Well I found the remedy for this. I simply accessed the match via ESPN+ on my Roku. However it was almost spoiled because ESPN posts highlight videos with results in the title but I remembered it in time and avoided looking at highlight titles while browsing for the match. But it was a close thing. ESPN (with or without the plus) is basically crap as far as being fan friendly. They don't care at all.
They follow the eyeballs. And, apparently, there were more eyeballs for SMU vs. Houston, in front of a few thou. If this was a playoff game for Hockey, for example, there's no way they don't switch from a cfb game. But, hey, BIGGEST MATCH IN MLS HISTORY!
It's really not all that interesting or surprising that Vancouver and Montreal are at the bottom of that list. More surprising that Toronto is close to the top.
I don't think this is that much to complain about. ESPN never interrupts a game in progress. If a game runs long, the next game starts on an alternate channel. That's always been their policy. Soccer gets the short end of the stick and gets cut into by other sports but never cuts into other sports, mostly because the clock is much more predictable than anything else ESPN shows *cough*baseball*cough*.
Agree that at first glance it is surprising but that is through my lense that is primarily looking for young Americans. Toroto has several older vets that are on their very last legs in terms of USMNT potential. While interesting, I think it would be nice and give more context if it also included average or median age of the USMNT minutes given by each team. I am sure that TFC would rank pretty low in that regard while FCD would obviously remain at the top. If you consider the prime age for an athlete to be somewhere between 24-29 that would be a very telling stat. Which teams have the "current should be" crop, which have the "has beens" and which have the "up and comers/future". Just to follow up on that comment: Altidore; 29 yrs Gonzalez: 31 yrs Westberg (born in Paris but American father): 33 yrs. Morrow: 32 yrs Delgado: 24 yrs Bradley; 32 yrs Not sure if I missed any regurlars or listed players that normally don't play but, that means that there are only two that will be in their prime for the next WC (or close to it....Altidore at 31 and Delgado at 26). The others will be candidates for medicare.
thinking about this at lunch, i had an epiphany. i've argued if you want to change how we play go back to age 10. but how does a team that as a matter of ideology delegates development to 24+ clubs, and has dismantled its national youth team residencies, actually in any comprehensive way "change how its players play the game.?" setting aside the question of whether academies have earned the role given them, you delegated away teaching to 24+ teams that may have as many as 24 of their own ideas how they want their academicians to play. those ideas are their own, not based on what USSF wants. kind of like when we were kids, one select coach might implement an english style for his select team, another guy more german, another guy italian. in throwing in the select discussion at the end, i acknowledge it has always been this way, to some degree. however c. 1990-something we did the residency at IMG/bradenton such that there was a point all this heterodoxy got homogenized. once in the residency they could try to make you play a particular way they wanted. at pain of being kicked out of the team. bradenton is now gone. where in the process can we say, i want you to play this way if you want to be on the team, and control it? saying you want prettier soccer is, so what, if you have no control over how they are getting to you. i can just as easily say i want the system to produce me "Pele" or the ever-sought but somewhat mythical "world class player." i have just as much power to get that end result. mind you, i would assume the YNTs still meet for camps here and there during the year. week here, week there. but that would mirror the senior team's brief window into its players. the primary developer is the team they go back to. they can tweak things or give you stuff to work on, but they aren't your regular coach. there is no residency. this also explains much of the focus on formations and systems. if for ideological reasons i concede away the ability to develop and control the players in the pyramid, the part i can control is how they line up on the field when they show up for camp. there i am boss. now, that formation may not match up with what they play the rest of the year, are used to, or are suited for. but that is where i can exercise power. that is, unless i exercise centrality and control backwards into the process. if you wanted to change how the best domestic players play, you would have residencies and/or USL type teams where you concentrated your choices and taught them Our Way of Playing. this would also result in the players ahem looking like they had played together before. again, i feel like few are actually thinking through, ok, this is the end goal. this is how i practically get here. this is where the current structure is at odds with what i am trying to achieve. this is how to change the structure to achieve what i want. we instead have whole hog adopted a xerox of a xerox of a xerox of a british system without thinking below the surface about how it would actually work. it's kind of like when you ask a berhalter fanboy what the plans a and b are for how this team will score goals. they can quote the mission statements. they cannot explain the actual concepts. and then the team itself looks like it's confused how to score other than get it wide and cross. hmmm
if you are opposed to a school type residency, it would at least make sense to have the players together all summer at chula vista or the like. someplace mild and where they can gather a whole team, during a period of the year when select somewhat slacks. i also think one way of chasing a (late) version of this, while not fighting capitalism/centralism/pro ball would be restore something like project 40 where teenage pro signees from the YNT would all be on one USL team, as a matter of choice and contract, make money, get playing time, have technique watched and worked on, have a style implemented. as opposed to riding the bench and subbing in for 24 different MLS teams, each with their own style notes.
