US SOCCER

Yeah read that earlier some of things that stood out:

"Noah Davis: I think one of the things that limits it is pay-to-play, I mean it's a problem.

Ocbazghi: Noah Davis has reported on soccer for ESPN and Bleacher Report.

Davis: So pay-to-play is this idea that to be a part of your local club, you have to pay for a spot on the team. In Europe, most of the clubs are free and so you don't have to pay. The way that those clubs make money is that their professional team or their men's team makes money and that, you know, that pays for the youth clubs, and you need money to pay-to-play in the US.

Ocbazghi: So, if your family is low income, you don't have that great of a chance of excelling in the US. Meanwhile, some of soccer's biggest stars like Ronaldo, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, and Neymar all come from poverty.

But Manny, school soccer is free. Why can't kids just play there? Well, they can and do, but that's actually another reason why US Soccer is falling behind. US schools don't invest in their teams as much European Soccer Clubs, so as a result, the path of your typical US player is much different than in Europe.

Davis: The soccer ecosystem in the US is not as fully developed as it is in another European Country. In European countries, there are a lot more clubs, at a lot of different levels, and England has, I mean, they have 20 different levels of clubs all different professionalisms. Some are amateur, some are professional. So, in England, if a player is good, he'll play for his local club, but that club will also have an adult team, so you can kind of, you go up the food chain in a much more natural progression than you do in the US."

"So, if we want to get better, the US Soccer Federation has to develop a better system. It can't be the case that potential stars aren't found because they can't afford to play or that they're just overlooked entirely."
 
This is why we suck at soccer. We don’t have anyone that feels soccer is life and death.
https://www.theplayerstribune.com/es-es/articles/angel-di-maria-argentina-english

And that’s probably an ok thing for our country overall.
Clint Dempsey and Gyasi Zardes are maybe examples of players that came from the slums. But the rest of the national team have all had a “Plan B” in life.

Nice read on the di maria article

GZ... is from Hawthorne, home of Space X, no not a slum but yeah I recall him mentioning growing up in poverty
 
Roger Bennett on 'American Fiasco,' the state of U.S. soccer and the 'siren call' of Chicago
http://www.chicagotribune.com/sport...ican-fiasco-roger-bennett-20180626-story.html

How big of a missed opportunity was the Americans’ failure to qualify for this year’s World Cup?

It was a darkness. A darkness for the players, who missed the jewel of their careers. It was a bigger darkness for the fans, especially for the “American Outlaws” who, in the last World Cup became just the darlings of world football. I feed badly for them. And it was a darkness for Fox. … Thank goodness for them this is one of the best World Cups of my lifetime.

The best news, which I think has been under-reported and underappreciated, is that the 2026 World Cup will be coming to Canada, Mexico and the U.S. — the NAFTA World Cup, if NAFTA is still around by then. That will be a huge lift for the sport, the money that will be coming in that can be put to youth development and scouting and to coaching, my god, to coaching. Coaching in this country needs to uptick significantly, and then some.

The award by FIFA of that 2026 World Cup is game-changing. 1994 made America not hate soccer anymore. I think 2026 will be deeply transformative.
 
"Noah Davis: I think one of the things that limits it is pay-to-play, I mean it's a problem.

Davis: So pay-to-play is this idea that to be a part of your local club, you have to pay for a spot on the team. In Europe, most of the clubs are free and so you don't have to pay. The way that those clubs make money is that their professional team or their men's team makes money and that, you know, that pays for the youth clubs, and you need money to pay-to-play in the US.

"So, if we want to get better, the US Soccer Federation has to develop a better system. It can't be the case that potential stars aren't found because they can't afford to play or that they're just overlooked entirely."
Help me understand why pay-to-play is the problem with finding elite soccer players when pay-to-play is the standard in all competitive youth sports in the US? Baseball, Basketball, Hockey and Gymnastics are all global sports and we have no problem finding elite talent for those sports within the pay-to-play system. Of those 4 sports, Basketball has produced many elite players who's families were below the US median income. Even non global sports such as Football and Competitive Cheer/Dance are pay-to-play that have found elite talent. If you think soccer is expensive talk to a parent with a child in cheer or dance. Wow!

To me pay-to-play is just part of doing business in the US because it's not hindering us in finding talent in other sports. Am I missing something?
 
Help me understand why pay-to-play is the problem with finding elite soccer players when pay-to-play is the standard in all competitive youth sports in the US? Baseball, Basketball, Hockey and Gymnastics are all global sports and we have no problem finding elite talent for those sports within the pay-to-play system. Of those 4 sports, Basketball has produced many elite players who's families were below the US median income. Even non global sports such as Football and Competitive Cheer/Dance are pay-to-play that have found elite talent. If you think soccer is expensive talk to a parent with a child in cheer or dance. Wow!

To me pay-to-play is just part of doing business in the US because it's not hindering us in finding talent in other sports. Am I missing something?
Toepoke has been here for a very long time and still doesn't get it. We beat this dead horse at last once a month 12 times a year. I guess we were all missing the part where's he's literally retarded.

Most pay for play parents are in denial and believe their players are just as talented as the rest of the world. Even when they don't make the world cup.
 
Help me understand why pay-to-play is the problem with finding elite soccer players when pay-to-play is the standard in all competitive youth sports in the US? Baseball, Basketball, Hockey and Gymnastics are all global sports and we have no problem finding elite talent for those sports within the pay-to-play system. Of those 4 sports, Basketball has produced many elite players who's families were below the US median income. Even non global sports such as Football and Competitive Cheer/Dance are pay-to-play that have found elite talent. If you think soccer is expensive talk to a parent with a child in cheer or dance. Wow!

To me pay-to-play is just part of doing business in the US because it's not hindering us in finding talent in other sports. Am I missing something?

