This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

I finally figured out why the general American public criticizes soccer for its lack of scoring: there is little else to get excited about. I’m talking about soccer not football. Someday, maybe the worst player from a MLS team’s starting eleven will be equal to the skill of the best today, but the MLS game on the whole is still a work in progress, where it is difficult to see a polished product - a team - from the individual pieces yet to be fit together. And if it’s not polished, how can we expect people to pay to watch it? You can see top level high school soccer for free, and on a beautiful Mother’s day Sunday in front of less than 8,000 fans at Giants Stadium the Red Bulls played Colorado’s Rapids, I would have rather watched MLK high school play. The passion, the beauty, the team if not the individual skill, would be there. It was not there for Red Bulls v. Rapids. Both names were a misnomer. Colorado was anything but rapid, and the Red Bulls had no wings.

Don’t let the above photo fool you, Captain America cannot fly. Claudio Reyna missed his second game this season with his second injury, and looking from the crowds, nobody is coming out to see this over-the-hill hometown kid as was expected, and increasingly I fear RBNY won’t be able to count on his presence. It is becoming clear the success of RBNY depends on the central midfielder, but it’s hard to count on anybody with a body you can’t depend on. Is he worth it?.

A few fans arrived draped in yellow, blue, and red, but I’m continuing to be proved right by the lack of attention garnered by the big singings beyond MLS and the media. Juan Pablo Angel had enough trouble on Sunday attracting his own teammates as he disappeared for most the game until a cross came in. This, though after all, is a Bruce Arena team: kick it and run; hope for counter attacks; pray for corner kicks and set pieces. Jamaican speedster Dane Richards played the DaMarcus Beasley role, running onto balls and past defenders, offering the only real gift to the mothers in the stands. There was no Landon to fight against the game plan, no Dempsey to maybe, just maybe, make the game his own.

It’s the first kink in the Red Bull armor, but games like this – and just about every US MNT game in the last 8 years - are why Arena is better suited for the broadcast booth than the sideline. I’d say general manager’s office, but given educated opinions, I’m not confidant Arena could co-exist taking a back seat on the field. I came to enjoy his certain brand of banter on TV, but there’s nothing enjoyable about his style of play.

“We played tactically perfect for 90 minutes,” Rapids coach Fernando Clavijo said. “We never allowed them to get a rhythm.”

It’s not just on Arena: add Clavijo’s name to the list; it’s not just on MLS. It’s on the whole of American Soccer, with a capital S. Whether it’s the inability of the offense to move forward in cohesion, or the defenders haphazardly fouling in the central midfield to thwart any fluid progress, certainly the players, and maybe the referee’s that govern them, have as much fault as MLS or USSF. But it all comes back to the coaching.

Coaching - moms and dads and rec leagues all the way to the elitist amateur and professional clubs - and the lack of attention American Soccer has given it, must affect the change.

Chatting with Paul Gardner of the NY Sun and Soccer America before the game, he reiterated some of these feelings. He told me how he remembers going to the national coaching conference some twenty years ago. There was one exhibitor. The discussions were about the enormous growth potential in the US market. Nowhere else has this situation presented itself in the world of soccer and never will it appear again, Gardner theorized. The population, the infrastructure, the money, it is all here for the taking. He went to a recent national coaching conference, and the discussion was the same, largely unchanged in the past 20 years. Foreign coaches and administrators come over for the conferences and are shocked by the thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors. It’s an untapped gold mine. So what’s the problem? Those of you familiar with Gardner’s writing know his answer already.

Gardner wasn’t the only person I spoke to yesterday. Besides having one of the longest-standing soccer journalists in the U.S. riding shotgun, our car to and from the game included David Hirshey, a protégé of Gardner who has covered soccer for his fair share of years and now does so for Deadspin among other outlets, Michael Agovino, a somewhat younger writer, and myself - a student to all of them stuck in middle of the SUV’s back seat. Along with the media-types was Martin Jacobson and Mickey Cohan, coaches from MLK high school, excited to see one of their former students, Bouna Coundoul, play as the goalkeeper for the Rapids (he pitched a shut-out).

If ever there was a think tank, a crazy opinionated think tank, on these subjects, I was dropped in it Sunday like a sponge to water flood, just trying to keep up, soak up as much as I could.

It quickly dawned on me as the voices chattered and clacked in what was seemingly a world’s worth of Anglo accents throughout the car. Nobody was satisfied with American Soccer, and everybody had their ideas, even if it was only to say the present system isn’t working. Where have we heard that before? It’s representative democracy at not its finest, but its most real. It’s that moment when you realize all those speeches were just words, the audacity of hope little more than the title of a book. Powerlessness is what I absorbed more than anything on Sunday, watching those in charge squander the opportunities in front of them, whether on the fields of battle or in the boardroom. Great reporters, great writers, great minds – all greater than mine – had trouble making sense of it. How am I supposed to?

I don’t know why exactly, but when faced with big questions, I find myself falling on American sport comparisons, and today was all about the NBA, a league for which I have little interest. When I was a little guy in the eighties, that wasn’t the case. I remember the OMNI fondly, and shooting free throws with my father in the driveway meant I could assume to be part of the final glory days of the league. I was Jordan wagging his tongue, Magic with a no-look pass, Bird with nothing but net. Even the ‘highlight zone,’ Dominique Wilkins, on my hometown Atlanta Hawks made appearances in the driveway, though it was more often than not on a lowered rim so I could perfect the two-handed windwill. You had the biggest stars, but you also had solid teams. For every star, there was a supporting cast playing their part, holding up their end of the bargain even if nobody wanted to be Scotty Pippen, Doc Rivers, or Horace Grant in the driveway. Now, the team concept is largely lost, no matter how hard Steve Nash tries.

MLS is quickly approaching that formula: a few talented stars with little to no supporting casts. Misplaced touches in the back created by an apparent lack of mental control and confidence sends the ball skyward, heads and legs flailing in hopes a Beckerman or a Gomez (the two brightest stars on Sunday) or a Reyna (still on the bench) can make something out of it. It’s a dangerous and dirty road, and on Sunday MLS was neck deep in the mud. I didn’t stick around for the press conferences, but I hope they apologized to their mothers. Getting the stink off those jerseys is going to take more than a little Tide.

Think I’m being too harsh? Here is the first few lines from Big Apple Soccer’s Michael Lewis’ game report. He obviously went to the press conferences:

Perhaps it was best that only 7,802 spectators showed up to watch the Red Bulls at Giants Stadium Sunday. The less witnesses to their uninspired performance in a 1-0 loss to the Colorado Rapids the better.

The Red Bulls did not look anywhere like the previously undefeated team that entered the MLS match.

“It was almost like we were brain dead out there,” Clint Mathis said.

No one gave him an argument.

“It was a bad performance,” coach Bruce Arena said. “We were very poor. We got outplayed in the first half. In the second half our performance on the technical side was horrible. Poor crossing. Poor finishing. Poor passing, which was the case for 90 minutes of the game.”

This is American Soccer?