Reply to Huge ECNL News coming 7/1/2024

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In a perfect world, we would have kids getting time with a couple of different age groups. The entire being tied to a particular age group thing is ridiculous. European clubs often group two or three years together. And bio-banding is an excellent initiative when it is implemented and not used for competitive advantages so that insane adults can try to win trophies. The last two years of ECNL are lumped together anyway to allow for that collective recruiting process. Stop relying so much on clubs for kids' soccer development. They don't give a crap about your kid.  Make it about a third of their youth soccer experience in addition to pickups with similarly skilled or more skilled players and private trainings with a coach who is going to instill discipline, work ethic, and game knowledge. [/quote]

At what ages do European clubs band age groups together? Never heard of that before [/quote]

Europe does stuff a bit differently country by country. Forget biobanding and RA and all that stuff for a second, what many European countries do really well is use the 4-corners model for tracking player development.

That rubric is 100x better at forming competitive groups than how we do it in the US with the “eye test” or the “his older brother is really good though” tests. Even in top competitive leagues in the teen years, with the IDPs etc we do poor bench-marking and development planning. And as a result we produce robots that play a version of soccer that their US trapped coach thinks soccer should be played like, often with position specific body phenotypes that make any adjustment in the face of soccer’s fluidity harder.[/quote]

Just to add on this, they have rules for the geography in which they can draw for their top academies. For example the younger age groups (u10 and younger) have to be local within a certain radius of the facility. Then the u11-u14(ish) can be an expanded radius or within the country, and the &gt;u14 can be even larger radius with many clubs opening international recruits at u15/16ish.

As for biobanding, they aren’t taking a US based u11 year old that has the body of a 14yo - they can’t. What they CAN do is relocate that 11yo though if they have a familiar connection to the area, or if the family is willing to wait for permanent residency by relocating. But that kid isn’t playing with the u14 squad because they probably aren’t mentally and socially developed enough (4-corners model) even if technically and physically they may be.

They also have a lot more fluidity between teams - being on the second team is not a stain like it in the US, it’s a mark of progression. Etc etc.

The easiest way to look at it is that the European model is development focused, because they have a way to get paid out for development - by selling player rights to other clubs.

The US clubs don’t have that, the pathway here is still (MLSNext included) very much a “get into a college” model as the payoff, so the clubs collect upfront, and are risk adverse in terms of “investing” in player development. The cost of development is then pushed onto the families via outside training costs and time, high club fees, etc.

That said, there are fees in Europe too, but much more is covered by the team (uniforms, travel, some meals, etc)
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So European academies don't allow kids to play 2 years up?[/quote]

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