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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Think about what you just said.  Your player was on a select team made up of the best boys from around the country.  And that’s what it took to beat local non-academy club teams. You just made the point that the boys are well behind the Europeans, and it’s not just at u16 and older. [/quote]

This post cracked me up.  I'm certain that PP's player was not on a team "made up of the best boys from around the country".  Who could tell something like that when kids are 8-12?  Sounds like they were a good team that did very well against local European competition.  When our son was in that age range several years back, he went on a trip to the Netherlands that included two age groups of kids from here and NY that the guy organizing the trip had been impressed with at a regional tournament.   We did well (especially the older group) against actual club youth teams (including Ajax and PSV).   The youth director at Ajax talked to our group after a tour of the club and mentioned that American teams always look good and do well up until U15 or U16.  He said the teams that train at Ajax or play in youth tournaments there have technical skills on par to their counterparts in the Netherlands, but as time goes on, they have much less game awareness and tactical sophistication.

OP, we found these trips to the Netherlands to be amazing experiences on both the soccer (for our son) and tourism (for us) fronts.  It really helped our son get a better sense of what high level soccer looked like, and what it would like to be a pro.  But this was a pretty serious soccer program where the boys trained at Ajax and participated in tournaments where they were the only American team.  A lot of the programs that sound like what you are considering more like soccer-light, tourism-heavy.  I'm sure it would be fun, but I'm not sure I'd let my kid miss a week of school for one.  Hopefully your club would not penalize the kids who don't go.  That would be really unfair given the expense.  [/quote]

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