culture is required too. It's great to build a lot of pitches, and we need to do that, but you'll also need kids who are virtual soccer addicts to want to play constantly. If you built this in West Baltimore, I don't know what the kids would use it for, but it probably isn't soccer.

You can also argue that the money is partially 'downstream' of culture. If you suggested that the government build a bunch of pitches in Baltimore, they wouldn't. To the extent they spend on parks and rec for team sports, it's spent on football and basketball, because those are the sports in the culture.

But France is still an interesting case, and it's why we've studied it. I would say that if you ranked all the countries in Western Europe in cerca 1990 by how popular soccer was among the dominant ethnic group and mainstream media, France would have ranked near the bottom. Not that it's unpopular, mind, but next to Spain or Italy or Portugal or England or Germany, it would have been palpably behind all of them. There are many places where they say football is a religion, France wasn't (and kinda still isn't) one of them.

But it is a religion among the subcultures of immigrant families that settle in France. And the FFF's job is to some extent to stitch those subcultures together and make a coherent program out of them. The pitches are in the banlieues because that's where those kids live. If you made a French National Team out of just players whose grandparents were born in France, it probably wouldn't be very good.

In most countries, I'd say the clubs do 95% or more of player development. In France, it might be 'only' 85 or 90%, with Clarefontaine and FFF programs trying to fill in the gaps of a league that isn't as big as the Bundesliga or the Premier League. (This has evolved a bit since PSG started spending big money, but it still isn't as big a league.) Zidane, for instance, played there for like a season, though it was mainly to get him seen and signed by a club.