I'm not complaining, I'm laughing. And, MLS would never put a hockey, basketball, baseball, or football playoff game in the position of being run over.
Ooops, I meant to say ESPN would never put a hockey, basketball, baseball, or football playoff game in the position of being run over.
Wow, excellent points, I think you're on to something there. It's worth pointing out that other countries that have been successful, such as Holland, have FA's with more control over their teams. In addition, they play stylistically-homogenous soccer. Dutch teams, club and country, play free-flowing Dutch-style soccer from youth ranks onwards. And the Dutch FA scouts for players that fit that system early and throughout their careers. It's commendable, and perhaps advantageous, to try to make an "American" style that will be played throughout the country, whatever that style is. But in a country made up of so many diverse peoples with different playing conditions, this seems like a project that is doomed from the start. Just looking at Mexican-American kids, we have millions of people who play a Latin style of soccer that is distinct from whatever style USSF wants to implement. Then you at the urbanite kids playing on streets and concrete surfaces, and you'll get another distinctive style of soccer. Then, if you're a suburban kid with an English coach, as often happens, you're going to play yet another style of soccer. And the USSF, with its inability to reach out to anybody that isn't a wealthy/middle-class suburban English-speaker, what the hell is supposed to make anyone confident that the USSF can actually implement a system of any kind, even if they had the necessary control over training, which they do NOT?
I see two different things with the hispanic player. When we played a MX age group academy team in Dallas Cup they one and two touched you to death. A player from that level would fit in here fine but need to adjust to formation. Like if we got someone who plays age group there to switch. But the rec adult hispanic league ball I would play some winters (and a team or two in HS) was this weird 1v1 atomized stuff. It was all get the ball, turn, and take your man on. I would be impressed by individual skill but actually found that fast, organized, and drilled Americans would eat it alive. I hear people touting this sort of "just let players take people on" kind of stuff periodically as where America needs to go. That might be useful if it then paired with drilling in organization. But my personal experience was that raw skill players would be eaten alive by organized teams. Part of the game is beating men with passes, or team defense. I would like to see us bring in the sort of player who started out learning how to take people on. I haven't seen much of that in midfield. But contrary to myth I think they would be learning from us more than us from them. The question would be absorbing faster passing tempo, committing defenders before passing, structure, and team/help defense and stuff. I think we need to keep improving our technicality and finishing to progress but the people who want to slough intensity and organization are selling a dangerous bill of goods.
I saw something similar in college, back in 2000. My freshman season (on a D3 college team), our coach took a flyer on another freshman whose entire soccer experience until that point had consisted of streetball and Hispanic leagues. He was by far the best 1v1 dribbler on the team and had some jaw-dropping individual skill. He was also one of the worst attacking players in intra-squad scrimmages, because for all his ability to take on defenders, he slowed down the attack by trying to dribble too much. He'd beat a man and unbalance the defense for a moment, and then waste the chance to create something because he was still dribbling and didn't see a teammate running into space. When defending, he tended to follow the ball and got pulled out of position easily by quick passing. He had one substitute appearance early in the season, was ineffective for the same reason, and never got on the field in another game. By the end of the season his defensive discipline was better but he just couldn't see the attacking runs quickly enough. Of course, this was an 18-year-old trying to learn organized team tactics for the first time in his life during a compressed college season. We need these players learning it much earlier.
