Reply to Landon Donovan was right

Forum Index » Soccer

Reply to "Landon Donovan was right"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Every sport in USA is structured as hell, almost year-round play. There's no incentive to go out and play in the street when you have gaming inside and air conditioning.[b] American youth is sucked up by four way more popular sports before a boy thinks of soccer after the age of 8.[/b] Girls gravitate to it because only basketball takes athletes away. Don't blame just the kids either... i see the sidelines heaving with heavy-set parents who very likey never usher their kids outside because they too sit on their phones all day.[/quote]

i think everyone is trying to find fault when there is no fault.  Soccer is just a fringe sport in America, it's just the way it is.

The facts are most boys would rather play basketball, baseball or football and it's likely because that's what one of their parents grew up playing or watched or whatever reason.[/quote]

I agree with this.  Our best athletes in the US are not choosing soccer.  If we took our best athletes in the NBA and NFL and they played soccer throughout their lives, we would dominate. [/quote]
It's not just that our best athletes are in the NBA and NFL. It's that all our best athletes are TRYING to be in the NBA and NFL. That 5'6'' kid whose body type would work great for soccer, but maybe not for basketball because they aren't very tall, is still playing basketball but their playing career ends in high school. Imagine if that 5'6'' kid didn't spend the first 15 years of their life trying to become a basketball player, and had started with soccer instead. Those are the players that we're missing out on because soccer isn't popular. [/quote]

I call BS on this. More kids are playing organized soccer at some point than any other sport. The stats are over 3 million according to multiple sources - just above basketball. And twice as many as American football. The 5'6" kid gets pushed out of both sports and quits sports all together. His odds of going pro are slim in soccer, but they are microscopic in basketball. The problem is that at some point a short-sighted youth coach wanted to brag to his buddies about winning the U9 league and decided that the diminutive player didn't give him the best chance. This was Landon Donovan's whole point that started this thread. [/quote]

We're also forgetting that most children can play high school baseball, basketball or football and still have a chance to play in college.  The same can't be said for soccer, there is no free path to playing at the next level in soccer like there is in other sports.[/quote]

So kids don't go from HS to college who play club soccer?[/quote]

I think Pps point is that no one goes pro in soccer from college. A few do but that’s not the traditional path like it is for football and basketball [/quote]

Basketball is a national path through a very few handful of high schools (who recruit kids from club). Most recruiting is through showcase tournaments and through EYBL and other top leagues. I.e. just like soccer [/quote]

28 million American kids are registered to play basketball every year. 2nd place at the Olympics went to France with 750,000. The US might have won, but it's not because of some sort of magical training system. It's numbers. Which is basically the same approach that US Soccer takes. We're not looking for quality. We're letting anyone train and hoping enough kids "survive" to make it big.

The pay to play model is there for all sports in the US. It works for some (swimming) and doesn't for others (Soccer). At this point though, I don't think that you could point to a sport where the US does it better than everyone. American football? Maybe if anyone else played it. Swimming? Australia crushes it on a per capita basis.

[b]As for soccer, the landscape is absolute trash as Landon says. The objective is and always has been to extract value out of families rather than invest in the future. Parents pay for an experience.[/b][/quote]

It is so ridiculous when people say this. The number of families who care about the USMNT and creating a pipeline for them to be competitive is approaching zero. Families want their own kids to have a good experience, making the US landscape better for the one kid who may come out of their region every decade is not their concern [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics