There’s no question about it – US soccer has been playing catch up to the rest of the world when it comes to developing elite players. We’ve never developed a player who you would call “world class” in their position, maybe aside from some of the goalkeepers we’ve produced (Friedel, Keller, Howard), and even then it would be a stretch.
None of our field players have really been in the conversation. Landon Donovan is an all-time great national team player, but spending the majority of his club career in the MLS never really gave him a chance to reach the highest level. Clint Dempsey was a good Premier League player but not quite world class. Claudio Reyna merits mention as one of our best field players, but no one is saying he was world class in his prime. Pulisic has had a few up and down years and bounced back nicely with AC Milan this past year, but he’s also not in the world class echelon of players.
Other than these players, at best we’ve produced solid professionals at the highest level. The main limitation of our players is never athleticism – we boast some of the best pure athletes. We don’t produce a high volume of skillful players. The ones mentioned above all have very good technical ability, but they are the outliers (and their technical ability is why they’re among the best players we’ve produced). None are elite.
Compare these guys to players like Messi, Neymar, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Iniesta, Xavi, Zidane, Pirlo, Kroos, Ozil, etc…, and we don’t come close. We’ve never produced a player on the technical level of any of these guys. Even with all the time, money, and effort we’ve put into the development system over the past 20 years.
The US is best known for creating athletic, hard-working, coachable players. As our country has started taking player development more seriously in the last 10-15 years, especially with the emergence of MLS academies, we have to wonder why we’re still not producing any players with elite technical ability. Even the younger players on our national team who have benefitted from this improved development aren’t overly technical. You could say Reyna, Dest, and Pulisic are quite skillful (Musah developed overseas), but none are elite.
So why are we still not producing more skillful players? Even England, who traditionally didn’t prioritize this trait, have produced Foden, Bellingham, Saka, and Palmer, all players who are technically a step above our best talent. I can think of a host of reasons, and we’ll break down the most obvious ones below.
Culture
As we mention in this article, the US has a much different soccer culture than most other countries. Of these differences, the biggest culprit is the pay to play model. And paying to play itself isn’t bad, but this system puts the wrong incentives first.
Pay to play – results-driven incentives
Digging into the pay to play model, the average cost for a player for travel soccer is $2,000 – $5,000 dollars per player per year. This type of fee automatically excludes a portion of the population who can’t afford this amount, potentially cutting off a pool of talent (although there are scholarships available, it’s still not a great system). But you also incentivize the wrong outcomes.
The parents are paying a lot of money for everything, so they become the “customer” who is to be appeased, rather than the player whose development is the priority. This doesn’t mean great players can’t come out of this system, but making parents happy is the more pressing issue for coaches and clubs. And most soccer parents have no idea about long-term player development.
Parents want to see results. The easiest result to tangibly show these parents for their hard-earned cash is wins. It’s harder to show and justify technical improvements in a player, but it’s easy to measure wins and losses. And winning at a young age can definitely come at the expense of player development.
Due to different rates of development, big athletic disparities exist in the younger age groups. Coaches can exploit this by putting the big, fast kid up top, and playing long balls for him to outrun and outmuscle smaller players. In the short term, this can lead to winning games. But in the long-run, players on this team will fall behind. Everyone will physically catch up to the big, fast kid, and since he was never forced to develop any skills, he will wash out (seen it countless times). And his teammates were only kicking the ball upfield, never learning to play their way out of trouble. So their development is never fully realized. You spread this across multiple clubs and teams across the country, and you will have players fall through the cracks.
I saw this time and again growing up a few decades ago, and admittedly it’s gotten a lot better since then. But when results are the priority, coaches will take shortcuts like these instead of focusing on long-term development. And when parents are the customer, immediate results will always play some role.
In other countries, the professional academies are free of charge for those who are selected. These clubs prioritize technical development, because they know that is how you produce the best players. And that is their business – to produce great players to help the first team win games when they are much older (in their 20s), or to sell to a bigger club for profit. Not only does this model not exclude significant parts of the population, but it also doesn’t need to make parents immediately happy.
Not enough pick up play and futsal
Another significant piece of our soccer culture is the organized nature of the sport for kids at a young age. The soccer mom phenomenon is real, and the fact that most kids’ early experience with the sport comes at an organized practice or playing in a league, it is a vastly different environment than most other countries.
The countries who are producing the best players almost always have a pick up culture that is akin to basketball in the US. In Brazil, everywhere you go you see futsal courts with kids playing pick up games. Kids are playing unorganized games in the streets and parks. Kids kick the ball against a wall, or juggle with friends.
This type of environment allows kids to experiment, get lots of touches on the ball, and develop natural instincts for the game that are difficult to coach. It is the best learning environment, because you truly are in the moment having fun, getting on the ball, playing for hours at a time, experimenting, and developing a love and passion for the game. It helps when you have no one breathing down your neck if you mess up or don’t do things their way.
Of course coaching is important, but it’s also important to learn things on your own as an athlete, in a fun environment.
We simply do not have this culture, and it is a big reason why we lack very skillful players. We just don’t have the place for experimentation with different skills in a low-pressure environment, and it’s difficult to force it. Our players are more robotic with the ball, because all of their early experiences are in an organized environment, learning from one coach (who may or may not be qualified).
Hopefully seeing more quality soccer on TV, with the sport gaining more popularity, will get more kids playing in their neighborhoods, parks, and backyards. This is why other countries consistently produce more technical players than we do. It’s not the academies, it’s the culture.
Coaches Prioritizing the Wrong Attributes
With this overemphasis on winning due to the pay to play set up of US soccer, coaches often prioritize the wrong skills. We already mentioned the scenario of kicking it to the big/fast kid up top so he can outrun/outmuscle smaller kids to score easy goals. But it goes deeper than this.
Of course teaching a winning attitude is important, but often you will see youth clubs who employ short-sighted tactics to prioritize winning. Overly-aggressive play, an emphasis on running/fitness/athleticism, and tactics that don’t emphasize technical skills can all be a short-cut to winning. And the players who are most likely to be adept at these tactics usually don’t turn out to be the most technical players.
I can list dozens of examples from when I was growing up. Based on what I’ve observed recently, I do think this is getting better. But it’s been a hard push to move away from a results-oriented youth setup, dominated by parents and their desires, to a developmental approach aimed at creating the best players possible.
Over-reliance on athleticism based on other more popular US sports
One thing we haven’t mentioned is the sporting culture in the US. We are obsessed with measurable metrics. If you look at any pro sports combine, all everyone talks about is 40 yd dash times, vertical jump heights, and bench pressing. There are countless personal trainers who are focused solely on the physical and athletic aspect of sport. These might work well for other sports, but soccer has such a huge technical component that these other sports do not (outside of maybe a few positions).
Not that it’s bad to value athleticism. Far from it. We do produce soccer players who are great athletes, and that has kept us somewhat competitive. And you need those players.
But the culture of prioritizing these measurable attributes comes at the expense of valuing players with skills that cannot be objectively measured (first touch, passing accuracy/weight, ball striking, vision, quick feet, creativity, etc…). Players who excel in these areas tend to get pushed by the wayside when it comes time to put elite youth teams together, unless of course they are also great athletes.
I believe this is changing too, but our sporting culture really likes these impressive measurable stats. When we start valuing technical ability just as much, more of these players will get their chance at a younger age (when maybe they just aren’t as physically developed yet), so they can play against better competition and fast track their development too. A lot of times these smaller/weaker/slower players catch up physically, and we need to take just as many chances on these players with high technical aptitude as we do on the athletes.
This is up to the coaching culture to emphasize, and this comes from the top of US Soccer all the way down.
England
It’s weird to list another country as a reason why we don’t produce technical players. But the English game has had an outsized effect on the US soccer culture. Growing up, we always had British coaches who were the de facto authority, because our American coaches “didn’t know anything” and their accents gave them an air of superiority.
These coaches were a big part of the US Youth Soccer set up too. And if you look at the English game before the last 10 years, they also did not produce many top-level technical players (at least as many as they should have given their standing in the game).
