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| I will be rooting for this guy. |
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| Croatia's roster. These guys are good. |
Because everything should always and everywhere be about what this means for American, consider that the success of the Croatian team gives hope for the U.S. men's team (USMNT). (The U.S. women's team, you should remember, are already world-beaters.) The reason for optimism is this: Croatia is nation of 4.2 million people. The United States has 14 metropolitan areas with more people.
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| 14 places in the U.S. with more people than Croatia |
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| American follow sports like this only every four years, yet we produce plenty of dominant athletes. |
USSF needs to improve, though. For years, the U.S. has had the largest number of youth soccer registrants (about 4 million) in the world, yet places with far less money and training resources (like Croatia, Rio de Janiero, or the Paris suburbs) produce better players. This happens for several reasons, but the chief one is obvious and overlooked: The American attitude towards youth sports, soccer in particular, is messed up.
Here's why:
- Teams in the U.S. prioritized playing a bunch of games instead of practicing.
- American coaches were woefully under-trained in technical soccer skills.
- A result of the first two means that most American players spend far less time with on-ball training and don't develop the otherworldly dribbling and passing skills that top European leagues require.
- Playing on traveling teams is expensive. Many talented players are excluded because their families can't afford the five-figure expenses and/or the amount of time required from parents.
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| Creating more Christian Pulisics will involve a lot of this |
To its credit, the USSF has taken steps towards a better system:
When U.S. Soccer first reached out to Lemov, in 2010, the organization was already in the midst of a wholesale reformation. Four years earlier, soccer executives had toured the world, studying what other countries did differently. They had learned, among other things, that kids in other nations spent less time playing soccer games than did their American counterparts, and more time practicing. In response, the federation created its own youth league, called the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, modeled after international best practices. Top youth-soccer clubs could apply to join, if their coaches agreed to get licensed and follow a new model for training. The academy now comprises 152 soccer clubs across the U.S., which have produced more than 180 professional players.They are also taking concrete steps in ensuring better coaching, hiring pedagogical expert (and folk hero in the part of teaching world I live in) Doug Lemov to instruct the instructors.
“For 20 years, we had focused almost exclusively on closing our global gap in the technical and tactical components of the game,” says Dave Chesler, U.S. Soccer’s director of coaching development. “In doing this, perhaps we had lost perspective on the quality of our delivery—a k a the essential mechanics of teaching. ” Chesler, who had himself spent 15 years as a high-school chemistry and physics teacher before becoming a full-time soccer coach, realized after reading about Lemov in The Times Magazine that he had never transferred some of his own best teaching techniques to the field. He made immediate modifications to his coaching—for example, slowing down practices and focusing more on watching the players, making sure each one demonstrated every step in a drill before moving on—and he sent copies of Lemov’s book to his national staff. And then he asked Lemov for help.The USSF is rich enough that this will gradually produce more elite players. However, the men's World Cup will be in North America in eight years. Accompanying the prep for the tournament will be both avalanche of money and also pressure to field a top American team.
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| Like this, but for soccer players |
So I have a radical idea: start an Apollo-like project to concentrate coaching resources in two metro areas that are already teeming with talent -- say, Los Angeles and Houston. Both are substantially larger than Croatia. Both are already soccer-crazy, have a ton of local money, and field multiple professional teams. Build something similar to La Masia, FC Barcelona's famous training academy in each metro area. (Barca is already beating us to this punch - it has its own residential academy in Arizona.) Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers recently made the case that Mexican pro teams have a better understanding of talent in those heavily Latino cities than the American teams.
Elite teams win in part because their entire system has consistent training methods and style. American teams have historically relied on grit and athleticism. That doesn't get it done at the highest levels.
It shouldn't be a matter of cash. The USSF had $152 million in revenues for 2017. Fox Sports is paying between $400 to 600 million per World Cup for U.S. broadcast rights through 2026. God only knows how much companies like Nike, Adidas, and New Balance would make if there were several more American stars. It wouldn't even need to be Messi or Ronaldo-level superstar; an American Kylian Mbappe or Luka Modric would be a worth small country's GDP on its own. For a relatively small sum and considering what's at stake, a lot of groups could reap massive rewards if a world-class USMNT is driving audience attention.
Sure, some will complain about the unfair distribution of resources. But a moonshot project that develops a top-tier USMNT would lift the American soccer structure as whole. Think of what the 1999 women's World Cup championship team inspired. Some of those later played for 2015 champions.
With all of the challenges facing our nation, this is one we could actually come together and solve.
