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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Messi grew up blue collar but not poor in a slum. Messi played club soccer like many kids.:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Messi[/quote]

Poor.  You are splitting hairs.  Poor kids in this country stand almost zero chance in soccer.  It’s a rich kid sport.

Basketball is different.[/quote]

Yes.  Scouts actually go out to all of the poorest neighborhood clubs.  They don't only have "ID Sessions" (many invite only) at one or two locations and expect kids to come to them.  They also don't only select from "rich" kid clubs.

We can keep whining how the US is so different we can't do stuff like that here.  We are just too big...blah, blah, blah.  The fact that we are so big means we should be doing light years above tiny countries like Iceland with a total population the size of Arlington County.

The fact is we don't develop all players.  We anoint a few at age 7-8 and those are the ones we choose to develop.  At 7 or 8 nobody can tell what they will be like after puberty.  And our track record shows that most of these flash-in-the pan tiny superstars aren't that great 8 years later.

We are a very closed system.  Hell----the Clubs are so political that if a player chooses to leave a Club in the younger years to develop elsewhere---he or she is never welcomed/allowed back in down the road because of grudges and egos.  It is the most f*cked up system in the World.  [/quote]

And yet Messi was found in a very traditional club soccer environment. There was no driving by an alley and seeing him play. Funny how we don’t make these same crutch arguments for scouting in our sports. I’m trying to think of that HOF Major League slugger who was seen playing stickball in Brooklyn.

Even though LeBron James was poor he was still discorved in a very traditional AAU Basketball as well as high school. A wise coach who recognized his talent took him in to give him a stable home life but he still was not discovered in a alley playing pickup basketball. These fairytales do not exist. Dominating the neighborhood does not translate to dominating the regions best. The only way to demonstrate dominance is to play against better and better kids and sorry but that just does not happen in pickup games. [/quote]

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