Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, USA 2, Canada 1.

Way to ruin the debate, man!

Does Canada have the culture? Seems we need to get past Costa Rica or Mexico to close this chapter. But can the debate truly end before the US can regularly compete with smaller S. American and European nations.

Except everyone here thought a tie or loss to Canada was inevitable. Thanks for moving the goal posts.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, USA 2, Canada 1.

Way to ruin the debate, man!

Does Canada have the culture? Seems we need to get past Costa Rica or Mexico to close this chapter. But can the debate truly end before the US can regularly compete with smaller S. American and European nations.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, USA 2, Canada 1.

Way to ruin the debate, man!

Does Canada have the culture? Seems we need to get past Costa Rica or Mexico to close this chapter. But can the debate truly end before the US can regularly compete with smaller S. American and European nations.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So, USA 2, Canada 1.

Way to ruin the debate, man!

Anonymous wrote:So, USA 2, Canada 1.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised

To a PP, ok, I’ll agree. I must live in a soccer bubble.

But the fact that the giant, wealthy USA even has soccer bubbles should matter and should be enough to easily overcome tiny Costa Rica, and not even be a question about too-cold-most-of-the-year hockey-crazed Canada.

There’s no question at all that many more kids in my area wear soccer jerseys than football or basketball or baseball probably combined. And yes, all races here. It also seems that soccer tryouts are much more competitive than football, even with some club players ineligible.

The question is, why can’t US soccer legitimately take advantage of the numbers we have (dollars and people) and be clearly and consistently better than Costa Rica (5M), Panama (4M), Canada (45M), and frankly Mexico too.

This, without talking about the many who do it better with far fewer players like Uruguay (4M), Croatia (4M), Switzerland (9M), Portugal (10M).

Surely US soccer with its money and access could learn development from someone. It’s wild to think that, way fewer than 0.01% of soccer playing US citizen boys play in another country as kids. Yet, a solid chunk of our national team pool always comes from that tiny number of overseas kids (see Robinson, Dest, Musa, Balogun, Tillman this time around). When half of our starters may once again be men who played as boys outside the States, US soccer’s youth development has not done its job. Pre-MLSNext, sure, but does anyone believe they’ve figured out yet.

There are several reasons:

The size of our country hurts us: Because the US is so vast in terms of how much land we have and the population is very much spread out, it is harder to scout well without a lot of resources and man hours. This scouting is done well in our main sports like American football and basketball because there is so much more money in these sports but we are really bad at this for soccer. This means that the talent pool isn't always the best players and surely not the best potential players because we don't have enough people looking for them and constantly evaluating youth players.

Scouting is terrible: The scouting that is actually done in the country is actually abysmal. We don't have enough scouts that have the experience and the results to flood the pool with legitimate contenders for professional football. The scouts have weak eyes for talent and see easily detectable traits, like size and speed, but have a much harder time spotting the pure soccer related skill sets that you need at the highest levels (technical ability, mental strength and decisionmaking, overall soccer IQ and a strong understanding of how to move off the ball). Because we don't scout well, our selection bias hurts the overall pool and we have low ceiling players that tap out their size and speed advantage early on in their careers.

Coaching is poor,: we dont have enough quality coaches to teach the game to our youth players. Period. Go to any MLS academy, MLS next club, college team etc etc and you will find a collection of coaches that haven't sniffed the highest levels of the sport EVEN IN THE US. When the majority of your coaches were educated in America about a sport that we have no history with, you can easily see why the quality is lacking. In Europe the coaches have far more experience both playing and coaching and it gives them an edge in transferring this knowledge to the youth. If your coach has only played college soccer, there is a limit to how much they actually understand about the game and conversely, a limit o how much your player can learn from him.

Pay to play history has corrupted the system: pay to play youth organizations aren't about developing players they are about making money. Because they were the only entities developing players in our country for so long (before free academies) they have away with the USSF and politics becomes much more critical than talent. This has also trickled to the MLS Academies in terms of politics...Because the majority of players in our country grow up learning the game in pay to play systems, they aren't in the best environments for learning the game from.the beginning of their youth careers because they pay to play clubs don't care about developing the players, they just care about how.mich money they can collect from parents. This is killing our youth development nationwide. Furthermore, the sport has become cost prohibitive in many parts of the country as lay to play clubs are greedy as hell. Meaning, some.kods don't get opportunity just because their families can't afford it. This doesn't happen worldwide.

