USSF will spend $23.1MM on the national team in fiscal 2015. Three separate players on the Philadelphia Phillies will each make more than that. The highest paid players in the MLS, Michael Bradley and Jermain Defoe $6MM each, make less than journeymen in the NHL. 74 individual MLB players will make more this year than the entire roster of Toronto FC, the MLS team with the highest total salary in the league.
Isildurr, I don’t think you are aware of how the game is played in the US - American boys are not soccer crazy Uruguayans nor are they Dutch boys who are drilled in brutally competitive academies from age 5 onwards and don’t play soccer year round. Soccer is rather organized as an american sport where the best athletes are selected in their teens for raw, explosive potential, but that doesn’t work for soccer where you need to be in a serious professional environment from a young age. Can you really expect Xavi and Ronaldinho to emerge out of this? But that is slowly changing as MLS teams are building youth academies along European lines.
It is a fact. Find me one soccer radio show among the three or four 24 hour sports radio shows that I have in my city. There isn’t one. This is because people do not care. I say this as someone who enjoys watching soccer and played for years in both HS and university. People in the US, for whatever reason, do not care or prioritize soccer at the profesisonal level. It essentially receives slightly more attention than lacrosse, which is a sport most of the world hasn’t even heard of.
What numbers indicate that the US cares about soccer? Youth participation in soccer has dropped by 8% in the last 10 years. All 380 EPL games were broadcast free in the US this year and managed a paltry 31.5 million combined viewers. MLS lags badly behind its American competition in television numbers. For example, the National Hockey League – easily the closest of the so-called “big four” U.S. professional sports to MLS in terms of ratings - averaged 392,000 viewers per game on NBC Sports Network in 2013, more than tripling the MLS audience. As noted in my prior post, the money spent on soccer here is pocket change compared to the other sports.
Because the main point you are missing is that the talent pool that is available to you even after filtering for the other sports is far greater than countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast, Uruguay etc.
Not only that, the ‘Pocket change’ you mentioned as well as the 150 million state of the art training facility you use far outstrips the resources available to these African nations. There is absolutely no logical reason that you should loose to Ghana in successive world cups yet you do.
@ Palantir
I can agree with that.
The last two points are what iv’e said. Two of the biggest problems are the selection procedures for the fastest, strongest athletes at a young age and the MLS model.
There are still quite a few more problems which makes it will take quite some time to mix it with the giants if it ever happens.
Anyway moving on, Colombia are a team to watch out for this world cup i think. Missing their talisman but flamboyance and style in spades
Whining? I’m stating a simple fact: the US is not a country that is happy just being competitive. If other countries are fine being “competitive” but never winning, good for them. Say all you want about the American system, but systems don’t play the game, the players do. When a country puts its 4th and 5th tier athletes up against the ROTW’s best, winning is not a likely outcome.
Good night Higgi, Fix these issues first, That should be enough to compete against teams like Ghana, Ivory Coast etc given the resources at your disposal.
Then we’ll talk about whether your top tier ‘Athletes’ will be able to take on geniuses like Xavi and Redondo.
USA focuses too heavily on athleticism and metrics rather than game intelligence. Kids who may have the intelligence are weeded out of youth academies because their athletic potential isn’t as high. MLS was kick and run before the latest wave of imports, it was 90mins of chasing the ball and maybe 5mins of actual skill or intelligence. Having watched for the past 8 seasons, I’m glad it’s getting better but it’s still a long way to go. Bringing back guys like Michael Bradley will help them get out of this ‘out-run everyone’ mentality. At the highest level you wont’ be able to outrun Africans or teams with technical ability. It will take another generation for them to develop better rounded players who have some variability in play.
Plus high school chicks dig the dudes that play football and basketball and scoff at the soccer crew(Head cheerleader dating soccer forward lol). Most high school boys, especially jocks want sex over just about anything else at that stage of life. They will continue to graviate to those sports that will get em the girls.
LMAO
Nothing should be changed. The game is perfect.
And football is not boring! :@ :@ :@
I can guarantee you the majority of brazilians don’t care about women’s soccer.
