Bill Ari

Let’s make a change

Supporting my local MLS club now that the USA got knocked out

One thing that’s discussed in the book is that the problem w youth soccer is that everyone is training ‘like a pro’ whereas in other countries, the top 1% or so go to academies and everyone else plays grassroots which is either free or about 300 bucks a year. Those academy kids have pretty sad outcomes on the whole. In the USA, MLS academies are much smaller in number and also less part of the culture, you have no system to definitively separate the 1% from the 5% or even the 50% at, say, u9. That isn’t really a problem in of itself but what it has encouraged is the expansion of pay to play, which has coincided w the gutting of rec leagues. Parents feel like there is no ‘normal’ option bc rec feels inadequate bc all the kids w a shred of talent went to pay to play. But pay to play seems absurdly expensive and time consuming. Most parents given that choice will choose the ‘better’ option and that’s how you have clubs that have 4 ‘competitive’ u9 teams. To justify the cost and to compete w the other clubs in the area, those kids will then train all the time and get the nicest 450 dollar uniform kits and most importantly, do everything to win bc that’s how they attract more customers. That means mostly picking fast big kids and kicking it long or in some instances using ‘tactics’ that 9 year olds cannot and should not be thinking about. The time and financial investment leads to toxic behavior throughout the system and the kids suffer from it, burn out, etc. More pro academies where the kids are seen as investments to be sold down the line (but don’t have to pay) would probably help USMNT. And a more robust public rec system wouldn’t make the cut off age at 8 for when parents have to decide whether they want to possibly bankrupt themselves to chase a dream. This would allow late bloomers to enter the pool of the 1% and possibly become the 0.1% (it is true in soccer a late bloomer probably means like 11 years old just bc you do need to learn ball skills very early which is why it’s ridiculous these clubs motivated by winning are just playing hoofball to the fastest kid). But ultimately the problem is that outside of immigrant areas we don’t have a culture where every 7 year old is doing tricks in front of the project buildings in les banlieues or in the favelas or whatever. If a kid that age wants to play soccer their parents have to find them a game and eventually they end up paying 3000 so their kid can be on the c team and r FC Columbus Ohio or whatever. Pay to play is not going away if you start opening a lot of NWSL or second div boys academies (those teams can’t afford to run those academies anyway so the question is mostly moot). And it is its own problem (a lot of this is discussed in the book as well as the history of how we got here). We should fix the public rec/grassroots system bc it’s the right thing to do and would make 95% of parents happier and would allow kids to learn to love the game and not have it be their job starting at age 9.