Our federation is a joke: the USSF is a federation of old school, establishment soccer players from our past (when we were not good at the sport). These are the people decisionmaking about the future of the sport in this country and the direction it should go in. They don't t know what they are doing. Period. Largely.becsusr they haven't been exposed to how it is done correctly. Until there are massive, wholesale changes at the USSF we will only see marginal progress in our sport overall and especially in our youth.

So, if I told you there is a country with a massive population but it can't scout the population for talent, can't coach the players it does have, doesn't emphasize youth development at the youngest ages and doesn't have a governing body that knows how to build a system that is sustainable and producing pros talent regularly for the highest levels, what would your conclusion be about their chances of success in soccer? This is the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised

To a PP, ok, I’ll agree. I must live in a soccer bubble.

But the fact that the giant, wealthy USA even has soccer bubbles should matter and should be enough to easily overcome tiny Costa Rica, and not even be a question about too-cold-most-of-the-year hockey-crazed Canada.

There’s no question at all that many more kids in my area wear soccer jerseys than football or basketball or baseball probably combined. And yes, all races here. It also seems that soccer tryouts are much more competitive than football, even with some club players ineligible.

The question is, why can’t US soccer legitimately take advantage of the numbers we have (dollars and people) and be clearly and consistently better than Costa Rica (5M), Panama (4M), Canada (45M), and frankly Mexico too.

This, without talking about the many who do it better with far fewer players like Uruguay (4M), Croatia (4M), Switzerland (9M), Portugal (10M).

Surely US soccer with its money and access could learn development from someone. It’s wild to think that, way fewer than 0.01% of soccer playing US citizen boys play in another country as kids. Yet, a solid chunk of our national team pool always comes from that tiny number of overseas kids (see Robinson, Dest, Musa, Balogun, Tillman this time around). When half of our starters may once again be men who played as boys outside the States, US soccer’s youth development has not done its job. Pre-MLSNext, sure, but does anyone believe they’ve figured out yet.

There are several reasons:

The size of our country hurts us: Because the US is so vast in terms of how much land we have and the population is very much spread out, it is harder to scout well without a lot of resources and man hours. This scouting is done well in our main sports like American football and basketball because there is so much more money in these sports but we are really bad at this for soccer. This means that the talent pool isn't always the best players and surely not the best potential players because we don't have enough people looking for them and constantly evaluating youth players.

Scouting is terrible: The scouting that is actually done in the country is actually abysmal. We don't have enough scouts that have the experience and the results to flood the pool with legitimate contenders for professional football. The scouts have weak eyes for talent and see easily detectable traits, like size and speed, but have a much harder time spotting the pure soccer related skill sets that you need at the highest levels (technical ability, mental strength and decisionmaking, overall soccer IQ and a strong understanding of how to move off the ball). Because we don't scout well, our selection bias hurts the overall pool and we have low ceiling players that tap out their size and speed advantage early on in their careers.

Coaching is poor,: we dont have enough quality coaches to teach the game to our youth players. Period. Go to any MLS academy, MLS next club, college team etc etc and you will find a collection of coaches that haven't sniffed the highest levels of the sport EVEN IN THE US. When the majority of your coaches were educated in America about a sport that we have no history with, you can easily see why the quality is lacking. In Europe the coaches have far more experience both playing and coaching and it gives them an edge in transferring this knowledge to the youth. If your coach has only played college soccer, there is a limit to how much they actually understand about the game and conversely, a limit o how much your player can learn from him.

Pay to play history has corrupted the system: pay to play youth organizations aren't about developing players they are about making money. Because they were the only entities developing players in our country for so long (before free academies) they have away with the USSF and politics becomes much more critical than talent. This has also trickled to the MLS Academies in terms of politics...Because the majority of players in our country grow up learning the game in pay to play systems, they aren't in the best environments for learning the game from.the beginning of their youth careers because they pay to play clubs don't care about developing the players, they just care about how.mich money they can collect from parents. This is killing our youth development nationwide. Furthermore, the sport has become cost prohibitive in many parts of the country as lay to play clubs are greedy as hell. Meaning, some.kods don't get opportunity just because their families can't afford it. This doesn't happen worldwide.

Our federation is a joke: the USSF is a federation of old school, establishment soccer players from our past (when we were not good at the sport). These are the people decisionmaking about the future of the sport in this country and the direction it should go in. They don't t know what they are doing. Period. Largely.becsusr they haven't been exposed to how it is done correctly. Until there are massive, wholesale changes at the USSF we will only see marginal progress in our sport overall and especially in our youth.

