Back in the day the focus in the USA was backwards: physicality was used to weed out players at 13-15, so only those who were early bloomers got their shot. Unfortunately, many guys who were smart and technical only hit the growth spurt at 16-17, and by then they had already been discouraged from being part of the program.
Where did I say causation? Correlation? Maybe, there's too much noise in the mix to get clarity and these are kids where the roster hit rate is still largely minuscule (usually about 15-25% of field players hit to any degree at all, and as such, the failure rate is super high), I just see relevance, that's it, you don't like it, that's fine.
Do they really never have camps? Does this mean they basically gather for international tournaments never having played together before? On the other hand you have Mexico who basically seems like they are having camps non-stop. Not that they don’t have good players, but part of me thinks they do so well in youth competitions because they’re youth teams are constantly playing with each other. Like they’ve already had multiple camps for their U-23 team for the next Olympics.
The youth Mexican NT operationally is superior to ours now. They just had a u17 camp a couple weeks ago and will be taking their 2005s and a few 06s to Europe next week for friendlies. I think for every age group this is their 3rd or 4th camp this year already. Even before Covid and USWNT settlement, they were operationally kicking our ass x3 in frequency.
This has to do a lot with the profits Mexico gets from playing so many times in US soil due to the contract they have with SUM. I know Mexican fans hate these games and call them "moleros" or "molero tour" but what they fail to acknowledge is that FMF gets enough money to fund all their YNT in both boys and girls. They have so many camps that players, at least a core, knows each other well. It requires a lot of money from any Federation to run so many camps for multiple YNT a year. Canada's Federation is broke. USSF had to spend money on attorneys for the lawsuits by the women for equal pay that apparently not much money was left over that they had to ask for donations. FMF has a big advantage here over both US and Canada.
I disagree here a bit -- UEFA doesn't take the youth world cups seriously, but they do take the continental tournaments seriously. And sure enough, you can see the same patterns -- senior success preceded by youth triumphs -- in those competitions as you do with the youth world cups. Now, is it just correlation? Or is there causation? I dunno, but it can't hurt. Especially since the tournaments serve as shop windows for some transfers.
I think scouts are always interested in seeing players going up against international competition. I recall Erling Haaland in a Generation Adidas Cup game in the USA.
What's odd is Mexico doesn't get this bump to their senior team. Their youth results are all fluff as hardly any of their players on those teams move up to the senior ranks. So would you rather do really well and sometimes win those tournaments are not do as well but move a bunch of players up who are then familiar with each other as they gain knowledge of playing other national teams in other countries?