voros used to be one of THE very best posters on here...iconoclastic but still on point and relevant. Now, he's like Bobby Fischer. It seems like his brilliance has destroyed his sanity. His biggest problem is that he thinks youth development is easy. He wants a quick fix. That's insanity.
Nah - I get what he's saying - and I think he's at least partly right. I don't agree that Cahill is currently keeping any future star players on the bench and not a good signing, but I agree that Red Bull should have a goal of producing guys like Cahill regularly. I once read an article about how Australia makes scouting and identifying potential athletes a science, down to the right kind of intelligence and what kind of bodies have the best chance of success. We need to do a lot better. Throwing money at the problem may not necessarily be that effective, but how is it we still are producing soccer players/athletes with poor first touches and limited soccer brains? Sure it takes time which is why I don't agree that Cahill is a poor choice, but does Cahill have transcendent creativity or ball skills? Is he really going to raise the soccer IQ of future players tomorrow? Maybe. Isn't part of England's problem that they are an importer of talent, especially in midfield creativity? Isn't that the model we are following that we are mostly assuming we can only produce water bearers/donkeys and not the creative intelligence/skill players? We should be doing everything possible to understand why so many countries are doing so much better with much, much less. Why does Japan seem to have better ball skills than we do? Why do Middle Eastern Countries seem to be much better in possession? We've obviously come a long long way even from 10 years ago, but are we growing in the right direction? Are we going to be like England where we require greater outputs of energy to stay in games against teams with better ball skills? Soccer at certain levels may be entrenched in old school English mentalities but that doesn't mean Red Bull needs to be.
If you're looking for a simple answer to an incredibly complex question, you can start with the fact that even young Americans in specialized academy systems still only train about 1/3 as much as their European counterparts. You say "still" as if we've been making a serious effort for decades without producing results, when in reality we're just now in the beginning stages of a cultural shift towards more effective youth training systems. Hell when this current generation of American professional players was growing up there was barely an access to watch the sport regularly on TV, how do you expect anything other than limited soccer brains? Check out this NY Times article from a few months back, it covers some of the issues pretty well: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/s...-school-players-to-choose.html?pagewanted=all
Good stuff - thanks for the link. Reading that makes me agree with those thinking kids should be kids. I personally think nature trumps nurture and kids with supreme soccer skills are born, not made -- and we need to stop thinking about bigger, stronger, faster so much, but as you say, it's an incredibly complex problem and we've come a long way in a short time.
tim cahill is a proper bet for nyrb. he's the realistic upper echelon of players who are ready to come to mls. a sure thing? no. a big big star? again, no. but a widely recognizable name. the goal for a 'superclub' in mls isn't a team chock full of international talent. it's a team where at almost each position you find someone well known if you follow the league, whether from a previous mls curriculum or from overseas. nyrb are well along that path. we'll see if it translates to victories.
http://www.mlssoccer.com/news/article/2012/07/30/cahill-says-ny-move-was-opportunity-he-couldnt-pass that made my day
I've seen the problem up close with my local club, CASL. It's not a great mentality. All I can do is coach my teams...and I've put a BUNCH of kids into the "travel team in waiting" program, considering I only have 2 kids and so I only coached two teams. My kids work on stepovers and Cruyffs at U8. But this isn't really the place for a long exploration of the issue. This is the Tim Cahill thread. And the Cahill signing has nothing to do with MLS youth development.
Makes me wonder if he knows he signed with MLS? But perhaps some give the league a lot more credit than we here at home do. And being from Australia, having a very similar sporting culture to the U.S., I am sure he understands what he is coming to, with soccer being way down the totem pole of popularity