The “don’t care” here is on a whole other league than the “don’t care” in US. US has 20 million or so kids playing soccer. Apparently by 15, they all decide they don’t wanna make a living out of the game, no matter how much they love it or how many millions they could make being the next Messi. And, if you define soccer as “11 vs 11 playing in a grass field and paying attention to passing and goal scoring” US has the most young players in the world by a fair amount.
In Brazil, the number of girls playing soccer regularly has been pretty much zero forever. Growing up, I’ve never met a girl who played soccer regularly, not in school, not street soccer, nor futsal. And there’s no money or even jobs for it here. I remember some reports on how the girls would practice every 4 years for the Olympics or something crazy like that.
As for the main discussion, I do agree that US could be better at soccer if there was a higher interest and yadda yadda. I don’t agree with some people that argue that US would or should dominate, as if it was a fact. By all money, interest and athleticism standards, Brazil should get schooled by England and Germany every single time. Tiny Uruguay shouldn’t ever have a shot. And yet Uruguay has more World Cups than England and more South America Cups than Brazil.
So US could be better. England could be better. Iran could be better. This is all fine and dandy, but coulda, shoulda and woulda are not the greatest arguments. And athleticism as a main hurdle is really a bad way to go here. The best soccer players in history were not the most athletic - most were actually short or regular size guys.
As current teams go, I’ve watched the US team play against Nigeria. They looked much stronger than I thought, but also boring. Let me try to explain.
US seems to “Moneyball” it, which may not be that great for soccer. They’re tactically very sound and disciplined, but the way US plays soccer, in my opinion, is as boring as soccer can be. As I mentioned before, kids grow up in Brazil focusing much more on dribbling than on soccer fundamentals. They get the fundamentals later on, but they’re already creative by then. The US squad seems to follow very rigid rules, and this may be the way you played since kids.
This is funny in a way because that’s how most brazilians play basketball - pass and shoot - avoid mistakes instead of trying to do awesome things. Brazil sucks at basketball and is really boring to watch. US sucks at soccer and is really boring to watch - maybe there’s something going on here.
Portugal looked pretty strong against Ireland. US may advance, but it is a tough group - Germany and Portugal seem a more likely duo to advance. If US manages to pass though, I think they have a shot as an underdog against probably Belgium or Russia, so who knows?
What people do here is to go to a little corner of the field, place a couple rocks as goals on each side of your new imaginary field and go wild. This is fun and any open small place will do. I even like it as an adult. Kids won’t develop long pass skills doing this, but with a 2-on-2 the time spent doing relevant stuff with the ball is much bigger than 11-on-11 where kids are mostly running around.
I agree with most of what you said except this part. You have accurately pointed out that they are rigid. Rigid can be good in someways if the team is extremely well drilled and tactically sound. Mourinho’s teams are rigid so are Capello’s and even Lippi’s.
USA are neither tactically sound nor disciplined. They don’t seem to have intelligence as a team on when to play the offside trap, when to step up, when to press and when to drop. It is very painful watching them because it’s like watching a pub team without the carefree attitude.
I do think that they are overestimating their opponents. Germany and Portugal are there for the taking. Give 150% on those 3 games and they very well might progress
US kids play 1 v 1 and 2 v 2 all the time. I did almost every day. The coaches do suck. If you dribble too much they’ll immediately label you a “ball hog” and start screaming “pass the ball, pass the ball.” Many coaches don’t know how to coach to win, they coach to be inclusive, which is stupid. This is true until you get to a pretty high level (over 17) in my experience.
Here’s a thought: are there any soccer superstars who were wealthy before they started playing soccer? I’m just saying that the correlation between having money and going pro in soccer seems to be negative. The best teams we played in HS were largely tough, relativley poor hispanic. Even at camps the Caribean and Central/South American kids (like 14 or so) were way better. Just insanely skilled. One kid just juggled the ball literally the entire day just holding it on his foot while eating lunch, just to see if he could. You don’t see US kids doing that. Just a different level of passion about it.
Klinsmann says the US has no chance to win it all and everyone gets on his back for his honesty.
For some trivia, that Klinsmann certainly knows, winners are usually past winners (‘62, 70’, 74’, 82’, 86’, 90’, 94’, 2002, 2006) or home teams (66’, 74’, 78’, 98’) and even Spain (2010) was a continental cup winner. The last time a squad that didn’t fit any of these requisites won was Brazil in 1958.