One Man's Plan to Change US Soccer

If you want to change US Soccer then put your funding and use your team to try to start up a legit statewide Texas league (or if that already exists, then work on making it better).

Pro/rel needs to start from the ground up and not the top down like a lot of people seem to think. The only way to do this is to have as many strong state/regional leagues as possible so that eventually they can take their top teams and put them in a 'higher division' that spans out further... for example if Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas all had decent state leagues they could each take the top 3-5 teams or so and create a "Great Plains Premier League" to promote to and be relegated from - now instead of small state leagues we've got slightly larger regional leagues. If this happens across the country eventually it's a piece of cake to work up to a top level nation wide league with several divisions and hundreds of teams under their umbrella, which could really force a shakeup.

There's this league in Florida called FESL which is making great steps towards this - but ultimately it will need other states to follow suit in order to achieve a national pyramid of promotion and relegation.

 

I totally agree. Let's deal with the reality of the world in which we live. Parents are not going to let their kids do this anymore......unless it is done through their schools.

Supervised free play on a basketball court playing Futsal. It is low cost, inclusive and in a gym away from the white vans.

To make your Ronaldhinho comparisons. He learned the game through Futsal. Robinho learned the game through Futsal.

The sandlot is just not going to happen in our fear based society. Putting it into a gym could happen.

 

i seen nothing unique about what the Original poster is doing. There are football clubs doing the same thing described and have been for 20 years. Some more then that. And all respect to those that love the U.S. open but most Americans could care less. It's barely on tv. And you're "shake up" assumptions seemed based on an event that few people give a ton of weight and the "shake up" you're talking about isn't going to happen even if an amatuer team did win. But charging high prices for kids of means to take soccer lessons is not new by any means.

As for MLS players as instructors, personally i can think of better. One cause players often make bad instructors and poor managers.

i'd love to see MLS make changes that make it more like the leagues i grew up on by its never going away from a salary cap, EVER. And what holds competition back within the league is single entity because teams that aren't profitable can ride the coat tails of the ones that are. Not to mention teams get no money for selling players, or very little, there's little incentive to develop players since it won't lead to revenue. What they need is a significant salary cap bump to allow profitable teams to grown and there are several parts of team revenue that need to stay with the team that generates it. Now sharing tv, and percentages of gate reciepts is all good but don't count on seeing no salary cap. better just hope it get's raised. because truthfully, Galaxy and Seattle can afford a ten mill cap and it wouldn't hurt them. And they'd be a damn good team.

But what your doing isn't new and it doesn't hit any segment of the market that's not already addressed. Want to make an impact. Go build a bunch of 5 a side pitches in the 5th ward with real nets so we can have some americans that can actually shoot. Cause in many of these places there's nowhere to play even if people wanted to play, which, most people realize a lot don't. Then go start a free league, not a one time clinic that will leave the next day but a free league (or hell $10) and run it.

 

I wish you success. While I can expect criticism of any business plan, some of the posts seem a bit harsh. I applaud any plans for departure from the typical club's league approach for pre-teens. The main thing is to keep refining your plan as you learn more.

As to comments about the player-coaches salaries, $60,000 a year in LA is poverty level. Lots of people support families on $60,000 a year in other areas of the country. So you have to take into consideration the locality when you discuss projected business expenses like salary.

This whole debate about the six MLS players seems a bit distracted. What you are hiring is six youth coaches, who can also play at a high level. Which means still young enough to run for 95 minutes. The MLS bit is just icing on the cake. If just one is a former MLS player, the sales punch is still there. Its the quality of cake that is important in the long run. As long as you have a DOC that can train them and direct player training, their lack of coaching experience is not a problem. Whether your budget can only afford three, four, or five, instead of six I see as a refinement, not a roadblock. Whether you charge one kid $100 for one week or five kids $20 for one day each I see as a refinement, not a roadblock.

About the suggestion to invest in infrastructure, I think that is a mistake. You want to supply a kind of professional training to the community, which they can't get from the local youth clubs. Kids can play futsal on any flat surface. You don't need to build facilities to provide training.

If you are interested in Galactico's suggestions above, the Claudio Reyna Foundation is doing pretty much exactly what he is suggesting. http://www.claudioreynafoundation.org/Welcome.html

 

I think the biggest issue here is that it looks for all the world like an amplification of the same terrible system that prevails around the country, which will make it more exclusive.

Well, that and that it appears to be a front for making a US Open Cup run from the "unfancied lower divisions".

 

Ya, I think it's the mixed message.

If you goal is the kids- your price is too high, and acceptance is based only on cash flow, not talent.

