I agree with the out of shape bit, although I’d say from my experience there are often youth teams with one or three bruisers who mainly succeed by muscling smaller kids off the ball. It works against kids who are just learning to control the ball but obviously doesn’t cut it at higher levels.

I agree that the fact that the MLS isn’t as good as the best European leagues isn’t the issue. That’s not what hurt US soccer. I think the place where MLS fails is in player development. Some European/English teams have worked out how to find and develop promising young players and then sell their contracts to higher…

Coaching is wildly uneven and often sucky at the younger levels, and I think the ratio of kids in soccer camps, special lessons, etc. to coaches being taught coaching skills is probably 100 to 1. That’s probably true for dollars spent, too. Parents and leagues would probably be wise to shuffle some of the money they…

No, it’s actually fine. Countries that dominate distance running have small populations relative to the US, and in absolute numbers we have plenty of skinny long legged big lunged people we could put up against the Kenyan highlands runners if they were filtered and trained for it. We don’t have those filters and…

That’s viewership and participation, though. A good parallel to US soccer is US running. Huge numbers of Americans run, many run marathons. Crowds at marathons are huge and there are tons of sponsors. US distance running at competitive levels? Meh. We punch way below our weight.

One of the things I’ve seen locally at the youth level, and I’ve heard it happens elsewhere, is that there’s a push to consolidation and merger by the top clubs. Supposedly it’s for the purpose of getting the best talent together, but it’s obvious it’s the same model as a local cable monopoly. They want to prevent…

I think development would speed up a lot if youth soccer teams and coaches were judged by the specific skills players had learned year after year, closer to the way that martial arts work. W/L records are valued far too much when evaluating programs, but soccer leadership really should grade teams on the specific…

My take on it is that it’s unlikely that you’ll see stylistic changes in US soccer players coming out of the youth ranks for a very long time.

The problem for the US is the youth soccer establishment is very focused on a pipeline model, a term which gets used unironically. If you think about it, a pipeline is a closed system where the first inside are the first out. It’s comforting for the parents and kids who get in the system early around age 7, but it’s a…

I don’t disagree that soccer is a lower level sport in the US — it doesn’t compare to basketball or football when you look at the combination of intensity and number of kids playing it plus the quality of coaching.

US soccer going down to the youth level has a basic problem with passing and control on the first touch. US kids learn they can beat weaker opponents by chasing down bad touches with a combination of muscle and speed and by flooding the goal box, and with the emphasis on winning at the youth level, there’s too little…

I can only speak to what I see in one area, but to me it looks like the US is never going to get past that middling tier of soccer until youth soccer is fixed. Countries with a 1/10th the population of the US, like Belgium and the Netherlands, are going to continue to produce far more top tier players than the US ever…