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

The reason people feel they're far ahead of us is because they like the youth set up, though I think that has quickly evened out in the last few years

 

I think in the women’s game the rest of the world is very much catching up and it’s for many of the same reasons as to why we have issues on the men’s side.

 

One other thing about American football is you can start playing it in high school and not really have any issues development wise. Whereas in soccer if you don’t develop the necessary base of skills at a younger age it’s just not going to happen.

 

Yeah, I remember the salary list just a couple of years of MLS creation. I was making more than them.

 

As an ex-coach of upper-level youth soccer. My top players were always pressured to give up soccer and join the HS football or baseball teams.
I came to hate HS football because they are the 500-pound gorilla, they do what they want at the local level. When they had their practice field redone, they requested to the city to give them our playing fields for practice, they chewed up and never even said thank you.

 

https://www.wsj.com/sports/soccer/a...r-now-its-more-popular-than-baseball-bc4d89ad

The irony.

 

I don’t think we’d be at our current level if the system was “broken.”

 

American football - Florida/Texas/California are the classic big 3, with Georgia edging their way into that tier in the last decade or 2. Lots of talent in the midwest, particularly Ohio, too as well as the greater DC area. Deep South states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi) punch well above their weight but don't have the population to be at the top of the rankings in raw numbers

Hockey - Starting to get more talent from the rest of the country as the sport grows (Auston Matthews is from Arizona) but traditionally most American talent comes from Massachusetts, Minnesota, Michigan and New York state

Don't know as much about basketball and baseball.

As for soccer, it's in a transitional phase IMO--traditionally we get the most talent either from the old "ethnic white" metro areas (NYC/north Jersey, Philly, Boston, St Louis) and from southern California. I'd expect as the sport matures in the US it'll be a hybrid of major metro areas, which is where MLS academies are located, and a Sun Belt pattern similar to American football. Cities/metro areas in those big 4 states for American football that also have MLS teams should be able to produce a ton of talent if their academies and organizations are run properly--the LA clubs, San Diego, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami.

 

Their high school system is better than ours. The play many more games and train daily. Lots and lots of ball time for free.

 

This country does provide all of this. So do you mean taxpayer funded healthcare and housing? Social security, Medicaid, and Medicare already take up about $3.400,000,000,000 of the US budget.

 

I'm aware of the issues but I consider them facts, not problems. Problems can be fixed. The issues surrounding soccer competing with the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc is not a "problem" because it can't be fixed. Other countries do not have competing sports like we do here. That's just how it is, like it or not. Hence, it's not a "problem" that can be fixed. That's my point.
The sun is going to blow up some day. That's a fact, not a problem that can be solved.

 

That wasn't the main thrust of my post, and I'm not gonna argue it here on account of the rules. The point was that we can't expect "the government" to choose to allocate taxes to provide the basics for everyone, but at least within the confines of soccer development we've got a professional system that does (to a limited degree) facilitate youth development, and that that system can be expanded. Indeed, it's likely the only way that youth soccer will get more funding than it currently does in this country.

 

The now accorded new transfer system by FIFA and FifPro might change alot in relation to academies.

 

Do you have a link for what you're referring to?

 

Yahoo Sports

https://uk.sports.yahoo.com › news › fifa-revolutionises-transfer-system-introduce-125725411.html

FIFA revolutionises transfer system to introduce mandatory release ...
1 dag geledenFIFA has officially announced a groundbreaking overhaul of the global football transfer market that serves as the most significant reform of the system in over two decades. The governing body has ...

 

I know there will be a lot of articles going around this month that are Captain Obvious to us..But this article really didn't go anywhere new.

 

Yep, this is a big factor. Some of are best players (Pulisic, Weah, Reyna) are guys whose parents played, and at a fairly high level.

 

That's misleading, though. Asking people to name the sport they like the most is a flawed method of measuring popularity. Money spent / gained (on TV rights, tickets, salaries, merchandise etc.) is a far better measure and the MLB earns more revenue than the Premier League.

It's a actually a great comparison, because the best demonstration I've seen of the difference between football culture elsewhere and in the US was done in the book OFFSIDE (by Markovitz and Hellerman, the best argument on the topic I've encountered) by contrasting soccer with baseball.

For all the talk of baseball's supposed decline, people underestimate how woven the sport is to American culture. For example, in the book they reference the nearly countless number of American idioms derived from baseball. The baseball cap is a staple of American fashion. What's the quintessential image of American fatherhood? Playing catch with your son. If you haven't played baseball exactly, maybe you've played a variant like tee-ball, softball or even kickball. Maybe your job has a softball team. My mom played stickball with her brothers in the 50s, I played little league, my kid plays in the city league -- and we don't not even consider ourselves baseball FANS. In America, you don't even have to be a sports fan at all to have played or watched baseball, or been to ballgame, or minimally be able to name a few teams or a legendary baseball player like Babe Ruth or Jackie Robinson*

That's how soccer is everywhere else. In the way the baseball is America's past-time, soccer is woven into the culture of other countries.

(*This is the internet, so I know some knucklehead's going to claim they never personally swung a bat in their life to try and undermine the point, but even someone who's never touched any kind of ball and avoided baseball like the plague, has unavoidably seen baseball players at school, in movies, in parks, etc.)

 

I think the narrative is a bit overblown. Sure... we are not an elite soccer nation but we have gotten so much better. It doesn't mean you ignore the problems that exist but I think the mindset itself can have negative impacts if you don't also recognize how far we have come.