to me a system founded heavily on club by club anarchy should be loosey goosey and bend to what the pyramid produces. i am not going to dictate how players get trained up. you will handle that. what have you given me? ok, this is what that group can play. i gave up control. my top team then needs to reflect a flexible response to what they all came up with. we are bizarrely acting like we have been on a centralized mission to change the players -- which we then think we will finalize at the NT level -- which has not really taken place in reality. bending to reality would also have the side benefit that maybe we would get more talent in hopefully, honest player eval as opposed to let's go look for theorized system players like an easter egg hunt or something.
I doubt that few if any of the academies have an actual school. What I believe most do is they form a partnership with a school. I think I also saw something about one academy (LAG?) providing tutors combined with computer based/online learning...if you call that a school.... Any residential program would have to provide for continued schooling. Whether that is on site or not would be the question. Each would have it's theoretical advantages and disadvantages. Not sure what Bradenton II would provide in schooling. They would have to provide something also.
in some big cities like houston, if you wanted to outcompete select, you need something to overcome/offset the travel, and also to start offering wrinkles select cannot. you would get more players in, either because the commute became less hellish, or because you offered a better education, or one stop shopping. to me if they don't offer that, or full time salaried coaches, or high level facilities, or some such step above, this is branded select, and the coaches may in fact also be coaching other select around town to make ends meet. you need player and coach magnets where it's special. otherwise all we did is cut the same select pie of players different to include the academies now. and add the development league.
Yes, there are quite a number of MLS residential academies at this point with more on the way. For instance, the YSC academy that the Union built in Philadelphia. https://www.yscacademy.com/ They have a World Cup winner coaching their U12 team . Kleberson. Actually, he won the international treble. World Cup, Copa America, and Confederations Cup. There are others. LAG, RSL, etc. Its not really about residential and non-residential at this point. Its about the quality of the coaching......................
Yes, Philadelphia: https://www.yscacademy.com/ https://www.nbcsports.com/philadelphia/philadelphia-union/inside-look-unions-ysc-academy https://www.philadelphiaunion.com/post/2018/06/11/ysc-academy-holds-graduation-18-seniors https://www.metro.us/philadelphia/i...ch-local-soccer-talent/zsJpkv---R721hJ67wuink https://phillysoccerpage.net/2016/12/20/a-day-at-ysc-academy/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2017/01/24/teaching-self-responsibility-at-ysc-academy/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2016/12/20/a-day-at-ysc-academy/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2016/11/16/ysc-academy-opens-its-doors-three-points/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2017/06/07/two-steel-players-graduate-hs-early/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2017/05/10/the-academys-future/ https://phillysoccerpage.net/2019/02/20/ernst-tanners-youth-emphasis/ Real Salt Lake: http://rslacademy.org/ Los Angeles Galaxy: https://www.lagalaxy.com/academy Some of the links for Philly are a few years old, but the information is still relevant.
US Soccer isn't trying to outsource development to MLS because they are cozy with MLS; they are cozy in part with MLS because outsourcing to pro clubs is one of three established development methods, and the one countries most like us use. The problem isn't that the method is wrong, so much as the scale hasn't built. Right now, MLS is probably putting close to $40M annually into it's academies -- not including facilties built, etc. Coaches are expensive, travel is expensive, etc. They may not be doing a great job right now -- and some are better than others -- but my point isn't that. It's that that $40M -- which doesn't include USL, MLS expansion, etc., is 40% of US Soccer's operating budget. Professional development has scale a federation could never dream of. And that's really important in the country the size of the US. (It's also worth noting that when Germany did Das Reboot, they had a much more invested pro system ... plus a Federation with a budget 10x per capita that the US is spending). MLS hasn't invested in development because they hate the US, or because they want Mexico to win (one of the dumber theories on this board, and that's saying something). It's because salaries in MLS have been low, transfers out have been non-existant, and the value of US development hasn't been demonstrated. As team payrolls widen, the value of younger talent increases. And as players like Tyler Adams and Alphonso Davies get sold, suddenly a revenue stream is more clear. Europe had to get over some of its prejudices. US (and Canadian) players had to get better. MLS owners needed to see the value (and yes, they move too slow). Creating the economic value of a development system takes time. Pro teams need an incentive and it's been largely theoretical until recently. I laugh at most of this thread because half the people are basically like "MLS should develop young players but we should also make it so they get no economic benefit from it." -------------------------- There are other models, to my mind. One is the "less rich, soccer crazed country" version, like Uruguay. There's no way for the US to duplicate the value of everyone playing in the streets as kids, of having a ton of essentially free coaches for the younger ages, or to mimic the economic pull or trying to be a pro players. This model can't be duplicated in the US. The other is the Iceland "massive investment in a small area." Iceland basically used all their UEFA money and made it so that soccer was PE for every school kid with a UEFA licensed coach. The US could maybe do that ... for the population of Iceland. But A) can you imagine the political nightmare from every region not selected B) would the government consent and C) you'd still have a bunch of kids picking other sports. ------------------------------------ MLS isn't the problem; it actually can be the solution. The focus should be on helping them and USL and other pro leagues find the business case, and then helping figure out how to teach and develop players better. In addition to that, we also need to solve: * Why we develop a tiny number of players we really strong skills. We almost never have someone who can nail a free kick or clinically finish. We almost never develop someone with an elite first touch. My guess is that we don't have enough kids play young enough but I'm no expert. * We need to find ways to get the very best athletes involved. We may have had athletics ahead of skill before, but the lesson we should have learned was not to trade one for the other ... it was to better teach the athletes skills instead of letting them dominate on athletic ability alone.
You're now talking about the youngsters to develop and how to find them. That indeed is another matter, but is unattached to the simple starting of the academy itself. That's a reasonable easy thing to do. To get kids that are worth developing is a matter outside the academy responsibilities.
Abroad they think Ajax is the only one and the pinnacle, but it isnot. They got the most expensive set up in grounds/facilities and staff, but at the moment the best academy is about 50 kilometers north at AZ Alkmaar. Ajax in fact aquires youth players from other academies (Frenkie de Jong from Willem II etc.) and for marketing objectives sell abroad they're an Ajax product, while more than often they're not, but the foreign press only knows Ajax and tend to attribute a player sold by Ajax as an Ajax developed player. In other words, the academies are spread all over the country and arenot at all expensive operations and produce world class players. For example at AZ now plays a sublime player developed by them, 20 yo Calvin Stengs, and Ajax are eager to put their hands on him. If AZ was going to sell him to a club abroad he would fetch around 25-30 million, but if he now was at Ajax those clubs would pay 15-20 million more because they think they buy an Ajax product. One has to get to the bare facts of what constitutes a good academy and that doesnot take rocket science and also not a huge amount of money.
Is the league young or is it just 3 years away from being a top league in the world? It looks like we agree on this... So most teams have... yet to have any clue what they're doing in terms of youth and player development. However, it angers me and you dont seem to have a problem with it. How long can these teams have no clue before it starts to bother you. LAFC looks to have made youth a priority and have made a lot of progress in a few years. Why arent they held up as a standard for what can be done and criticize the ones that fall way short?
Something to point out. Current US Soccer Technical Director Earnie Stewart had some influence in helping AZ turn their academy into a focus for their first team. He also had a hand in helping mold the direction and integration of Philadelphia's YSC Academy and the Union first team while he was in Philly. That should give US soccer fans some hope. He knows how to get entities on the same page and pulling in the same direction. Now granted doing that at the national team level for a country the size of the US will be a different level challenge for Stewart.
The biggest problem in a country as massive as the United States with as many kids in the sport as the US has...……………………..is generating the youth soccer infrastructure on a nationwide scale. Yes, you can build a pretty good residential academy (or semi-residential academy) in Dallas. Texas alone is the size of much of central Europe. Clint Dempsey drove two hours each way to train in Dallas from Nacogdoches. Just building a youth soccer infrastructure, developing coaches, developing infrastructure, etc. in Texas is a major challenge. FC Dallas now has youth affiliate clubs in 12 other cities in Texas. Starting from scratch with local coaches and scouts. Then they're bringing the best players from those clubs to their DFW operation. But even that barely covers a sliver of Texas, much less anywhere else in the country. And it'll be a long time before the coaches and infrastructure in those cities produces consistent professionals. The best is probably the El Paso affiliate. Ricardo Pepi, the FCD youngster on the U17 World Cup team comes from El Paso, Texas. How long is the drive from El Paso to Dallas? 9.5 hours. That's just Texas. Its a completely different job than the Belgians have or the Dutch or even the English have.
Undeniable, but the Dutch infrastructure is even in Europe of an unprecedented level. The French and Germans changed the way they developed players around 2010 iirc the Dutch way. One thing they couldnot copy was our finemazed network of amateur clubs cooperating with the pro clubs. I recall one of the German commenting that that would take decades, so they went for a centralization into DFB regional centres. Edit: The main point in what try to get across is that the youth development isnot exclusive at the pro club academies. It's in the Dutch setting all over the place at our amateur clubs. They're not spending enormous amounts of money on it. We simply have KNVB licenced youth coaches all over the place in all ages clubs that donot charge much to be a playing member. Just take a look at the membership fees this club in my neighbourhood charges (those fees are year fees! From this club several Feyenoord and PSV professionals came. https://www.spartaan20.nl/contributie/
I think it takes a fair amount of time. Look at the path of the LA Galaxy. The Galaxy was one of the earliest teams to make a commitment to the academy and had both well-regarded youth teams and a plan that led from the U-x to the USL to the starting team. It took several years to see that the plan failed. The star youth were successful at the U level and the USL, but were not good enough for MLS. Realizing this, they brought in a new general manager who demoted the old academy director and brought in one of his own. Now they brought in a new USL coach. Unfortunately they had to let Kleiban go, so the youth coaches will be overhauled too. These should be improvements, but who knows. It took 5 years to figure out the old system wasn't working and it will take another 5 years to figure out if the new staff will. My view is the opposite of @feyenoordsoccerfan . Getting a new set of players is mostly about spending money. Developing an integrated development culture requires a lot of different things to work together, mostly by people who are inexperienced at it. That's hard.
If the target is just get a team to win a trophee than it indeed is just a matter of spending money on a coach and players to make it hopefully happen. If it's about building a club (notice! not a team) with a distinct character that has to be carried by the organisation as a whole, it is a long and arduous job.
guys.....does MLS care about the USMNT? no. they care about integrating MLS into the USMNT.... maybe they don't think that integrating MLS into the USMNT will decrease the success of the USMNT...BUT I DO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! if anything, being in MLS should be a slight detriment to getting into the USMNT compared to eu etc...but at the moment it is like a red carpet.... MLS would benefit from a good USMNT even if they werent forcing it to be MLS-heavy like they currently are.... it is embarrassing.
It only takes so long because they dont know what they are doing and it isnt a priority. What they pay for foreign players continues to outpace what they can develop. It really doesnt make any sense. They didnt have to fire Kleibann, but chose to be shortsighted anyway. They dont know what they are doing, but yet fire the first guy who appears to because his brother gave a couple kids good advice. Kleibann shows that if you know what you are doing, you can build a program in So Cal pretty quickly. Unfortunately, they tore it down and going start over. I wouldnt bet on them. I am sure MLS fans will just keep cheering them whether succeed or fail. MLS is the ultimate participation trophy. How are they going get an integrated culture when the owners dont buy into it and fire the guy that was integrating the culture they wanted?
And all of this is just lipstick on the pig. It's about coaching. Especially youth coaching. The USSF does it's dead level best to make this difficult, expensive, time consuming, and inefficient to the needs of not just MLS academies but especially non-MLS ones. Quality coaching matters. See Iceland. Near retirement MLS players can't work on their coaching badges because of reasons. Not only is it dumb but it's harmful to our future. More online course work is needed. Cheaper fees, a greater spread of locations for coaching courses, etc. Why can we not start with one of the easier things to fix that actually makes the biggest difference?
Coaching is a problem at all levels in the system. Still, the question is: if Egg is gone, who better than him will take his place? Being realistic, it's not going to be a Euro big name, and the USSF has basically banned the people with a Spanish last name (so forget Almeyda or even Ramos). Who's left? Friedel? Vermes? Magath? Stöger? Klinsmann again? Some other second-tier Euro manager? Some other MLS manager?
You first need to get sorted what precisely is expected from him. If it's a kind of Jack of all trades (developer, development infrastructure builder, beating Mexico coach, etc.) it's a long wait for success. Only megalomaniac coaches like van Gaal think of themselves to be able to do that all.