So, if I told you there is a country with a massive population but it can't scout the population for talent, can't coach the players it does have, doesn't emphasize youth development at the youngest ages and doesn't have a governing body that knows how to build a system that is sustainable and producing pros talent regularly for the highest levels, what would your conclusion be about their chances of success in soccer? This is the US.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised

To a PP, ok, I’ll agree. I must live in a soccer bubble.

But the fact that the giant, wealthy USA even has soccer bubbles should matter and should be enough to easily overcome tiny Costa Rica, and not even be a question about too-cold-most-of-the-year hockey-crazed Canada.

There’s no question at all that many more kids in my area wear soccer jerseys than football or basketball or baseball probably combined. And yes, all races here. It also seems that soccer tryouts are much more competitive than football, even with some club players ineligible.

The question is, why can’t US soccer legitimately take advantage of the numbers we have (dollars and people) and be clearly and consistently better than Costa Rica (5M), Panama (4M), Canada (45M), and frankly Mexico too.

This, without talking about the many who do it better with far fewer players like Uruguay (4M), Croatia (4M), Switzerland (9M), Portugal (10M).

Surely US soccer with its money and access could learn development from someone. It’s wild to think that, way fewer than 0.01% of soccer playing US citizen boys play in another country as kids. Yet, a solid chunk of our national team pool always comes from that tiny number of overseas kids (see Robinson, Dest, Musa, Balogun, Tillman this time around). When half of our starters may once again be men who played as boys outside the States, US soccer’s youth development has not done its job. Pre-MLSNext, sure, but does anyone believe they’ve figured out yet.

There are several reasons:

The size of our country hurts us: Because the US is so vast in terms of how much land we have and the population is very much spread out, it is harder to scout well without a lot of resources and man hours. This scouting is done well in our main sports like American football and basketball because there is so much more money in these sports but we are really bad at this for soccer. This means that the talent pool isn't always the best players and surely not the best potential players because we don't have enough people looking for them and constantly evaluating youth players.

Scouting is terrible: The scouting that is actually done in the country is actually abysmal. We don't have enough scouts that have the experience and the results to flood the pool with legitimate contenders for professional football. The scouts have weak eyes for talent and see easily detectable traits, like size and speed, but have a much harder time spotting the pure soccer related skill sets that you need at the highest levels (technical ability, mental strength and decisionmaking, overall soccer IQ and a strong understanding of how to move off the ball). Because we don't scout well, our selection bias hurts the overall pool and we have low ceiling players that tap out their size and speed advantage early on in their careers.

Coaching is poor,: we dont have enough quality coaches to teach the game to our youth players. Period. Go to any MLS academy, MLS next club, college team etc etc and you will find a collection of coaches that haven't sniffed the highest levels of the sport EVEN IN THE US. When the majority of your coaches were educated in America about a sport that we have no history with, you can easily see why the quality is lacking. In Europe the coaches have far more experience both playing and coaching and it gives them an edge in transferring this knowledge to the youth. If your coach has only played college soccer, there is a limit to how much they actually understand about the game and conversely, a limit o how much your player can learn from him.

Pay to play history has corrupted the system: pay to play youth organizations aren't about developing players they are about making money. Because they were the only entities developing players in our country for so long (before free academies) they have away with the USSF and politics becomes much more critical than talent. This has also trickled to the MLS Academies in terms of politics...Because the majority of players in our country grow up learning the game in pay to play systems, they aren't in the best environments for learning the game from.the beginning of their youth careers because they pay to play clubs don't care about developing the players, they just care about how.mich money they can collect from parents. This is killing our youth development nationwide. Furthermore, the sport has become cost prohibitive in many parts of the country as lay to play clubs are greedy as hell. Meaning, some.kods don't get opportunity just because their families can't afford it. This doesn't happen worldwide.

Our federation is a joke: the USSF is a federation of old school, establishment soccer players from our past (when we were not good at the sport). These are the people decisionmaking about the future of the sport in this country and the direction it should go in. They don't t know what they are doing. Period. Largely.becsusr they haven't been exposed to how it is done correctly. Until there are massive, wholesale changes at the USSF we will only see marginal progress in our sport overall and especially in our youth.

So, if I told you there is a country with a massive population but it can't scout the population for talent, can't coach the players it does have, doesn't emphasize youth development at the youngest ages and doesn't have a governing body that knows how to build a system that is sustainable and producing pros talent regularly for the highest levels, what would your conclusion be about their chances of success in soccer? This is the US.

