It's not that surprising when you consider that about one-third of El Salvador's citizens live in the US, many of them born here. Salvadoran-Americans are still overrepresented on the El Salvador national team, but not by all that much.
Ok, but that's true of every country. Their top tier guys usually have a pretty significant pedigree in the sport. Why would the USA be any different?
The reality is that most of the current American players (and I mean that fairly broadly in the professional ranks, but within earshot of the USMNT) do NOT have a parent who was a professional. Much less a professional soccer player. Or a coach. Or a referee even. Or anyone in their family who was. However, the landscape here will look much different with each decade that passes, as higher and higher quality players' kids grow up.
messis dad was a steel worker. cr7s was a gardener/war vet. i dont know where you arrive at this conclusion that top tier guys usually have a significant pedigree in the sport.....watching teams like germany, italy, france, etc....the last names of their best players have changed a lot every cycle.....so....idk if I agree with you there overall, despite MLS having this academy system in place....i dont think the pipeline of players has really made much of a difference. i dont think mls player development has moved the usmnt needle much....in fact, the usmnt ranking has basically gone down over the last 10 years, as MLS has supposedly grown. you cant look at mls and say....they really developed that usmnt star level player.....mls provides the replacement filler level players that we see in january camp.....but its been a long time and we're really not seeing much .....there have been a few successes here and there.....but a large majority of failures (from a usmnt perspective)
Uhm, why do you (I presume) think that European/South American pro players "have a parent who was a professional. Much less a professional soccer player. Or a coach. Or a referee even. Or anyone in their family who was."? That simply isnot the case in the overwhelmingly majority.
I don't think they all do. But I do know that professional soccer has been played (regularly and continuously) in Europe and South America a hell of a lot longer than it has been in the US. There is far more collective high-level knowledge of the sport in, say, Argentina, than there is in the US. It doesn't touch everyone, but it is definitely much more prevalent. That glut of experience works its way down into the lowest ranks when only the best of them can get jobs at the highest ranks. We've still got baseball dads teaching 8 year olds "how" to play soccer.
If only all the USMNT stans and guys like 3four3 and other YouTube and Twitter USMNT "experts" would coach kids we would have a top national team with quality players. These people are the most knowledgeable people in the US when it comes to the sport. They know better than anyone. They have all the solutions. But....instead of doing the work they just want to go around criticizing those that actually do the work and tell them that they don't know shit.
Hey, hey, hey, the 343 guys don't just criticize MLS and the broader pay to play system, they do coach players ... for a fee.
They must be developing some ballers that go on to play for Real Madrid, Manchester City and PSG. Worth the $50 a month they more likely charge for the good of the sport.
Messi has two cousins who were professional players. Ronaldo's dad was a kit man at a professional club from when he was 7-10. In education, particularly early education, we have a concept called language rich environment. This is an environment that is designed to give kids the maximum exposure to a broad variety of language contexts, interactions with spoken and written language, and specific resources in order to maximize early development of vocabulary and speech. The top players in the world are almost entirely coming from soccer rich environments. I'm not saying you have to have professional athlete parents, Messi and Ronaldo certainly didn't. Nevertheless, they were raised in a soccer rich environment. They were surrounded by peers and adults who were passionate about the game, and practiced at a very high level through play and interaction. That provided the necessary baseline for their natural talents to shine through. I'm also saying that soccer rich environment is vanishingly rare in the USA, with the notable exception of dual national communities. Most commonlly, a kid might have a parent or two who is truly passionate about the game. If they're really lucky, they'll have a bunch of friends who like the sport. This is what Tom Byer talks about when he speaks about raising the water level of the talent in the country. It has little to do with MLS because by the time the league gets involved, that vital early learning period is over. They get what they get. What professional clubs do is take the material they have, make reasonable technical and physical improvement (which would happen with age anyway) and try to successfully manage a transition from developmental play to professional play. MLS isn't perfect at that either, but it's a different conversation.
Really like this idea of a soccer-rich environment. Definitely is the case from my experience. It is why I think college soccer is so vital for soccer in America, not for developing national team players but for developing good soccer parents, coaches, refs, and communities.