I have a different take on this. A professional soccer player must/should be flexible in the styles that he is capable of playing. Skill/technique on the ball is the primary driver in determining how flexible and able to adapt to different styles that player will be. A secondary necessity is being exposed to different styles of play...24 different teams is more likely to provide that variety imo. Obviously, IMO, some players will be more comfortable or their skillsets (especially physical) may make them better suited to certain styles of play but it is technique that determines whether or not they CAN play different styles. That is not necessarily dependent upon playing within a specific system. I think it makes the adjustment easier if they are already playing in that system (ie Adams at RBNY and Adams at RBL) but I firmly believe that he would be able to adjust to other systems and or the coach may adjust his system to better incorporate his unique abilities. (Ironically, I think that is what Berhalter was thinking with the whole right back idea....it's just that nobody else (including me) really thinks he is right). Does Germany have a residency program? I'm pretty sure they don't but could be wrong. Their national team has a style but I'm pretty sure that few would argue that the B1 teams have a homogenous style that they rely on to prepare their NT players.
I think I know what you mean, but not sure about it. I will tackle it with my next part ..I guess True, as the Dutch mantra is 4-3-3. The KNVB doesnot enforce it, it's seen as the natural way to play by everyone in the country. Actually the KNVB doesnot have to scout players that fit the system, the system=youth development in the clubs does that job. The KNVB just has to select the best players from the clubs. Those will fit the system by default. So the KNVB has in that sense control over their teams, that they all play the same system and donot have to be forced into it.
first, you're skipping past the part where i said that the reason we focus on style -- which you are then reemphasizing with your critique -- is because for all our talk about shaping players we have limited control over that. second, while emphasizing "style" as "formation" you are overlooking that there seem to be certain "values" inculcated into german players, for good or bad. the stereotype of the matthaus type player who comes over here and complains we don't practice at 110% is a trope. stuff like that. i think going back to the college era there were fighting values that were implemented here. you wouldn't see the field in either place without assimilating to those values. some would argue the fighting and organization went too far at the expense of skill. one might argue, for good or bad, that what you're seeing now is GB trying to undo those values. so you undo the core fighting values and the replacement? would be 24 different teams' ideas of how to play. and then there is no common grit to build off of. in terms of different styles,i agree to an extent with the idea but i also got my "two styles" by playing for "two different teams" as a kid. but i'm pretty sure the rules would be against you going from academy club x to club y, to get multiple styles under your belt. and, again, you seem to be focusing on this as implementation of style, education in styles, etc. and here i am not trying to say good style bad style etc. i am saying we focus on superficial style because the way we allow the overall pyramid to be constructed hands away the ability to actually complete our primary sales pitch of changing the player. if the player hasn't changed altering the formations and such to anticipate such changes is silly. if you want to implement changes assuming personnel who play different common sense would be some mix of selecting players towards the goal, and in fact getting more involved in shaping the players to get there. i mean, just think about the evolution in our relationship with USL over the past decade. initially we made 5 man loan carve out deals with existing USL teams. but then we have no control how they get taught. so over time it's shifting to, as in MLB, owning your minors/affiliates. here is your coach. here are your players. they will be trained how i want. you run the business side. if MLS sees no sense in its players being taught to play different than the first team, or in another team's ideas of its players distorting who gets time, why are we so deferential?? let's be real, ever since this was plain old HGP with no/few academies to speak of, at least one big purpose of the way things are done is "dibs" on the perceived prospects. players used to be swiped right before college from their select teams. the pro team then claimed them to avoid the draft. an element of that remains. i say this because one reason to get rid of centralization, or fend off the attempt to have, say, a YNT in the academy league, or a project 40 in the USL, is forcing those players into the "dibs" process and divvying up the talent. if the academies have not yet developed a knack, this is not "practical" or "optimizing." but it would facilitate more and more players being subject to MLS dibs.
