I hope I'm putting this in the right spot and I'm sorry if it is too long... I started thinking about this a few weeks ago during a conversation about Julian Green and his options going forward. In my mind there are some serious drawbacks to the European development system and since we currently are developing a system that closely follows Europe, I thought it important to think about where we are and where we are going. Player Development in US & Germany: The basic structure of youth development in Europe and the US is basically the same. In Europe, the system is mature and most changes will be minor. The US system is still in its infancy. Some teams have a relatively strong development system and some are much further behind. I am using the Galaxy as an example for the US because they are the one that I am somewhat familiar with even though the actual model, most likely varies from team to team. Each team has youth teams at various age groups (U-17, U-19 etc.). I assume that they would begin at different age levels for different teams. (ie some would have a U-8 team and some would begin at U-10 etc). the galaxy’s lowest level is U-12. In place of lower level teams, the Galaxy has partnered with a local club team (pay to play) which has been renamed “Galaxy South Bay”. I believe that most big European clubs tend to start younger. The highest team within the development program would generally be the reserve team. In Germany (per Wikipedia) the highest allowable reserve team level is BIII (I don’t know if this is for BI teams only, or all German teams). The Galaxy’s reserve team plays in the USL Pro (3rd division). The reserve team is primarily for the development of younger players, and first team players that need a game (recovering from injury or possibly just need a game due to a lack of playing time at the first team). The Galaxy, I believe, does not use the Galaxy II as much (if at all) to rehab older players. In both cases, players that are almost ready for the next level (first team) have three basic choices: play with the reserve team which is below their level, sit on the bench but train with the first team which is slightly above their level, or loan out to a team that plays in a lower league, or is lower in the table than the first team. In the MLS, I believe that loans are not as common among teams that have development systems. Major disadvantages: (only applicable for the team if they hope to keep the player long term) There is a huge difference between the level of play for the reserve team and the first team. That is especially true of a team with Bayern Munich’s quality. This leads to a gap which makes it is difficult to develop higher level players within the system. (Hence the need to loan players) The major disadvantages of loaning a player include lack of control and a difference in needs between the loaning and loanee clubs. The club that takes the player has primarily short term goals, while the loaning club has primarily long term goals. That is true of all teams, but especially in teams that face relegation or are fighting for promotion. The difference in needs between the clubs is primarily a problem because the loaning club now has very little control over how a player is used or trained. (I know that not all loans are intended to develop players) As in Germany, MLS teams have the ability to loan players to other pro teams in either NASL or USL pro (2nd and 3rd division). This year, 11 teams have loaned approximately 50 teams to NASL or USL pro teams. (Not all MLS teams have reserve teams.) The current systems seem to be very similar on the surface. The major difference being that there is no relegation in the US, so the relative “spacing” spacing between the teams cannot change, while it can and does in Germany. The other difference is not so much in structure but in the size and quality of the programs. I don’t know what the 3rd division in Germany is like, compared to USL Pro, but I assume it is at a much higher level. Also, I believe it is safe to say that the quality of coaching tends to be better in Germany. These differences are less important going forward because they will change as MLS and soccer in general grows. More ex players will coach at a lower level (not only in the Galaxy system, but at all youth levels) and more money will increase the size of the program and the quality of the lower leagues will continue to grow while the quality of soccer, in general, grows. So what’s this mean and where do we go from here? First of all, we have 2 choices in terms of player development, going forward. 1. Continue following the model of the European teams. 2. Do something different. If we continue following the model of the Europeans, than I believe we will begin a fairly rapid development and then level off somewhat. (our progress, I would expect, would be faster and greater than European countries have experienced because we are starting from zero. ANY development system would show progress.) We will have the advantages of Europe and the disadvantages as well. If we decide to add to our system, we do have an advantage. We don’t have promotion and relegation. I know that many people have their reasons for liking promotion and relegation and relegation. I must admit that I never was among them but I never thought of one disadvantage of promotion/relegation until one of the conversations about Julian Green got me thinking…first about the gap between Bayern’s first team and their reserve team and how it has a negative effect on Bayern’s ability to develop players at the higher levels. To continue his education, Green will most likely have to sit on the bench and get very little playing time or leave the Bayern system (at least temporarily) and go to a team that does not have the same incentive to develop him. (this is bad for Green and Bayern.) The problem is that because of promotion and relegation (and probably other factors as well), Bayern cannot have a team in B2 and their reserve team may be in B3 some years, or B4 (like it was last year…I don’t know about this year). That leaves AT LEAST a one division gap and sometimes a 2 division gap in development within the Bayern system. Without promotion/relegation, Bayern 2 could play in B2, Bayern 3 could play in B3 etc. there would be no “gaps” in development. (I am guessing, by the way, that the rule against reserve teams playing in B2 is in part due to the possibility that the first and second team would be in the same league. I expect that our teams (MLS) will adopt the European model as we have been doing, and slowly add teams in the NASL so that there is a Galaxy, Galaxy 2 and Galaxy 3. MLS teams will tend to move away from loans as a way to develop players. This will make it easier for teams to maintain control while they develop their higher level prospects. It will be a long time before we pass the Europeans in talent, but this will be a step. (maybe a long, long, long, long time!) What do you think? Am I crazy?
Your ideas about the structure and formal setup may or not be important, it's extremely hard for me to tell. There are differences between europe and the US that has to be adressed when designing a formal youth teams setup, mimicking a setup is probably not the same as re-creating the effects of that particular setup when other things in society are so different (economic opportunities, scolarships, importance of college sports etc). However, I firmly believe that what is decidedly extremely important and in my opinion more important in the sense that it has the ability to overcome weaknesses in formal setup, is the knowledge, culture and philosophy of the environment in which the talents are brought up in. Good player developmen you will get, when: - Teams at youth level play to develop individual skill, to maximize potential for future levels, not maximize current team level or current win-loss ratio - Individual players at youth level should be selected for their inherent potential for high future levels, not because they are prematurely developed or because they contribute to win-loss ratio of youth teams. Those might correlate in many circumstances. - If your youth team is dominating, then make it harder for yourself. Play with fewer players, choose an extremely risky formation and generally try - and fail - harder stuff. Set the bar higher and higher. - Individual players from an early age is encouraged and expected to have good ball skills, good vision, to try hard things to do, to show off etc. If kids from the age of 5 and upwards have fun and do tricks and begin trying to pass the ball and make ambitious plays then guess what, they're going to end up good at what they've been practicing on their entire life in football. I think the most important thing the US federation can do to improve player development, is to understand what fundamentally creates the environment that tend to see skilled players develop and try to enforce top-down cultural change. Campaigns, education for coaches and setting an example (with the us youth teams setup for instance or even the US mens) are ways to go forward. Coaches, parents, friends, media and everyone involved in soccer culture in the US are important in influencing how the kids play ball.
That is not a problem inherent to pro/rel. In Spain, reserve teams play in the 2nd division with teams automatically relegated if an associated team in the league above them is relegated. For example, last year Real Madrid Castillo (aka Real Madrid B) were relegated from the 2nd division to the 3rd division which meant that Real Madrid C were relegated from the 3rd division to the 4th division despite finishing in mid-table. The "gap" is a result of a DFB rule that says that reserve teams cannot be in the 2nd division. In England, reserve teams play in their own league (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Development_League) with the level decided by the rating of their academy rather than the first teams level. Many other countries have something similar.
Thank you both for your replies. I obviously don't know as much about specifics about individual leagues and I don't really follow international soccer except, for the most part, when an american player is on a team. I've been away from the keyboard for awhile and since returning have been thinking about how your replies apply to my original post. While Germany's situation may be unique in the sense that it is based upon legislation and other leagues have different policies, I still believe that the important part of my post In my mind, the ideal development system would be somewhat seamless in the sense that the best players from one level, when moved up to the next level "belong". They would no longer be the best in most cases but would belong on the team. I believe that this is not necessarily the case. My "evidence" is when some players are moved up, they are then loaned out because they will not get playing time. In some cases, the gap is small enough so that loans are from a higher table team to a mid or low table team within the same division but often they are loaned out to a lower division club which then becomes the players defacto development. (If they are being loaned out with the idea that they aren't good enough and are hoping for a sale, than this loan doesn't "count against" the system.) Spain's system is very interesting and could lead to some very interesting scenarios. I'm still digesting the answers and really appreciate your replies. By the way Ontnr, I agree that development of a player is, for the most part, independent of the team goals and your outline of development is excellent. I do believe also that within the development system there should be competition both within the team and within the league and that is the reason that I feel the level the team plays at is important. A team that is too far above the quality of the league would be better off with practices among themselves then playing games. Your scenario of one team destroying the other teams on a regular basis is counter productive to development for many reasons but as you pointed out there are things that can be done to minimize, somewhat, those disadvantages.
I think you'd be most interested in the Youth national teams forum, especially the development academy threads. Lots of lively debate on these topics. http://forums.bigsoccer.com/forums/youth-national-teams.255/ We have success stories from all different pathways. Best example of a Euro development path is probably John O'Brien.............. This is a recent video. If you can get thru the initial intro in Dutch, there's lots of good highlights from his career.
Green is already developed. The development age in Europe is anywhere between 5-17. He's 19 now. He's at the stage where he needs game time experience and should be pushing for first team minutes. So, this is actually an advantage of the loan system. Bayern loans Green to Hamburg where Green benefits from the game time minutes and Hamburg benefits from having a quality player. Loans don't always work out for either the player or team, but the advantage this system has is that the player is playing in a highly competitive real environment with consequences (pro/rel) and not a reserve league or minor league where the stakes aren't very high.
Green may very well need game time minutes more than anything, but I'm not sure what you mean by developed. He (hopefully) still has a long way to go. I will stay away from pro/rel debate and supposed low stakes where it doesn't exist. I am glad that we don't have it here and eventually when the overall level in the US is at or above the level abroad, I think we will benefit (you are obviously free to disagree and I'm fine with that).
By developed I mean he has already technically developed. If a player doesn't have the technique by 19 he'll never have it. Players Green's age need game minutes to hone their tactics and get experience playing at the higher level.
On one hand, we were really excited about 10 years ago because we had John Spector, Kenny Cooper, Frank Simek, Danny Karbassiyoon and Zak Whitebread all doing well in academies of English powers. They've had nice careers, but not major USMNT players. OTOH, the Germans seem to be developing a lot of our youngsters into good pros and USMNT.
No one has mentioned an entirely American developmental method that might work for MLS because there is no promotion/relegation. I'm talking about Major League baseball (and NHL to a lesser extent) where each team has team in the lower leagues of A, AA and AAA. The players move up when they deserve it, the major league team is in charge of coaches, instruction and style and the games are competitive as the teams are trying win games to win their league. Would be very, very different than the rest of the world but well so is MLS with 19 teams and counting, no promotion/ relegation, the league owns the contracts (and sets up crazy acquisition rules on whims) and the country is huge and has many, many large cities that could support teams.
For the most part I agree, but I feel that the game time coaching (tactics) is extremely important in determining the final product and i think that it is strange for a team to take so much interest in developing a player until he is almost a finished product and then allow another team to do the polishing. Agreed. Currently, there are several teams that do this, but there are gaps (ie one team in pdl, but nothing else)
Why be different than the rest of the world when we already know what works?????????? That's like Henry Ford developing the assembly like for the most efficient way to build a car and someone else coming along and saying it would be best to use another system.
That's exactly what has happened. For example, the Japanese developed their own version of the assembly line that worked best for their culture and the available technology. Assembly lines are constantly evolving and are different in different countries. So, why would football be different.
The Japanese still use an assembly line. They just modified it. In the same way every country uses pro/rel but they modify it to their leagues (some send three down, some two, some have playoffs to decide who goes up and down, some haver parachute payments etc etc). What you're proposing is not using the assembly line at all.
I wasn't proposing anything, just pointing out that this example shows that you can't just blindly copy what other countries do without considering local conditions.
It isn't just an assembly line. It's the concept of "lean manufacturing", with a focus on getting high-quality, skilled, cross-trained workers that work very hard in teams to come up with creative solutions using ever-decreasing levels of resources. Every year or so management makes a cut. Perhaps teams will have 10% less time, or 10% less resources, or 10% fewer workers, but they still want the same output. It's not just a take on the assembly line, and the road to becoming a world soccer power is likely not going to be because we copied and pasted the European system (whichever one we want to copy) over the US. We'll take elements, for sure, but we likely won't take everything, and almost certainly not Pro/Rel. And, why the heck couldn't another system work better? People do things for a long time a certain way. Some countries succeed, but as in most things, most fail. Pro/Rel, and the European development system has worked exceedingly well for a select group of countries (e.g Spain, Italy, Germany, England, France, etc.), and for the other 40-odd non-contenders, it hasn't. That's not a sterling record, and it's certainly not a good enough success rate for me to automatically think it will work, especially considering the many crucial differences inherent in the US sporting culture and geography.