Jorge Messi will go down in history as the greatest soccer dad of all time. This total chad finagled a try out for a 12 year old with growth hormone deficiency with Barcelona and has remained his agent all these years. Per Balague's Messi, Jorge was in the development program of a major Argentinian team, Newell's Old Boys. He was also Messi's coach in their neighborhood club, Abanderado Grandoli. That probably lasted about a year or two because Leo was fast tracked to Newell's Baby 7 team. From what I can tell, the majority of Messi's family was good enough to be in Newell's development academy.
Soccer rich environment is vanishingly fast in Europe. With that I mean the difference between my childhood and that of kids today. When I was a kid I would have what you call "a soccer rich environment", which is that I would go out and play it with my neighbourhood kids on the grassfields in my neighbourhood....almost every day. When old enough I joined an amateur club, which is the opposite of your P2P system. In the rebuild after the destruction of the war, soccerclubs were about the only way to spend your leisure time. So on a street between the (big) park and my neighbourhood you had about a dozen amateur clubs, that each pulled on saturdays and sundays 6000 to 8000 fans watching those matches. Nowadays you almost never see kids play soccer on the grassfields, that are still there. The number of amateur clubs has gone down. When kids want to play soccer, it's almost entirely done within an amateur club. So there has been a tremendous shift in the make up of the "soccer rich environment". Not so much anymore in the sense of being busy with it each day, but more as one of the things you can do as a leisure activity. The dwindling numbers of clubs, also due to the need of space for houses, has the effect that kids cannot become member of a club when they want to. There's now the phenomenon of a waiting list, kids have to wait very long to be able to get into a club. It's gone so bad now that the KNVB urges cities and the government to take space for sporting/football specific in consideration when planning for new neighbourhoods.
^^^^^^^^^ The English FA has made the same point, that kids don’t go outside and play like they did 20 years ago.
I loved this article. It’s about why Barca has probably the best academy in the world but doesn’t produce strikers. La Masia emphasizes working in tight spaces to such an extent that kids in the academy don’t learn how to operate in open spaces, I.e., how to play striker. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7038697/2026/02/12/barcelona-la-masia-strikers-lewandowski-yamal/
Well..... this is..... something? Regarding Patrick Agyemang:10 goals, 3 assists in the English ChampionshipYet another example in a never-ending list that the USMNT is the platform, and the USMNT manager (whether controlled or not by MLS) is the gatekeeper to *success.Which is why that position is so… pic.twitter.com/lFRxurC9pb— 3four3 (@3four3) February 14, 2026
"Agyemang is scoring goals in the Championship because he was forced into USMNT" - 3four3 Agyemang already has the same goals as Haji Wright who is highly rated by USMNT fans for scoring goals in a league that is highly rated by them too.
It's truly amazing the twists and turns conspiracy thinkers do when they are clearly wrong but don't have the mental fortitude to actually acknowledge it. These dudes are weak.
You're more likely to go into your parent's profession then the general population is simply because that's what you are constantly exposed to. Doctors, lawyers, mechanics, etc. If your parent is an athlete than you're of course going to get better coaching and be surrounded by athletic adults in childhood which will give you a massive leg up on the general population. And I mean "coaching" as in playing against your parent and their friends as opposed to Joe Blow playing against their non-athlete parent and that parent's friends.
You're in the camp of those with the fake excuse that European/South American players have the benefit of being children of professional players. We have about a thousand professional/semi pro players and about 1.24 million amateur players, of which I guess about 750,000 are youth team players. So when we're generous and give the pro players (of whom at least half arenot that good) 3 kids= 3000 kids under the influence of pro related environment. So actually 96% of our kids have your Joe Blow environment. Stop making again and again this lame excuse.
He is always blaming MLS and USSF for everything. Only he has the solutions and knows how to develop good quality players.
It's not an excuse. It's an acknowledgment that having a broader and deeper base of understanding of the game in all stages and areas of life aids in better soccer development. But it's incremental and hard (or even impossible) to quantify.
I'm seeing more and more X USMNT accounts moving the goalpost on Agyemang for scoring goals in the Championship. Don't understand why US fans hate a guy so much just because he started of in MLS. These guys that were claiming Agyemang was bad and that he wouldn't crack it in the Championship and won't score more goals than Haji Wright, are now saying the Championship is a bad league. The length these people go through to discredit a US player that their own inner circle told them to hate on cause he was a "bad MLSer that will never succeed outside of the mediocre MLS."