I think, in some respects, soccer in the USA is not really a trained sport, more of a self-developed thing. I think in most sports, players have a series of developments to go through. First is personal, developing a set of personal skills to play. Some of this is because it's the only part most young (U12) players can actually understand. Players that stand out in this area (1vs1, "taking on" players, etc.) get noticed, and are grabbed up by better teams and clubs. Unfortunately, it seems that at this point, we suffer a minor breakdown. coaches improve teams, not by training, but by continuing to grab "better" players. Those players are not being taught to develop a more cerebral game, they are instead relied on to continue dominating by their already developed skills. Next SHOULD BE thinking development. With our major sports, (baseball/football/basketball), by the time players are at the college level, they are all pretty well developed in their physical part of the game, and will need to develop a mental game to continue to succeed. Everybody is physically good, so new things must be learned. Again, in soccer, it seems little attention is paid to coaching player development, there just seems to be a "put out the best 11, and see who wins" mentality. Eventually, when a player reaches the pros, in say football, everybody is physically good, and everybody has developed a better understanding of the game, so now, self-motivation is a new factor that must be learned, and used. I work in live sports television, and see the difference between college and pro athletes is often a case of "everybody here is good, I need to work to get time". When the best Americans couldn't play in the USA as a pro, there were a fair number who understood this, and were willing to take the steps to get recognition, earn time with top teams, and when they came to the USA Nats, they were ready to be a force. MLS has no real obligation to push players to this point, and any more the owners seem totally content to grab foreign players to fill in when they can't draft young Americans with the skill set to play as a professional. Most languish on the bench, and don't really even understand why. It's all opinion, of course, but that's what I think I see. I left basketball out of this, for the most part, there's only 5 players, many can do "one and done" in college before going pro, and many can succeed on physical talent only. Soccer is infinitely more complicated.
Just a reminder: About half of the clubs in MLS are less than 10 years old. With that percentage to go up even more as five more teams are scheduled to join over the next three years. So most teams have yet to establish an identity, yet to establish a culture, yet to cement a "style," yet to have any clue what they're doing in terms of youth and player development. Folks watch Holland or Germany and start comparing. They have generations worth of a head start. Ajax is 119 years old. Atlanta United is three years old. For Pete's sake........................
that sounds all well and good but my point riffing off your description would be we've handed our development to babies in the cradle. i get we're not ajax and that's kind of my point. i see no one scrutinizing whether these teams do development very well at all, before they get handed the keys. why do i hand my keys to a 16 year old who has barely taken driver's ed? yours is arguably a historical/calendar explanation for mine. otherwise what you're saying is, we're babies, but hand them the keys anyway. i think we do it because we are cozy with MLS and MLS wants to xerox elite leagues. xeroxing elite leagues doesn't give you their secret sauce. the secret sauce is going to be money, schools, coaching, more effort than we put in. right now some of the academies are no better than local select options, and the tables reflect that. also, i wasn't limiting my argument to "style." if academies are getting kids at 10 they will be teaching them most of soccer, period. what they teach more of reflects their priorities. i was first taught longballing and team defense. i then shifted over into other emphases on my second team. if you stay on those teams, you will become good at their priorities. you might care less about things others might prefer to work on. for example, if you want technical, passing players, you would focus on those things. but what if only some academies want those foci? my point is they don't have to grow the New Player Type the NT wants. and if you don't do that, to me, a lot of these systemic ideas building off that are pointless. furthermore, what do you do if MLS teams increasingly buy their 10s and 9s and have less incentive to "grow" them here? i could see them focusing on 8s, 6s, backs, keepers. but the NT needs creatives. everyone can't be a water carrier grown to support someone else. re a national style, my point is with a heterodox league you don't usually get there. 