Why the US Men Will Never Win a World Cup by Beau Dure

I have no clue what you're talking about.
Please quote me in relation to your post.

 

Löw's fault, and you better go to the German threads that discuss the way he managed the whole tournement, was according to the German posters his stubborness to stick with players that werenot able to deliver in terms of fitness and form. In the pre WC tournement he played a team that was thrilling and winning. In the WC he felt back to his trusted old guard who were out of form and lost.

 

The real odd thing is you advocating a style the Germans costed a 24 year drought and right out humiliations.

 

you talk like you are scouting for center mids when we have 11 positions to fill with other needed characteristics. you talk like at those other positions there aren't other characteristics we need like speed, height, defensive aptitude. or like i can't scout people for the speed and height type positions for those traits, and then SPEND 8 YEARS SKILLING THEM UP. yes, i might want my 10 to be the kid who is a dribbling prodigy age 5. but my center back needs to be wired to smash age 5 dribbling prodigies and not so much like he is a playmaker. or my team will lose.

moreover, it's a constellation of qualities that makes one great. maradona was not slow. i want him before valderrama because one guy is special in 10 ways and not just 1.

the end result in houston of following your skills obsession is we abundantly produce slow 5' 7" Latin mids who are ok on skill but not world class, can't hang with the speed of play, can't do good team defense. basically USL level.

 

I have no clue what you're talking about.

 

You have a bad habit of addressing issues not raised in unreadable long posts trying to explain what you think.
To make things more readable quote what you want to address and then stick to that part without meandering into a lot of side streams that donot add clarity.

 

You've got an endless imagination to distort what someone has written, hence your dodging quoting posts, and on top of that post an insane diarrhia of text that has head nor tail and the cohesion of sand and with the same fertility in it to grow a discussion on the subject that leads somewhere. Your texts are all over the place.

Donot need to. You're doing a brilliant job on that on your own.

 

that last post is pure ad hominem with obnoxious language. several recent posts are like that. they're being reported. with the exception of the development post you're not making substantive points and you're just trying to be nasty.

can we get back to substance?

 

you seriously can't see how some foot speed and endurance might make maradona a different and superior player to valderrama, in terms of personal ability and team success? and i say this as someone who took a photo with the latter and was impressed with his foot skills. but one of them could make similar passes and dribble 100 yards at full speed, and the other had one note he played all day, and his teams won little hardware.

to me it's a set of things that make a star. i knew plenty of childhood skill prodigies who quit progressing or became useless for lack of foot speed as we grew more athletic and the game faster. i also know my home MLS club loves tiny slow fairly technical players who have limited MLS impact because they can't outrun anyone, aren't great team defenders, and only offer ok skills. we overrate how much skill a pure skill player needs to be special and compete at the pro level. we underrate how much athleticism one needs to have to be useful in pro soccer. one reason colombia and tampa bay never won a thing is you end up 10 v 11 on defense.

good teams are looking for a constellation of attributes, not just skill, and are also shopping for players with attribute sets to play positions other than central midfield.

i also think you're ignoring that when we are talking a U10 academy, that if you can't make players more skilled in 8 years you're doing it wrong. i would want x% of dribble prodigies but then y% of tall or fast or defensive knack or good hands kids to fill out a team.

and if you say, well, i know many dribble prodigies who can also run or play defense, i would say that's my point exactly. i might make an exception for someone truly special but i would be looking for the ones with multitalents and not just the slow league juggling champion who can't stay with the play or defend by HS age. true story, our juggling champion and technical god at U10 in select was a bench player by HS because he was slow as molasses. if i am fast i can be drilled on skills until i catch up. but you can't make him faster or give him a defensive work ethic. technical players with no foot speed become easy to guard.

 

Sorry, where do you get those bolded parts from? Not from my posts (again).

But this is the kind of post I refer to. Endless and with no contribution to the subject of the thread, not even to your own stance of adopting winning methods.
It's all over the place and again in this post you refer to things I never posted, but only serve the purpose of you having a lead to go boom. (quote: and if you say, well, i know many dribble prodigies who can also run or play defense, i would say that's my point exactly.)

Relevance?

 

a good skill player is usually skilled AND quick, or skilled AND fast. the explosion is what creates the separation or gets me by you to set up the next bit of skill. without that explosion you can't get room to hit a home run ball, and a patient defender just watches you dance and either tackles you or you pass the ball sideways or backwards.

to me what separates landon from davis or your average MLS putz was his ability to blow right by someone. and davis was very skilled but he had to juke you to find any room to play. to me what separates pro ball is the speed of play continuing to rise and you need explosivity to cope. you are not given ages to play the ball but you can buy more room and time by being quick or fast.

 

Please stop littering the thread with these posts that lead nowhere.

 

i've reported the two newest posts as well. you alone do not get to decide who posts here.

surely you get that when you say we pick the athletic more so than the talented, that there might be a response? "relevance?" what you said the last page.

i said that you had no development theory voiced, you voiced one like we ignore talent, and since you're excluding athleticism as talent, i explained how that's wrong. the best players are often also great athletes. players with one dimension do not necessarily progress or keep up with the speed of play.

you were supposedly providing me with a "CL player" roadmap as an explanation what we lack, which i don't think would create the sort of player an elite team wants. Dortmund wants Sancho and Pulisic not JUST for skill but for being fast and a list of other things.

plus, you're trading in a stereotype. i don't think this has been a team of clods ever, and particularly after about 1998. we have emphasized speed and organization, yes, but more and more reynas and landons and o'briens and mathises have come in over time. it's bull to say this is like 1990 bunkering and we pick crunchers.

so your theory of how we are is wrong as is your theory how to fix it. like i have been saying all along, the approach of this type of critic is to create a false image of what this team was circa 2010 and then sell a drastic 180 away from it. that we had counter tactics at that time and won some games with defense doesn't mean we had no skill. what were landon, dempsey, etc? the deal is y'all are trading on the generalized stereotype of we played defense-first -- while achieving significant success -- and then pretending we had no skill to do that.

bunk. that the 2010 team won playing a lot of defense doesn't mean they lacked skill. you have to erase that to then pretend that we are going nowhere the old way because we don't have the skill. otherwise if you admit we have skill then you have to admit the degree to which the 2009-10 tactics worked and developing more skill can become accentuating what we have as opposed to starting over.

to control the tactical direction you basically have to fib about our prior skill level.

 

Gsus, are you serious? Donot you have the ability to distinguish between a "friendly" suggestion and "deciding" about who can or can't post?

 

So now you're not only filling this thread with posts that are hard to read, but now you decided to fill the moderators mailbox too?
Great idea.

I put you on ignore to be able to read short and to the point posts in here.

 

Good points, but I disagree on some of your conclusions about the USA's challenges. The biggest challenge in the USA is still culture, not institutional organization. Germany, France and Belgium already had the culture: a high level of demand for the professional skills associated with the game (not just playing, but coaching, youth development and all other aspects). Revamping the institutional side was about maximizing raw materials they already had. Case in point, even in their lowest periods, Germany and France were still very good teams by any standard (the US would be very happy to be as "bad" as the 1995-2005 German NT).

The USA is still in the first 40 years of its football development, where other countries were in the early 20th century. Our league just turned 25 years old. Still more time is needed for the US to develop a national language of football, like every other country has, before trying to institutionalize a framework borrowed from other countries.

From 2000 - 2012 or so, the US was actually a pretty good team (not contending for WCs, obviously, but better than, say, Colombia, over the same period) mostly stocked with players who came through the NCAA or Bradenton in the 90s. Pretty much "self-made" players who nonetheless reached a relatively high level. We clearly have better infrastructure now, but club academies have yet to bear the same kind of fruit.

I just don't subscribe to the idea of the US having lots of "hidden talent" going to waste. I think, despite soccer becoming more popular and relevant in the US since the '94 World Cup, football and basketball have also become more popular. Additionally totally new sports have entered the culture sports space since then and each, IMO, has become more relevant than soccer over the same period: extreme sports, MMA and pro gaming. These others sports compete with soccer to attract young boys to be future pros. Soccer is the most rigorous in the commitment it takes to build a technical foundation from an early age. So I'm skeptical that there are as many American kids spending the time it takes to build the technical foundation required to excel in soccer (which is going to be mostly self-guided; a kid just deciding to go outside and kick the ball around on his own time) as there are getting good at basketball, football, MMA, baseball, Fortnite, etc. etc.

 

@MPNumber9
It's a relief to have an exchange of opinions without necesarily agreeing with each other, but with points put on the table in a coherent way.

This depends on the view when to talk about hidden talents. It can mean kids not yet focused on one sport yet, but enjoying them all or some.
It could also relate to kids already into soccer, so the crowd already separated from the other sports. I'm referring to the last group. I thought in one of the articles I posted the link of a top official of the DFB says that despite the changes put into action since 2000 he's sure still many top talents are unnoticed and thus donot make it into the academies and regional hubs for development. If that's the case in the thorough approach adopted by the Germans, I think it's safe to say that has to be the case in the USA too.
It's the weakness of a system not interlocking from the very base on. To be honest I wouldnot know a solution to that problem in this approach.

 

This is indeed a pivotal point. If I understood some articles right there are huge markets in the USA without a decent academy, which means talents have to go great lengths to even attend quality coaching. How much talent already give up under those odds?

 

So did you enjoy the book?

 

So did you enjoy the book?

 

I havent read it but would guess some of the posters in this thread have given you enough material for a sequel.

 

I didnot either, but from the condensed version in the Guardian I got a pretty good idea of what BD wants to bring to the attention of US soccerfans.
He's pretty honest regarding the near future outlook for soccer in the USA and the impact of it on the USMNT as he sees it.
I however wonder if the jump to the top leagues will be possible with such a gap between the mls and what comes below it.
What incentives are there for those leagues to develop players and build a structure capable of nurturing talents in a pool that functions as the fishing pond for the top academies. Developing talents has to be a part of the strategy to grow as a club and one way to make growth visible is promotion. You promote by virtue of the quality of the players you develop. When there's no incentive like promotion, it suffices to produce players to compete in the stagnant pool you're in.
That's the elephant in the room.

 

See my comment above.

 

I've always believed that it is the job of the federation to oversee a vast network of youth coaching in order to create a very large pool of players who play at a high technical level. From that pool, the national team coaches pick the most athletic and most effective players to play on the national team. The national team will then naturally be comprised mostly of players who play in the top foreign leagues, with a smaller group who play domestically (MLS) or in lesser foreign leagues (e.g. Denmark). When these objectives have been achieved, I think the USA will then be in a position to challenge for a World Cup. Right now, the Federation seems to be failing badly.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobcoo...-hurting-most-every-other-sport/#6284c04d1ea8

 

It's quite interesting the finger in other sports is put on the P2P/money driven environment as a killer too.
Is this a typical American problem, when it's also influencing in a negative way other sports?