Um... it would be best to use another system, which is why no one uses motor and rope assembly line any more...
It's actually worked well for just about every country that uses it. Take pro/rel away and those countries would see their lower divisions collapse and interest in the sport decline. Pro/rel is clearly the best structure for sports leagues if you intend to spread interest of the sport throughout the whole country. I don't even think that's debatable anymore.
There are 8 countries that have won the WC. 5 of them are European. You think the Czech Republic is going to win one anytime soon? Poland? How about Russia? Norway? Denmark? England? Boy, they were close this year, right? They've got the most expensive league in the world, they must be contenders every time, right? There's a long list of countries with Pro/Rel that haven't even come close to winning the World Cup. Hell, most just don't even freaking qualify. Taking away Pro/Rel could be a bad idea in those countries, but that's because you're changing up a sporting landscape hundreds of years in the making. Why the heck don't you understand that you're doing almost the exact same thing in the United States? Forget all the obvious problems in terms of how much the US cares about soccer, or where you'd put teams, or why owners would decide to accept possibly devaluing their teams, or how the heck lower-division teams, who already in the 2nd, and certainly the 3rd, division are struggling just to travel to games, would even be able to cope with relegation and decreased revenues, and just focus on the fact that the US has never had this system in any of its sports. Ever. It's not and has never been part of our sporting culture. We're all about playoffs, 9-7 underdogs defeating undefeated juggernauts, the chance for every team to compete for a championship. Does that mean all of our leagues have complete parity? Of course not, but lack of relegation ensures that no team is forever non-competitive, it helps maintain interest levels, even in terrible teams, and it doesn't prop up terrible teams like the English system, with their revolving door of relegation-fodder.
Actually, it still is, considering the experiences of Australia (which scrapped pro/rel in part because no clubs were capable of being promoted to the top division and sustaining the cost of playing in a national league) and Japan (where interest in soccer exploded while pro/rel was suspended). India has also been considering scrapping pro/rel for several years now. The common thread among those countries? Soccer is not the most popular sport. Fact is, pro/rel is a solution to a problem that the US has never had, namely too many clubs, which is why countries where soccer is less popular have chosen to discontinue or at least suspend pro/rel in order to get professional leagues off the ground. And, in truth, pro/rel has probably hindered player development more than it has helped. Teams fighting to stave off relegation and teams chasing promotion become much less likely to take chances on young players. Pro/rel stunted a young Benny Feilhaber's development when he was at Derby County. He got some minutes in the first half of the season, but when the midseason transfer window opened, the club was in last place, signed a bunch of "proven veterans" on the wrong side of 30, and stopped playing just about everyone under 25. Meanwhile... does it really produce great players? The world's best players may have developed in pro/rel leagues, but with only a few exceptions they have spent their entire careers at superclubs with virtually no chance of relegation. Most of the players who get into World Cup contending national teams have never even spent time out on loan. It's great youth academies that develop great players, not pro/rel leagues.
One other thing: do players loaned to relegation-threatened clubs really have any incentives that are different from, say, players in the lower half of MLS? If Hamburger SV is in a relegation battle, relegation doesn't really matter to Julian Green if he knows he's not going to be there after the end of the season anyway. He still has an incentive to play his best because he's playing for opportunities at Bayern or at other clubs, but relegation has nothing to do with it. That's basically the same situation as players on a last-place MLS team who, even if they aren't going to be relegated, are mainly playing for their jobs next season.
Our problem isn't not having pro/rel, the problem and solution is in coaching, better access to better coaching and an end to pay to play, as well as academy systems which go down to the U9's. Tactical acumen must be taught better as it's probably our pool's biggest weakness.
Oh wow. The opposite has happened. Interest in soccer in Japan has flourished since they adopted the European system. And when we have enough clubs for pro/rel I'm sure you'll move the goal posts and stop using the "solution to no problem" argument.
This is a good sign if true... Don Garber: MLS now spending more on academies than it was spending on player salaries 5 years ago.