Also- there is no proof that other than being able to say "trained by MLS talent", that there is any benefit to having former MLS players train kids.

If your goal is to have an elite NPSL team to make a deep run into the US Open Cup- then you are exploiting kids and their parents to do so.

These seem on the surface to be conflicting goals, and likely one, if not both, will fall short.

 

I don't disagree with the benefit of improving the quality of coaching for younger kids, that was never being debated by me.

But one of the greatest problems we have in this country is that a huge percentage of the population is being excluded by the age of 10 from quality training based on ability to pay. I'm not just talking about inner city kids here, this also includes many middle-class families that can't afford to fork out $5000+ on soccer per child.

The presented program brings the selection of kids based on income from 10 down to age 3! This of course has absolutely no basis on athletic ability, only based on whether the parents are rich/gullible enough to pay for over-priced coaches to play keep away games with their toddlers.

I say overpriced coaches because $60k/year is a significant jump from the minimum salary MLS players are making currently. If a guy is being paid more than that in MLS, then he's not going to leave to play for a D4 team and coach whiny toddlers 4 days a week. Please correct me if I'm wrong -- with proof of the willing MLS players and their current salaries.

As RicardL pointed out, the chances of making it to the pros (not even being a superstar) are extremely low. The US's greatest potential lies in our large population and misguided plans such as these only weaken such an advantage by excluding kids - in this case while they are still in diapers -- I doubt there will be a policy that the kids must be potty trained, why exclude parents willing to fund the US Open cup team??

In addition you have the direct advice of thousands of medical experts against sports specialization at an early age.

Yes, we need to improve the quality of coaching at all levels. No, this should not be done by excluding the vast majority of the population and exploiting children of gullible parents.

 

why is soccer so middle class in america?

 

Any and every sport in the U.S. is a middle class sport if you want to play at the highest level available if you think about it. It's middle class because none of the leagues, MLB, NFL, NBA pay for youth sports clubs. I think this claim that Soccer is a middle class game is a vague claim. I see many low middle to upper low income families kids playing in the same league my kid (middle class) plays in. Every race is represented heavily except maybe there could be more Black players but that is their cultural choice rather than any sort of exclusion.
I don't know how poor some families are but I know some who are struggling heavily.
There are many many leagues that poor families can have their kids playing in in the poorer parts of my area of the country. Those leagues are intense but they are not to the caliber of play of the top, pay to play league.

 

This post, to me, falls so far short of why Ronaldinho, and all others, became a great player. I don't know how much instruction Ronaldinho received and I bet you don't know either. He was probably surrounded by family members who taught/instructed him on all the skills of the game. He was probably surrounded by family members who absolutely loved the game, watched it constantly with him and they all studied the game as well as played the game.
He probably logged many many hours of practice under the supervision of someone who cared about what he was doing. AND YES, for fun he would play the game anywhere he could to show off his acquired skills from the practice he did. Why did he choose to play on a patch of anything, because he was taught from birth that Soccer is something special and players who can play this game really well are heroes.
Practice under any circumstance is not bad. There are many roads that can lead to the promise land. The only answer is not concrete, or dirt, or rag balls or garbage cans as goals.

 

It's actually upper-middle class.

Baseball, football and basketball have been the working and middle class sports of choice throughout the various decades and left soccer out on the margins.

Soccer is sloooowly creeping close to the mainstream. Lacrosse is starting to take its place as the suburban kid sport that not a lot of people know about.

 

What does it matter whether MLB, NFL and NBA pay for youth sports clubs or not? That isn't where their players come from. They come from the public school system, and from colleges that provide a free ride to pro-quality athletes.

 

Soccer is not a middle class game in the rest of the world because kids play for very little money or not at all because sport clubs pay for facilities, coaches and equipment in the hopes of selling players they developed. We don't have that luxury here, parents must pay those bills. That's why we call it a middle class sport because you have to have expendable money for your kids to play at higher levels. The emphasis on Soccer is because we compare ourselves to the way the rest of the world does it and we are different to most. We don't compare ourselves to the rest of the world in other sports, so this issue doesn't come up.
If you look at any high skill sport, like Soccer, in the U.S. and you will see some large bills that had to be paid for the athlete to have gotten to that level.

 

In soccer, those bills are paid for by the parents, I agree. This is not true in football and basketball. In those sports, they are paid by the people who pay property taxes that fund the school system (which sometimes are the parents of the athletes, but not always) and by parents of other college students (the ones who aren't on scholarship).

