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

Birthright citizenship is a very hot political potato in the US that we're better off leaving alone on these boards...........................

Here's what we can say.

At the 2026 World Cup, nearly a quarter of all the players weren't playing for the nation of their birth.

At the 2006 World Cup the percentage of foreign born players was 9%. In 2026 it was 24%.
So there's a changing perception about this. We're not even talking about the nature of immigration here or dual-nationals here. [The expanding field to 48 also had something to with that. Curacao, Cape Verde, etc.]

Most of us don't know or don't care. Mateo Kovacic of Croatia was born in Austria and started his career at LASK. I didn't know that and also don't care.

This is truly an interconnected world. You either become part of that community and recruit as such..................or fall behind. Both home and abroad.

 

Apparently Morrocco only has 1 native born player on their team. I was there in March for 10 days right after the African Cup, or whatever the actual name of the tournament was, and none of the people there gave a crap that Hakimi was born in and grew up in Spain. There were posters of him all over the damn country.

 

It can be hard to understand. But the old country is very often very proud when one of its children leaves and goes on to achieve great thangs. Not just in soccer. And it can be the child of someone who left. Kenya is super proud of Obama for example.

 

When I was in Germany (1957-61), I played "sandlot" soccer all the time and there were no adults around at all. We younger kids (2nd - ~4th grade) made way when the older, bigger kids came out and took the field. I was the only Ami in the crowd.

 

Just imagine this Spain team if they had Hakimi playing right back.

 

Look at minute 10: neighbourhoods

 

I have some American friends who are long-term residents of the Netherlands. They always tell me one of the best things about the country is that kids go off on their bikes and no one worries about them.

 

I think some of the confusion is over the use of birthright citizenship.

There are actually 2 types of birthright citizenship:

Jus soli -- the right to citizenship based on the location of the birth (soli = soil). We in the US use this as our primary definition of birthright citizenship.

Jus sanguinis -- the right to citizenship based on the heritage or status of the parents/grandparents (sanguinis = blood).

Most European countries operate currently in a combination of the two. For example, the UK grants citizenship based on at least one parent's UK citizenship, but children born in the UK can be a citizen if a parent has Indefinite Leave to Remain. Historically, jus soli wasn't a thing in Europe, but that changed as immigrants came to Europe and some were left in a sort of limbo as they could never gain citizenship.

 

There are four ways to become a French citizen:
- 'droit du sang': one of your parents (or both) is French. You may be born in France or abroad: it doesn't matter. You're French from your birth.
-'droit du sol' (what we're discussing here: birthright citizenship): you're born in France from foreign parents. The country where they were born is not relevant. You have the right to become citizen under certain conditions.
- 'naturalisation': you're a foreigner living in France. The State grants you the citizenship under certain conditions.
-'mariage' (wedding): you marry with a French citizen. You can become a French citizen under certain conditions.

 

Only one of those ways gives you right to citizenship. The other three give you the right to apply for citizenship. That's why France's version of birthright citizenship isn't really birthright citizenship.

 

It is a deferred right for those who meet the residency requirements. However, the underlying principle is right of the soil (jus soli), or birthright citizenship.

 

My observation from being there 25 or so years ago was that soccer was palpably less popular among the dominant ethnic group in France than it was in neighboring countries. If the Euros and Roland Garros were going on, you could bet the latter would be getting the attention. That is probably changing over time (for one thing, Paris had no dominant team back then, and it's hard for USians to wrap their head around how much Paris leads French culture. It's like NY, LA, and take your choice of third place all rolled into one).

Investment heading towards the immigrant population might be due to land costs, but it might also be because that's where the most fervent religion of the sport was.

 

The mistake I think a lot of people have made is to assume that high-level developmental soccer is cheap in the state of nature or that it isn't all about money in the state of nature. It isn't cheap and it is still about money, it's just a matter of who's paying and where the money is.

There are only so many sources that funding can come from:

1) the pro clubs
2) national FAs
(and confederations like UEFA who in turn get their money from competitions featuring the above two sources)
3) the government
4) corporate sponsorships

and
5) the parents

The reason why the first 4 in the US couldn't fund much, historically, is that the sport's role in the culture wasn't large enough. So it fell to number 5.

There is hope for changing this. It's a hard thing, but we should distinguish hard from impossible, and we should distinguish slow change from permanence.

