tamil yogi
After every uninspiring World Cup result, the most typical answer to the question of why the United States can’t ever get great at soccer (at least on the men’s side) is that our best athletes play other sports.
If only LeBron James were out there.
It’s a hackneyed excuse. Yes, soccer fights in a crowded market of sporting possibilities in America, but that’s true almost everywhere. A lack of athletic ability wasn’t the cause of the USMNT’s failure to advance past the round of 16 for the sixth consecutive World Cup courtesy of a dispiriting 4-1 loss to Belgium on Monday.
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Our players can run, cut and jump as well as almost any of those on advancing teams. This is a nation of nearly 350 million, with untold millions more available through various citizenship tentacles allowed by FIFA.
Belgium has just 12 million residents. Norway has 5.6 million (the size of South Carolina) and is not only through to the quarterfinals but is obsessed with enough different sports that it just won the total medal count at the Winter Olympics.
We have enough athletes and enough athletes with the requisite technical skills.
Do we have enough competitors, though? Do we have enough players who don’t just want to win but need to win? Guys who want more than just to appear in a Michelob Ultra commercial.
More troublingly, how do we get them in a country where the developmental system is powered by travel soccer that requires ever-increasing pay-to-play?
The Belgians didn’t just outclass the Americans; they outworked and outhustled them, too. They were tougher, physically yes, but mostly mentally. The U.S. too often looked soft, weak and overwhelmed.
“I felt like they lost the game before they stepped out onto the pitch,” mentioned Carli Lloyd, who before working for Fox Sports was a blood-and-guts leader of a U.S. women’s national team that captured two World Cups and two Olympic golds.
“From the beginning: chasing, tentative, scared.”
There is no excuse. The U.S. was set up with all the advantages: a raucous home crowd in Seattle, a nation united behind it, and even the White House trying to tip the scales. This wasn’t England going into Azteca. And yes, Belgium is good, but it isn’t France or Spain.
This was a big stage for the Americans, but it was their stage. This shouldn’t have been too much. But it was.
U.S. Soccer has made efforts to change the developmental pipeline. MLS academies are now operating sort of like European clubs, with free training for top players. MLS Next doesn’t start until the teen years, however, meaning the predominant way kids get started is through the increasingly capitalistic travel soccer system.
It’s a business, and one that caters to kids from the suburbs (where potential customers are) over rural areas or city centers. It all but requires parents to pay what can exceed $20,000 a year in travel, fees and training, in addition to investing lots of free time to drive three states away for some “elite showcase” (often to play a team from across town).
And travel sports of all kinds are only getting bigger — a $40 billion-plus industry, increasingly making it the playground of the upper middle class to the wealthy. Each year the goal is to wring even more revenue out of families.
Is that going to get us the requisite grit?
It’s not just the lost talent from closing out huge segments of the populace. It’s a system that rewards clubs for fielding the rosters that deliver the best results even at the U8 or U11 level to market “championships” as a way to sign up even more kids for more teams and more profit.
That encourages playing the biggest and fastest of those ages, not necessarily the most creative, the most competitive or those with flashes of raw potential. How many of them wilt away on a B or C or E team?
Then comes the development. When young players (and their ever-present parents) are paying customers, exactly how hard can you coach them? Break them down before building them up? Offer real adversity, especially the mental sort?
Players can just flee to another club at season’s end, if not sooner. Clubs, meanwhile, counter by recruiting new talent rather than developing what they have. It’s a circle of mediocrity.
Perhaps not coincidentally, this World Cup was very much in the travel-soccer style for the Americans — they shined when they had the talent advantage and got to bask in premature adulation only to wilt when confronted by a real opponent. Give them an orange slice and pack up the SUV for the Sunday drive home.
To be sure, there are many positives to travel sports — they can be fun and rewarding and build confidence. They can offer time together for a family.
But the hard stuff that makes champions can barely exist. It’s one way you end up with a World Cup team of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots: representing a soccer culture built to develop well-adjusted D-III players, lots of future accountants and lawyers, along with the occasional European pro, but not a full team full of the necessary resolve.
If anything, this group was a regression, lacking the obvious heart of past teams led by Claudio Reyna, Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey and others. This one was more talented but somehow even further behind.
If that’s the trend line, just as youth soccer gets even more expensive and more unique and more about coddling for cash than actual coaching … then what?
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