World Cup and European leagues

[stlawus]

A lot of truth here -

https://x.com/TheSammahmood_/status/2074434672201785728?s=20

This is it. So sick of hearing about "pAy tO pLaY".  Of course, there are issues with that. But this is as much cultural as it is structural. Jurgen Klinsmann has pointed this out numerous times, as he is obviously a product of the European system as well as a witness to how things work here since he's lived here since the late 90s. Until there's a change in the cultural mentality of a significant portion of America not a lot will change. You will have to convince the parents in this country that think the most important thing they can do for their kids is to send them to the best college possible should change their focus and instead send their kids to a professional academy and completely forgo the idea of college. That is a major, major breaking of the social psyche of a huge portion of the country's population. And that is also contingent upon players at a young age having the hunger for soccer like kids do for basketball and football.

This is why I absolutely HATE all the changes to college soccer that are currently going on. Coaches are trying to act like college is the premier league. College soccer is an extremely unique and niche thing only seen in America. It is not where we develop pro talent. It is for players who simply want to play a few more years while getting an education. We should not be altering the sport to accommodate the egos of coaches who delusionally think they're all a bunch of Pep Guardiolas.

At a SLU game a few years back I sat next to the coaches of a New England Prep school program and listened to one of the new members of their staff complain about college soccer rules like unlimited substitutions being a reason why the US national team hasn't become elite. This is the kind of brain rot and misplaced attitudes toward US soccer structure that continues to make the soccer intelligentsia in this country make wrong decisions. 

Personally, I think that the main way is to keep creating MLS academies as a way to get young players scouted and bought by European team. Mathis Albert being the most recent example. Scouted by Dortmund in the Galaxy youth system and then bought and transferred over to their youth program at a critical age window for development. But that is still a somewhat rare thing happening for American players. For every 1 Mathis Albert there are 9 kids whose parents would rather light themselves on fire than be told their kid cannot go to college at 18-22 years old if he wants to pursue soccer seriously.

[SierraFD3soccer]

Yup absolutely nuts imo. I don't know how we will be able to get away from the pay-to-play system.

One thing that is stunning from my days of reffing all teams from mens to U7. Every level fewer and fewer Hispanics teams/players. Another indication clear indication that US soccer is for the middle class and rich. So, so much talent is not being developed imo. 

[Gregory Sager]

A lot of truth here -

https://x.com/TheSammahmood_/status/2074434672201785728?s=20

Every word of this really rings true to me as well. And I see how the big-bucks bonanza and resultant boom in pay-for-play over the past two dozen years has had some bad fallout in other sports, as I'm pretty familiar with how AAU syndrome has afflicted basketball and how travel-team ball has created some real problems in baseball as well. And then there's hockey, a sport in which for generations players grew up learning the game on backyard rinks and neighborhood ponds but which is now too expensive for any kid whose parents aren't at least upper middle class.

But the big problem for US soccer, as I see it, is actually twofold: 1) The pay-to-play model has become widely successful in the US because it fits the capitalist system, is immediate-results-oriented as opposed to long-term-results-oriented in terms of stressing winning over skills development, and it follows a familiar template within the larger American sports culture that culminates in D1 college athletics as the be-all and end-all (with a professional contract dangled as an unrealistic carrot atop all of that); and 2) the grassroots fan base of soccer has yet to expand broadly enough to trickle down to support locally-based, pro/mixed/amateur tiers for those fans outside of major cities; you don't have the half-dozen to a dozen tiers of soccer in the US made up of teams manned by players 17 and above that you do in other soccer countries. The USSF's soccer pyramid only consists of three levels, with no promotion/relegation system, and, while another first division league (USL Premier) is in the works, the truth is that the financial infrastructure in terms of stadiums, salaries, promotion, etc., doesn't really seem to be there even for that top level, to say nothing of lower tiers. Outside of the MLS, pro soccer in America is a congerie of shoestring operations. As Sam Mahmood explained, the US soccer community is trying to build a soccer culture in this country in an ass-backwards manner. That's not an indictment of anybody in particular or of the US soccer community as a whole. It just means that the United States has a massive, vibrant, well-established sports culture that in a lot of ways is the envy of the world, but which just isn't conducive to being retrofitted to a particular sport (soccer) whose dominant existing national model is much more finely-tuned to player development and economically-broad-based outreach (both in terms of fans and of childhood sponsorship and scouting) than the American sports model.

As for soccer demographics, I don't worry about soccer missing out on athletically promising American kids. There are over 340 million people in the United States. Of the eight countries that made it into this summer's World Cup quarters, the most populous (the UK) has about one-fifth the population of the US. Belgium is a country of 12 million people. Even with the popularity of basketball, baseball, and football, there are more than enough athletic kids in the US for soccer to draw from for the US to be successful on the international stage -- provided that those kids get introduced to the sport early and are nurtured in an environment that prioritizes skills development over winning tournaments that are basically promotional vehicles for travel club owners trying to make money by using trophies as advertising tools.

Besides, there are different body types and innate athletic abilities within the pool of every generation of American children, and not all of them translate well to soccer. If you're a very large kid whose main assets are size and strength, soccer doesn't really have a place for you ... but football does. If superior hand-eye coordination is one of your prime assets, you'd be wasting your talent on a soccer pitch unless you're a goalkeeper ... but you might be perfect for basketball or baseball or as a football wide receiver. Superior jumping ability? Yeah, that's helpful in terms of the niche aspect of soccer's air game, but that particular ability is far more prominently showcased as a basketball player or as an outside or middle hitter in volleyball. That's doubly true if you have a large wingspan, a physical asset that, again, soccer can only make use of if you're a goalkeeper.

[Gregory Sager]

Heh. Been working on the post I just sent throughout the morning at spare moments around my work tasks for the day. Now that I've posted it and can look at the thread again, I see that two other posters have posted pretty much the same conclusions as me.

[Kuiper]

Caltech getting into the World Cup by having students explain the physics behind certain shots

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DaivjHGBonC/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

[Hopkins92]

Nerds.

[Gregory Sager]