One thing I think we have achieved so far is that our development system in 'broadly coherent' in the teenage years. By 'broadly coherent' I mean:

1) The best academies are good enough to be springboards to high level play. (They've never sent anyone to the top 8 or so 'elite-of-the-elite', but they've sent a lot of guys high enough that it's unclear they're the problem in terms of going any higher.)
2) The most talented players in the teenage group mostly know who those youth clubs are. (There's a lot of aiming at the 'alphabet soup' of leagues for those kids, but I think most people recognize that's for at least one tier below those top clubs.)
3) Most kids "can" play for those clubs, in the sense that the arbitrary barriers to that are being reduced. The natural barriers, such as having to move, are still there, and there are still a few territorial restrictions out there, but you don't have to be from Dallas to play for FC Dallas youth (Richards wasn't, Tessmann wasn't).

Low hanging fruit would be to eliminate the territorial barriers that still exist, but the main tasks are to cast a wider geographical net, and to penetrate deeper into lower age groups.

 

Football has been the number 1 sport in France since decades, but yes, you're right: it's not really an obsession, much less a religion, for the average French person. It obviously depends on the location, though: football is followed and played with great intensity in certain cities—for example, here in Marseille—and particularly in the disadvantaged suburbs. That doesn't mean it's not played or that people are uninterested elsewhere, far from it. But I think there isn't the same fervor as elsewhere in Europe or South America.
It must also be said that rugby is a serious competitor. It's probably even more popular than football in the southwest. The closer you get to Toulouse, the more rugby surpasses football in people's hearts and minds.

 

Bruce Arena does a great job in the first two minutes explaining why we can't be Spain. Later some disheartening words on how there is little coordination on the "technical plan".

 

It’s ridiculous. Everyone is eager to share some contrived, convolute bad ideas that they see as a solution. The real solution is so simple that people overlook it.

When we all played club soccer back in the day, there were tons of guys who left the sport by the end of 8th grade. They migrated to football, basketball, or sometimes baseball. I played with 4 guys in our region’s 1st division who left the sport at that time. Two of them were 6’3” athletes with fantastic ball skills and field vision. One of them was strong, smart, skilled, and impossible to get off the ball, the other had incredible vision and I remember he scored a ridiculous bicycle kick in one of our games. They would have been scooped up by a foreign academy today. One left to play defensive line in football and the other was a shooting guard in basketball.

There were other guys I played with on Sundays in other leagues who would have been prospects as well, and actually were looked at by Tigres, who were in our region back then (not much though).

The way to keep the guys who leave in middle school and to bring the guys in from the Spanish-speaking leagues is to introduce soccer to middle schools from 6th through 8th grade. You introduce a USSF certification for middle-development and ask states to require coaches to have this certification to get hired. You can practice literally every day throughout the school year and incorporate a regional league. You focus on ball retention and tactics and introduce an American system that everyone learns (like the dutch learn total football).

Our public schools have driven excellence in our other sports. They can drive excellence in soccer as well.

 

The main comment he had in terms of development is at different times he’s asked USSF to gather together coaches to talk development and he’s mostly been ignored on that front.

Also listening to this podcast it made think Bob Bradley would be a good candidate to be sporting director.

 

Actually, I think you are really on to something. If we want to expose more kids to the game, we have to take it to them. That doesn't mean building futsal courts in the projects and hoping kids show up to play. It means going through the schools to access children there.

My answer to the "What is the one thing you would do if there were infinite financial resources available" questions would be to hire thousands of highly qualified coaching to work IN schools alongside PE teachers. They would run programs throughout the school year and identify potential talent. They would create game opportunities after school using school resources so that children could play in a convenient place for parents. Motivated children could come to school early and train with the coach a couple of times a week.

If you had 10-20 of these programs running in a big city, you could do special events to get the most talented players together. The programs would focus on ages 4th-5th grades, and the coaches would work with local clubs to facilitate opportunities to continue playing.

This is the way that we can create a Clairefontaine type of system. We can't just build something and wait for the players to come. That's not building culture, and it's not reaching anyone new. We need to take the game to children, and we need to have people there to facilitate it. This is culture building on a mass scale with a potential long term payoff could look like.

 

https://socceratschools.ussoccer.com/
https://www.ussoccer.com/soccer-forward/soccer-at-schools
https://about.bankofamerica.com/en/...mc=ENT-_-MSN-PS-_-soccer_for_kids-_-NB_Soccer

 

Well, if you're too big to be Spain, you surely can be Brasil (8.514.877 km², 200 million people)

 

Actually building small square soccerpitches in neighbourhoods with no grassfields to play unregulated soccer on helps, because kids flock to it.
Clairefontaine centres are useless if not proceeded by these: