LMFAO! Reminds me of the late California Victory owner Dmitry Piterman a little bit who had all these grand plans and was dismissive of the US soccer system... right up until Deportivo Alaves his the La Liga team was relegated and then relegated again...
Or, for that matter, inferior to Denmark and Sweden even though top players from those leagues come over and mostly fail to break into MLS lineups.
From what I observed while working , traveling and living across Europe and other parts of the world and with the exception of the top clubs , our American NCAA and even NAIA colleges have better facilities than most Division 1 professional teams.
I was encamped with Olympique Lyonnais Féminin as their team photographer while they were here for the WICC. Lucy Bronze (who spent a year at UNC) and I caught up and she pretty much savaged the facilities at the top women's clubs in Europe. She said only a few English clubs and a few other European clubs were on par with generic NCAA soccer facilities.
I just had Ted reply to a tweet of mine from back in May... Then some other random person as well... that was entertaining when I called the random dude out he was like, "I didn't even notice the time stamp, I would never do that normally"
When did he Gwen Oxenham's Under the Lights and In the Dark: Untold Stories of Women’s Soccer is a pretty good book on women's soccer around the world that I'd recommend reading. There are some pretty harrowing stories from teams in Eastern Europe and Brazil.
My cousins team at UC Berkeley toured Italy a few years back to play a few (primavera) youth teams who all trained on Serie A training facilities. When they played AS Roma’s boys at their training field called Trigoria , the pitch was in shambles. Granted as opposed to the Bay Area , the weather in Rome is horrid for grassy fields with hot and humid summers and even (by comparison ) fairly chilly winter. Tuscany’s fields are a little better but even though it never snowed , the weather was not good. When I lived there even some third and fourth division clubs had just dirt as fields. Things started changing a bit in the last deecadewith the advent of field turf or what they called it Italturf but not every club could afford that. Another cousin of mine who was with Lazio’s youth team and now plays beach soccer , was amazed when I showed him San Jose’s high school, junior college and university fields. He hadn’t ever seen such luxury.
Absolutely true. I played with a couple of guys from Croatia and they said that this was the first time they had ever played on such a nice grass field. And these were garden variety park type fields, nothing overly special. In some of the Mediterranean areas, I've seen fields that look like clay tennis courts. Sure, the top pro clubs have nice facilities, but any lower-division team is not going to be wealthy enough to have what a good college program will have. My old neighborhood club in Brussels (who were in the 3rd division at the time) had a stadium that was built before WW I with a wooden grandstand that looked like it was never renovated. I think now they tore it down and built a new one, but that was mainly because it was condemned and they had to.
Blasphemy. However, it is something that I've tried to explain to people that have said an open pyramid will result in more investment in the game. If you are a team that wants to be in the first division where the money is what are you going to do? Spend 80 million dollars on an academy and training complex (like RSL) that may pay off over the course of a decade or more? Or do you spend a lot less than that on player salaries and transfer fees to get into the top flight? Obviously option B. Then when you get there what do you do? Spend more money in order to stay in the league where the money is. And if you drop out of that league? Well now you need to spend money to stabilize the team because you are carrying several contracts that are too damn much for the league you find yourself relegated to. So when do those teams find the time or money to invest in actual infrastructure? For most of them, never. Even in the EPL you have a team like Newcastle saying they can't upgrade their facilities right now because the money is better spent bringing in new players so they don't fall out of the EPL. Meanwhile, Man City goes of and builds what is supposedly a 200 million plus pound complex. To me, the only thing that actually lets teams invest in real infrastructure is stability. That is why the top teams in Euro leagues do, because they know they are staying right where they are. MLS teams have been able to because they know where they will be in 5 or 10 years. So spending a huge chunk of change on youth facilities or training facilities is ok because it won't be a death blow to your continued stability.
We also had to pay to play on tennis style fustal asphalt court. Nowhere were there any parks or elementary schools like we have across the USA and Canada where you could play for free. When my cousin came out here, we would drive by a deserted school or park for example in the summer months and would look at the many deserted grass fields and he would say if it were Europe, those fields would be packed with pick up games…. On the flip side, many would argue playing on a street, dirt or sand could definitely strengthen and help you grow as a player.
I've done a bit of traveling in South and Central America and here's some of the "highlights": (1) I wanted to go see a local game at a town in Colombia. There was a little tiny stand and they were selling beer. I noticed there were rocks as big as three or four inches all over the field. Passes would often bounce off one and go in a different direction. I guess it negated skill and threw a bit more luck into the mix. Local team lost anyway. (2) Saw a local game in Panama where one side of the field was flooded and they were playing playing through about a foot of water. Nobody seemed to mind so it must have been a common occurrence. (3) Went to see a game in a suburb of Guadalajara. It was a long bus ride to get there and I had to use the restroom. It had an incredible stench because most of the toilets didn't flush and people were using them anyway. Found out later it was also the locker room. Players who come up from teams with facilities like that must be awfully tough and able to play though anything.
Might help explain why guys like Commisso don’t like USSF imposing minimum standards. They’re more attuned to a world of soccer that is such a free for all that teams are allowed to play in such conditions “for the love of the game.” And to them that overrides all.
Right. I've tried to tell the pro/rel zealots that pro/rel was a contributing factor in the wave of stadium disasters for exactly those reasons. Every dollar spent on maintaining or improving infrastructure wasn't a dollar spent keeping the team in the first division or climbing the pyramid. And the whole "spend money to make money" takes too long, as what good is a nice new stadium if you've dropped one or two divisions while it was built? England only has nice relatively modern facilities because the laws that were implemented post-Hillsborough forced their hands. And as so many U.S. based stadiums are built with at least some financial assistance - from permitting to restructuring roads/infrastructure to outright cash - from various municipal and state sources, implementing pro/rel would pretty much make getting a modern MLS stadium built all but impossible. No government entity is going to spend money when there's the risk that the team won't be in the top division - seeing revenue streams collapse.
Is this what the Germans call Hardplatz? Some semipro/amateur clubs in Germany (maybe 6th tier and below) play on that kind of surface. I think I've even seen photos of Bundesliga teams playing cup matches on Hardplatz, when playing away against lower-league opposition.
YEah, only the very top club have adequate facilities. Not even all of the first division teams have good facilities, or at least comparable with high school / college programs in the US. A football game in a small town in colombia?. Be gratefull there wasn't cows in the field.
Seconded. (Disclaimer: She's a fellow Dukie. Far more accomplished than I am, though.) When I wrote my book on the Washington Spirit, a player griped to me that the buses and other facilities were so much better at her ACC school. I asked her why she was surprised. She didn't talk much to me much after that.