 

Really, only football relies on high school (which isn't always public school) as its primary development system. AAU basketball and the mishmash of youth baseball organizations are much more important to college and pro scouts.

 

To be perfectly honest, Football is not a high skill sport. It's a specialized, athletic sport. This is why you can take an athletic kid in High School and create a Football player worthy of College. You cannot do that in Soccer, Baseball or Hockey to name a few. Basketball is more skill than Football and specialized in a different way. If you never played before High School, you would not make it in most cases.

 

I don't question this at all. I think you are right. What I'm questioning is your original statement that all American sports are middle class because the pro leagues (and the NFL is one of the ones you cited) don't pay for youth sports clubs.

 

All the skillful professional/Olympic sports that required many years of training/hours from 5 years old or so on will require parents to pay for the top leagues/coaches and associated costs. When people talk of Soccer being a middle class sport, they are talking about the kids of the middle class families are the ones who can afford to play it at the higher levels because of the cost.
That cost does not exist in Europe and South America the way it does here, making the game available to all players because the professional clubs, ie. Manchester United, AC Milan, Barcelona and even the Div 2 teams, pay for youth development in the hopes of developing a sellable player. Smaller clubs develop youth in the hopes of selling them young to the bigger clubs.
In this country, people theorize that we are missing training a large pool of potential talent because of the prohibitive costs.
I simply argue, it's not just Soccer, it's most of our sports. It's just focused on in Soccer because we compare ourselves to the rest of the world, where we do not in our "top" supported sports.
Football, I agree, High Schools and Colleges produce those players. I can't really think of another sport that that can be said for on a mass level.

 

I agree that pay-to-play is a serious problem holding us back in soccer. I'm not convinced that this is true across the board with other sports. We seem to be agreed that it is not true of football, and I have my doubts about basketball. I think there is still plenty of opportunity via the high school route for a would-be pro basketball player. You mention Olympic sports, and I am sure that the high schools and colleges are still the primary source of talent in track.

 

Good points.

IMHO I'd add the layout of cities/towns and transport. In English-speaking countries cities are "build out", while (Continental) Europeans and Latin Americans are "build up". The result is apartment blocks and row houses/favelas versus suburbs and exurbs. In Europe & South America a 10-year old who starts a 5-a-side game goes 1-200 yards round the corner to his pals' homes to round them up; in the UK it's 1-2 miles at the least, double that in the US. Add in better public transport, at least in continental Europe, and getting to-from games in the US makes a reliable car that is big enough to carry 5/6 kids absolutely essential.

Also, with the partial exception of baseball, the college athletic scholarship system has made the NCAA colleges the lower-Division structure for the dominant US sports. Smaller sports follow that model because the model is there and so is the supporting infrastructure, which is there because the model is there, which is there because . . . The result is the scouting and academy system for NFL and NBA is outsourced to the colleges, who outsource it to the Senior High Schools, and so on. Almost everyone & everything runs through the colleges, which are run by and for the middle classes.

 

For the students, maybe it is true that the colleges are run for the middle classes. For revenue-producing sports like football and basketball, they'll take the athletes at whatever economic level they can find them.

Maybe basketball is a middle-class sport in Ireland, but it's not in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, etc.

 

What really gets me is this unrealistic vision to get the Open Cup because this one time Dallas Roma made a miracle run. The fact is that in the MLS era only once has this trophy been won by a non-MLS team and that was the fully pro Rochester Rhinos. The also fully pro- Charleston Battery has made a final. The fully pro Montreal Impact has won the improvised Canadian championship over MLS Toronto once (and they will be MLS soon), and the fully pro-Puerto Rico Islanders have qualified for the Concacaf Champions League through the Carribean and upset some MLS teams on the way. A team I fear in the US Open Cup is the Harrisburg City Islanders - they have knocked out MLS teams in more than one year despite being D3. The Dallas Roma guys might still be rocking Dallas, but have we ever heard from them again?

Even with the 'not professional' ex-MLS scrubs making 60k as coaches this team needs serious luck to do anything and get past 2nd and 3rd division pro teams (assuming they even qualify in the amateur brackets), let alone MLS teams. The MLS teams might not care that much in early rounds, but the USL teams sure as hell do.

 

Good point you bring up

But in Europe it is the same, if your kid plays with the U10 or whatever of a pro team the ''membership'' might cost you 200-300-400 US per year.

Than again, if your kid is not really talented, and plays with the U whatever of a amateur team this might drop to like 50 US per year

The Bosman verdict lead to these ''membership''fees

 

*Ahem*

Status report?

(Check out http://regalsfc.com for why I bring this up)