24 teams doing 24 things. people will hire different coaches with different concepts to pursue their own advantage. furthermore coaches get fired and so over time a team may move between concepts or even the more basic idea of are we "offensive" or "defensive." people who watch the leagues close tend to realize that the elite may play one way, midtable another, and relegation fighters another. there may be common values that help a NT -- which i worry we are abandoning -- but teams may play more cynically the closer to the drop they get. at which point, a NT coach coming in selling "system" is trying to force something in on top of all this heterodoxy, and on players not necessarily grown to play his way. this is probably true of any coach coming in, to some level. they will be offering their own thing. but right now we seem to be out chopping back any YNT growth around the heterodox clubs. there is nothing that says it has to be a complete, go-twiddle-our-thumbs delegation. we could have a residency. we could have national and/or regional teams competing not just in isolated tournaments, but together in the development league. we could have YNT in the USL on a single team. we could have team america in MLS. we instead seem to be very into "the market will provide." the NT will then recover precisely when the clubs below get their own developmental acts together. you're pointing out the history but not acknowledging the flaws in handing baby teams the complete responsibility to imitate 100 year old teams. and i am not saying take it all back. i am just questioning the "complete" part when they barely seem "responsible" at all at this point. why can't we have some of column b and column c in addition to the market ideas in column a?? is this a purity test? does this upset the ones who want their xerox perfect? what about practicality ie does it even work?
Academies arenot that difficult to get running on a high level. It's not like building up a team to compete in a league. You only need to get a bunch of coaches together with proven records on development of youth players and a style you want them to imprint in the kids that gives a seemless transition into the first team and facilities where you do the stuff. It doesnot take ages to do that.
I have trouble determininig exactly what you are trying to say but is the gist of your original post saying that implementing a "national style" would be easier/more effetive if we had a ynt residency program along the lines of Bradenton and that having 24+ different teams doing the development impedes that process? If so, my main point was that I disagree because I believe that technical skill is what gives a player flexibility to play in different systems even when they were not brought up in that system. (when I say system, that is pretty broad and is meant to include style). I also mentioned that some players would be naturally more suited to certain systems based primarily on physical characteristics (endurance/motor, speed etc). Perhaps I should have omitted those remarks because they are independent of training. I have to admit, I have never thought of values as something that is part of a playing style. Competitiveness, grit etc are not unique (IMO) to any style of play. You can play a direct style and give up just as easily as in a possession based style.
if the idea is the 'market will provide" hmmmm maybe wait until the market really does start providing well before giving them the whole job my dynamo can barely develop players to get club minutes much less NT players. to the point where people in our "attendance zone" like the servanias and cappis were, basically end ran us to FCD and normal select. and we can say the dynamo are failing at their job, and it's their problem, but at a density of other similar teams it speaks to how well the concept can work at present.
Getting a whole bunch of youth talent evaluators, scouts, recruitors, coaches, and administrators together in a country where few existed before............does take some time. Some MLS clubs recruited from overseas. Most of them didn't pan out actually. Prior to 2007, MLS clubs couldn't sign academy players to their first teams. There was no mechanism to do so, and thus no incentive to do it. There was no community of youth scouts and coaches in MLS. None. Few development experts amongst the professional clubs (there were a few in non-MLS clubs that had been successful). So around 2007 clubs starting building from scratch. From the absolute bottom up by developing their own coaches and scouts. Many of the first generation failed. There were successes (like say the FCD academy staff.) But in many places its stopping and starting stopping and starting...............learning about what works and doesn't work. Its hard for fans in other parts of the world to understand the concept of absolutely starting from scratch. If everybody involved in the professional sport in Holland was wiped off of Earth tomorrow (the Rapture)..................imagine starting over. People talk about FCD as the vanguard. Sure. But only this year did they start a reserve team!!! Every club is building and building at a steady pace. People seem to want to snap their fingers and have MLS development programs become equivalent to Argentina or France tomorrow. I'm sorry. We're FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR from that.