One of the main reasons we have not solved some of these problems is just that it takes time. It seems like we have been playing soccer for a long time now (AYSO began in 1964...almost 60 years ago) and soccer was being played in pockets aroond the country before that but the growth has taken a while to get going. If you look at absolute numbers, we hve had large numbers of players for quite some time but if you go more deeply, and consider the lack of density of players and more importantly, the lack of density of serious players has been a hindrince. Even now, top players have to travel long distances to find competition. I truly believe that most people that wonder why we haven't had more success to this point in time greatly underestimate the time it SHOULD take for the US to produce top players with top skills, first touch etc. Add to this the time that it SHOULD take for us to develop a top level coaching generation. (the most important part of that group are the grassroots parents, AYSO and young youth coaches)
No doubt. The challenge in the US is that those elite amateur clubs are few and far between. They do exist, mostly around our big cities. A lot of them are now being affiliated with MLS as the league continues to expand. [Scott Gallagher in St. Louis for instance.] They're in the Development Academy, so the same league system as the MLS youth clubs. How many licenced youth coaches of quality would you need in order to cover just Texas? And consider if you start from scratch to train these coaches, how long would it take before they've really started to produce professional caliber players? If we just think about Texas, there are huge cities that produce very few professional players. Hell, metropolitan Houston is almost 7 million people. The 5th largest metropolitan area in the United States. Its larger than metropolitan Madrid or Berlin or Rome. It is many times larger than metropolitan Amsterdam. How do you start from scratch to support Houston alone? We have one or two youth academies of note there. The Dynamo, who are perpetual underachievers in terms of development..............and the Texans affiliate. They won a DA title a few years ago with players like Chris Cappis and Chris Richards. [Both of them subsequently moved to FC Dallas and then on to Europe. Hobro and Bayern Munich respectively] So we have two academies that are sorta good. Each one with a U15 or U17 or U19 team that start 20 or so players each. So you have opportunities in those academies for 100 or so youngsters out of how many millions? Its going to take generations and generations of investment and growth before Houston develops players at a reasonable scale. The Dynamo seem to have a very minimal scouting and development department right now. Its a daunting challenge. I'm only talking about one city in the corner of Texas. One city in one state in the country. Hell, the population of just Texas is three times that of Belgium or Portugal. Dallas in the north of the state has a loooooooooooooooong history of producing players. Way back to say Kyle Rote Jr., arguably the best USMNTer in the 70s.
This is the major issue with getting academies starting to deliver talents for the pro scene. They havenot got the supporting infrastructure to do alot of the work that goes in it before the talents emerge. By the way, in the USA context our amateur clubs may come across as elite, but they are in our eyes ordinary clubs with nothing special to talk about. Spartaan 20 I mentioned only two years ago they promoted to the First Class of the amateur league, while they have been playing in the second tier for 30 years. So it's not like you need elite amateur clubs to produce talents fit to be picked up by the likes of Feyenoord and PSV. They simply have to be there, as their main task is to provide their members opportunity and joy to play soccer and in the process of giving kids that opportunity they by default (not designed or tasked to) also function as sifts that spot those who are worth putting into their selection teams (you see in the contribution fees a special selection fee for those that get the special attention) to develop on their level. The beauty of the Dutch fine mazed landscape of amateur clubs lies in the fact the Dutch donot have to search for talents as these automatically come to the forefront by joining clubs just to enjoy playing soccer. In fact the production of talents is just a happy byproduct of providing opportunity to enjoy playing soccer. It never was intended as such and still isnot.
This post just shows how poorly we are doing. The fact is less densely populated than Europe would suggest we need more lower division teams. USL has made strides over the last few years, but there isnt a huge incentive to start a club and those that do dont have incentive to have youth academies. The federation has allowed MLS to completely control the game in this country and they have slowed the growth of the game immensely. Here is the landscape in Germany.... This is a vast network where 36 Bundesliga organizations tap into the more than 25.000 clubs who have more than 100.000 registered youth teams where the basic training and development of the players happen. https://www.cantpasscantplay.com/2015310youth-development-in-german-soccer-part-2/ Comparing Germany to Texas wouldnt be fair as the population of Germany is so much higher. Combining California with Texas get a population that is fairly close. How does it look for two of our best states for producing players? There 5 MLS teams and 10 second division teams. No idea on the number of clubs they have to tap into. I dont see 12 affiliate clubs as doing that much to get us where we need to be. Why would they do more when their fans celebrate such little accomplishments?
That wasnt the question people who wanted Klinsman out, but to answer your question, bringing Klinsmann back would be a huge upgrade and would be a very good fit for where we are right now. Our biggest problem right now are the players and specifically the ones Berhalter selects. JK had a much better idea for talent. He also was a good recruiter and track record of working with young players. Who cares tactics arent his thing. He'd role out young talented players and we would qualify for the WC. He would then get an assistant who was strong tactically. It would never happen, but would be a huge upgrade to this mediocre MLS coach and these mediocre MLS players.