Anonymous wrote:Thank you!

I’d say “helpful response, but difficult headwinds.”

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised

To a PP, ok, I’ll agree. I must live in a soccer bubble.

But the fact that the giant, wealthy USA even has soccer bubbles should matter and should be enough to easily overcome tiny Costa Rica, and not even be a question about too-cold-most-of-the-year hockey-crazed Canada.

There’s no question at all that many more kids in my area wear soccer jerseys than football or basketball or baseball probably combined. And yes, all races here. It also seems that soccer tryouts are much more competitive than football, even with some club players ineligible.

The question is, why can’t US soccer legitimately take advantage of the numbers we have (dollars and people) and be clearly and consistently better than Costa Rica (5M), Panama (4M), Canada (45M), and frankly Mexico too.

This, without talking about the many who do it better with far fewer players like Uruguay (4M), Croatia (4M), Switzerland (9M), Portugal (10M).

Surely US soccer with its money and access could learn development from someone. It’s wild to think that, way fewer than 0.01% of soccer playing US citizen boys play in another country as kids. Yet, a solid chunk of our national team pool always comes from that tiny number of overseas kids (see Robinson, Dest, Musa, Balogun, Tillman this time around). When half of our starters may once again be men who played as boys outside the States, US soccer’s youth development has not done its job. Pre-MLSNext, sure, but does anyone believe they’ve figured out yet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised

To a PP, ok, I’ll agree. I must live in a soccer bubble.

But the fact that the giant, wealthy USA even has soccer bubbles should matter and should be enough to easily overcome tiny Costa Rica, and not even be a question about too-cold-most-of-the-year hockey-crazed Canada.

There’s no question at all that many more kids in my area wear soccer jerseys than football or basketball or baseball probably combined. And yes, all races here. It also seems that soccer tryouts are much more competitive than football, even with some club players ineligible.

The question is, why can’t US soccer legitimately take advantage of the numbers we have (dollars and people) and be clearly and consistently better than Costa Rica (5M), Panama (4M), Canada (45M), and frankly Mexico too.

This, without talking about the many who do it better with far fewer players like Uruguay (4M), Croatia (4M), Switzerland (9M), Portugal (10M).

Surely US soccer with its money and access could learn development from someone. It’s wild to think that, way fewer than 0.01% of soccer playing US citizen boys play in another country as kids. Yet, a solid chunk of our national team pool always comes from that tiny number of overseas kids (see Robinson, Dest, Musa, Balogun, Tillman this time around). When half of our starters may once again be men who played as boys outside the States, US soccer’s youth development has not done its job. Pre-MLSNext, sure, but does anyone believe they’ve figured out yet.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do any of you have kids in school? I do. Ask them the most popular sports or what they talk about with friends. It’s soccer at my DS’s school. American football and lacrosse still get the alumni and administrators’ attention. But the teen boys lean toward soccer in a way I never would have guessed until I asked why talks so much soccer.

So maybe, just maybe, the old folks on this chat don’t know as much as we think about what wil make soccer “better”. I have my opinions, but the sport is soaring like never before in the U.S. and worldwide.

Where do your kids go to school? Because that is absolutely NOT the case where we live in Virginia. My kids mostly play basketball around the neighborhood and they all watch and follow NFL. I see lots of football jerseys at the bus stop in the Fall.

We are in NW DC and I would the interest is 40% soccer, 30% basketball and 30% football.

Baseball should be worried. They are not even a rounding error. My kid gets the daily scores from Alexa but that’s it.

Bethesda/Rockville here. Ratios probably close to 45 soccer/20 basketball /33 football/2 hockey. Also think baseball is in trouble. Soccer is top. Basketball and football matter, but not quite as much. Top is the Premier League, followed by La Liga, Serie-A, then Bundesliga. I barely hear a word about MLS.

You people live in a soccer bubble. I guess that’s to be expected if you are on this message board. No way kids are watching more soccer than football. If that were the case you would walk into Dicks and see soccer jerseys not football. Friday night high school football games wouldn’t be filled with kids and high school soccer games would have spectators. There would be pep rallies before soccer games not football. Kids would have fantasy soccer leagues not football. There would be more soccer goals in driveways than basketball hoops.

Dick's has a whole large section dedicated to soccer jerseys

I don't see kids playing football all around the dmv on Saturday and Sundays at every available field from morning till night. It's soccer.
If more kids are wearing Eagles, Cowboys and Commanders jerseys than soccer jerseys in Elementary and Middle School I'd be surprised