They too emphasized athleticism, fitness, physicality, and getting stuck-in (meaning to tackle your opponent with gusto) over technical ability. They had maybe 1-2 players each generation that you would consider technically world class, and many of these (Le Tissier, Sheringham, Gascoigne, etc) were overlooked for the national team for more workmanlike players.
That has changed with the academies there focusing on more technical players, which has led to the development of players like Foden, Bellingham, Palmer, Mainoo, Elliot, and a host of other English players who are very strong on the ball. Some of these players may not have made it in a past era in England, and their national team is reaping the benefits.
This impact of England on our soccer culture is waning, but the imprints are still there. Our academies need to do the same in terms of looking at players who are more technically skilled, even if they have room for physical development.
The Key Developmental Years – 17-21
One thing I noticed playing in Germany for a Bundesliga U23 team (their reserve team level), is the difference in training for their 17-21 year olds vs. what most good US players were receiving at the same age. Granted, this was in 2008 and a lot has changed since then, but it is why we’re still catching up.
Even in those days, our youth national teams were competitive. Landon Donovan’s U17 team, the first one in the US Soccer Residency program in the late 90s, made the semi-finals of the U17 World Championship in 1999. There are many other examples of our youth teams performing well. But this never translated to the senior level.
Brutal competitiveness
The problem was the late teen years. In other countries, as I observed firsthand, the best players are training twice per day for 10 months out of the year. They are usually in a reserve team or first-team set up, with constant competitive pressure. If you have a couple off days in training, you may not make the squad that weekend. Have a few bad weeks, and you might be looking for another job.
Conversely, if you have a good week in training, you may get rewarded with a place on the bench or in the starting lineup. Which means you may get some game time. Which means if you perform well during your opportunity, you could see more game time and a move up to the first team. And so on.
This pressure from both above and below creates an incredibly intense environment. I’ve never experienced more pressure in training sessions, including professional sessions in the US, than I did in reserve team sessions in Germany. The competitiveness was unreal, as players were fighting for their lives each session. And they experience this day in and day out for 10 months out of the year.
Compare this to my experience at the same age in the US. I played D1 college soccer on a mid-level team. Our season was 3-4 months long, we had to go to class, and really only the top 15-16 players on the team were good enough to contribute. And the top 3-4 players would never lose their place. The starters mostly knew they were starting, even if they had a couple bad games/practices. This was true even at the top programs – it was hard to break into or lose your place in the lineup.
The games were very competitive but training was less so. And the very best players (who became top-level professionals) were not really challenged at this level. Certainly not the extent of their counterparts in every other part of the world.
Some college players did make good or even great (i.e. Clint Dempsey, Brad Friedel, Kasey Keller) professionals, but they were the exception to the rule.
Positive change
This is what our best 17-21 year olds were experiencing up until about a decade ago. And it’s good that now our best players are going straight into professional environments. I know they are playing higher level games year around and training in more professional environments with more competitiveness, with the vision of a first-team spot on an MLS squad within their grasp.
But we don’t have the infrastructure and culture in place that creates the same cutthroat environment in the US today that I experienced in Germany 15 or so years ago. There’s no promotion/relegation, the best talent here is still “coddled”, and it’s hard to work your way up the ladder if you weren’t a hot prospect. We are still playing catch up when it comes to polishing our best diamonds, and that shows in the results of our full national team.
In fact, many of our best and most technical players (Pulisic, Reyna, Musah, Cardoso) came through youth teams abroad and have developed better because of it.
The best players in the US still tend to be insulated from real internal competition until they hit the full-professional level. At that time it may be too late to see who can sink or swim. In other countries, this weeding out takes place constantly starting at age 16-17, which ensures that the best players survive. When we can replicate the same environments that players across the world experience, the best and most technical players will thrive.
Verdict
While our development process has improved quite a bit in the past 10 years, we still have a long way to go. We have yet to produce a truly world-class field player, and we don’t produce any technically elite players. It will take a culture shift before we see that happen – hopefully the momentum we’ve gained recently can push this forward.