Yes.
 
Help me understand why pay-to-play is the problem with finding elite soccer players when pay-to-play is the standard in all competitive youth sports in the US? Baseball, Basketball, Hockey and Gymnastics are all global sports and we have no problem finding elite talent for those sports within the pay-to-play system. Of those 4 sports, Basketball has produced many elite players who's families were below the US median income. Even non global sports such as Football and Competitive Cheer/Dance are pay-to-play that have found elite talent. If you think soccer is expensive talk to a parent with a child in cheer or dance. Wow!

To me pay-to-play is just part of doing business in the US because it's not hindering us in finding talent in other sports. Am I missing something?
Soccer just isn't as important to us than the rest of the world, I will take running water over being a top soccer country and so would they.
 
Soccer just isn't as important to us than the rest of the world...
Exactly! That's why I don't understand why the same old excuse about pay-to-play continues to be discussed by people with more soccer knowledge than I'll ever have as the reason why our men's team is not successful.
 
Nice read on the di maria article

GZ... is from Hawthorne, home of Space X, no not a slum but yeah I recall him mentioning growing up in poverty
Hawthorne didn't have Space X when this was his hood. Much rougher than it is now. It's changed a lot in the past 10 years. Thanks to SapceX and Amazon and that new Rams stadium, folks who bought homes there when it was gang territory in the 90's could sell and buy a mansion in most other states.
 
Exactly! That's why I don't understand why the same old excuse about pay-to-play continues to be discussed by people with more soccer knowledge than I'll ever have as the reason why our men's team is not successful.
Politics. These people are globalists.
The best athletes in the USA are doing something else, but with this concussion thing in football that could change in the coming years.
 
To me pay-to-play is just part of doing business in the US because it's not hindering us in finding talent in other sports. Am I missing something?
Pay-to-play shrinks the size of your starting population of available talent. Almost all the other sports you mentioned are traditionally white-middle class sports: Gymnastics, Hockey, cheer, even baseball to a certain extent. Those sports require a different sort of athleticism, mentality, and body type than football, basketball, and soccer. Those sports require more sheer speed and explosiveness and aggression (save maybe hockey, but hockey is unquestionably a white-middle class sport all the way.) The athletes that dominate basketball and American Football are generally African American and from lower income demographics. Quite simply, there are more poor people than middle class or rich. Soccer in other countries (because of the feverish passion) pull from every demographic, so there is no filter on the entry level for soccer in those countries. Here, the lower income families across the US don't play soccer because it isn't a passion sport. But even if they wanted to, they couldn't get scouted or developed because soccer is a suburban middle-class sport. So it's both. It's the lack of soccer culture, but the fact that pay-to-play is the only route for most decent youth players, it automatically creates an environment where the sport can't develop that cross-class passion that other places have.

Edit: And basketball and football are not pay-to-play at the premium developmental levels for youth: High School. HS Soccer has been undermined by P2P club soccer.
 
Pay-to-play shrinks the size of your starting population of available talent. Almost all the other sports you mentioned are traditionally white-middle class sports: Gymnastics, Hockey, cheer, even baseball to a certain extent. Those sports require a different sort of athleticism, mentality, and body type than football, basketball, and soccer. Those sports require more sheer speed and explosiveness and aggression (save maybe hockey, but hockey is unquestionably a white-middle class sport all the way.) The athletes that dominate basketball and American Football are generally African American and from lower income demographics. Quite simply, there are more poor people than middle class or rich. Soccer in other countries (because of the feverish passion) pull from every demographic, so there is no filter on the entry level for soccer in those countries. Here, the lower income families across the US don't play soccer because it isn't a passion sport. But even if they wanted to, they couldn't get scouted or developed because soccer is a suburban middle-class sport. So it's both. It's the lack of soccer culture, but the fact that pay-to-play is the only route for most decent youth players, it automatically creates an environment where the sport can't develop that cross-class passion that other places have.

Edit: And basketball and football are not pay-to-play at the premium developmental levels for youth: High School. HS Soccer has been undermined by P2P club soccer.

I think in Soccernomics they mentioned how Soccer is actually a low-medium income sport, and how they have a hard time attracting upper-income college bound kids. They also mentioned how other European countries don’t have this stigma, but still have a lot of kids from low-medium income.

There is a decent article that talks about issues in US (2 years old)

https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/jun/01/us-soccer-diversity-problem-world-football

The pain point in US is still lack of grassroots infrastructure (esp inner city play areas) and a path to go forward. Around the world the clubs have a vested interest to make the academy free - with the return on investment from transfer fees. I do not know how it would work in US (anyone care to fill in the gaps of the money model for clubs) ?
 
There really isn’t much of a path beyond playing in college in the US.
All of our “main” sports have college as the step before playing professionally.
If you play soccer in college in the US and then make it to the MLS, the income is pretty weak compared to other sports. And compared to what 1st team pros make in the rest of the world.
 
There really isn’t much of a path beyond playing in college in the US.
All of our “main” sports have college as the step before playing professionally.
If you play soccer in college in the US and then make it to the MLS, the income is pretty weak compared to other sports. And compared to what 1st team pros make in the rest of the world.

With the mls draft 4 rounds: 60-80 college players may get selected each year, but many don't make the 1st team roster, not many past the 1 round picks stick. Besides Jordan Morris most are hard pressed to name a us college star player in the MLS.
 
If it wasn't for pay to play and title IX there would be no women's soccer.

What's wrong is US Soccer, little power hungry pricks.
 
In AAU basketball if you are playing on a team on the top level in the nation the shoe companies pay for it. And you dont have to pay for tuition at Mater Dei either. And if you are a possible 1 and done college to nba player someone associated with you maybe your coach maybe your family is actually getting paid
 
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