my point was never really about national style. it was that if we are trying to develop a more skilled player, and the NT adopts tactics/formation assuming that transformation, they could be completely foiled by the underlying structure not cooperating in that process. we have dismantled Bradenton. we have handed the teams the keys for the development machine. who is out there growing the players to play the way the NT wants? i am basically going one step beyond "if what we are growing right now is as clunky as ever, why adopt tactics unsuited?" and saying, "please remember they are barely seeing the players they want to shape." the latter explains why GB wouldn't have the tools to do what he wants. the academies have the players. they don't have to focus on NT mission statement ideas. they have their own priorities. re development is easy to fix, you are right that you could quickly make it a priority at a team, if they wanted. but at the moment, MLS only requires having academies, not caring one bit. several teams act like they don't care. that the switch could be flipped doesn't mean they intend to bother. i brought up "dibs" for a reason. i think HGP initially started out as cherry picking local players few had actually developed. for some MLS teams this is more about claiming players so they miss the draft than being any better than local select. "dibs" and running players through the select league on an academy team, is relatively cheap. development is you put more money into the same amount of players for the same level of dibs. pay full time salaries. scout more. get better coaches. get better facilities. send the team to better tournaments. build schools for the so called academies. perhaps even residencies. otherwise is this anything more than branded select? even if they cared, they would be building for 24 different teams, not for 1. if your idea is i want the New Player to have x y z then if the academies don't see those as their goals, or maybe just x, how are you getting that done? GB can then come in all he wants with his system but few may be ready to play it. so what. you can't wish the type of player you want into existence. i would even grant there are economics arguments in favor of developing and selling, that could pay for the money expended and then some. but you have to sell franchises that may be on limited budgets and risk averse to do this, when branded select is cheaper and gets the same dibs.
You're saying, "It's not like building up a team to compete in a league." This might be true in terms of an isolated team. But the NT is basically the sum total of the various development efforts at our disposal, plus a limited number of players other countries "grow." I am saying at a point of cumulative crappiness our academy system could show up in the failures of the final product. I am saying if the consensus is becoming that the pool doesn't match the tactics, this is one reason. I am saying that in terms of who would be responsible. I am also saying it in structural terms in the sense that if you create a pyramid where non-NT forces are the big drivers in development (by choice), how are you going to do changed player solutions? that arguably requires either anticipating where those teams are headed, or re-centralizing to get back the control to create the desired type. otherwise it's a pipe dream. Personally I am Mr. Practical. Let the pool dictate the tactics. This is what I have. This is what our best chance is with this bunch. Whether the academies have done their job is then a side issue, an explanation. But if your goal is wholesale change I don't know how you do that with anarchy beneath the umbrella. It's the contradiction of, "here are our players, develop them how you see fit," and "but can you pretty please make them into the players I want."
I think at least some of the problem lies in the easy appropriation of "academy." Does anyone but Vancouver actually have a school? "Well, you don't need one." Except the academy in Houston is like hell and gone from half the city in terms of where it got put, and if it's neither residential nor even a school, the kids or parents have to drive in rush hour like it's select practice, and people normally pick select near where they live. And then without looking under the hood or reading into results, a well run serious academy would be indistinguishable from branded select. If I opened Ajax Academy tomorrow wouldn't mean I had the slightest clue how to do what they do. I could nonetheless go honestly to cameras and tell them I have created an academy system that aspires to Ajax and will develop the next generation of local players. ironically, I think it plays upon snob ideas of xeroxing Europe. You say academy, they go ooooooh. But does the thing actually have that infrastructure, staff, seriousness? I think our formations, development, etc., we have gotten off the road where we did things that suited us, that we had somewhat thought through, and now we mimic Europe, and since we don't quite understand what we are doing, we then are not sure how to fix it. i think we're really into shallow-theoretical and pretty and not thinking through things in terms of pool reality, in terms of present structures, in terms of how to bend structures to our goals, in terms of practicalities.