re: The pay-for-play debate

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The lead in that article says US Soccer made a lot of money off the Copa America. That is not something that is guaranteed to continue to happen. How many coaches can we pay with $100 million? For how many years? Yeah, it's not enough

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Making 100 million every couple of year, is easly a start to sustain a real infrastructure to develop players.

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That Copa America was not a recurring event. That's not a revenue stream. That's a gift.

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But the world cup is

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And I assure you that not all players who play for FC Dallas do so for free. The vast majority pay to play. So clearly FC Dallas does not make enough to even fund it's own youth operation, much less to pay transfer fees to fund other clubs. Yeah, I'm the one who doesn't know what he is talking about

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The entire FC Dallas system is huge, they have so many teams its absurd. But the actual top level academy players playing on the A team are not paying to play.

I'm not talking about kids who have to pay just to be under the FC Dallas umbrella. Their set up isn't a traditional academy set up. When a club has one u-9,u-10, u-12, u-14, u-16, u-18 and u-21/23.

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Correct. But how do you think FC Dallas identifies the players that will play for their top academy team before those teams are formed? They have to pay to play Junior Academy and even higher level select before playing their way on to Development Academy Teams

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Or they scout them at tournaments. Top level talent gets identified pretty fast. You are using FC Dallas which is an outlier of how academy's are run.

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The world cup is in the US once every 40 years or so. Not sure we can count on that either.

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The USSF makes money off every World Cup from multi revue streams, regardless if we qualify or not.

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And these players playing at their tournaments that FC Dallas (or Atlanta United or Houston Dynamo, etc.) play on teams not affiliated with MLS clubs. And they are paying fees to play for those clubs.

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Correct, now if these teams can get paid for the players they develop then we can move away from that. But USSF will not allow it.

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No one pays to play youth soccer in Spain because enough people pay money to watch professional soccer in Spain. There is enough revenue to make it so. There is not enough revenue associated with professional soccer in order to pay youth soccer coaches!

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Travel teams that are not MLS affiliated could pay coaches and for stuff if they got their fair pay or if USSF actually invested in them. Instead USSF takes money from the.

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Are you suggesting that there is enough money to pay youth soccer coaches in the USA. The revenue is there, but it is just all going into the USSF's pockets instead of into the local club and youth soccer coaches' pockets?

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Go back and read my previous post in this thread. I have addressed this multiple times. But yes the USSF makes money off travel league fees.

US Youth Soccer Stats

This says that there were roughly 3,000,000 registered youth soccer players in the USA in 2014. Let's say that for every 20, there is a club team. That's 150,000 teams. Let's say on average a youth soccer coach coaches 3 teams. That's 50,000 soccer coaches in the USA. That number seems low, so maybe one of those assumptions is off. But let's roll with it. If each of those coaches, on average, made $50,000 per year (we don't want the to struggle or they will look to find employment elsewhere...) We are talking about 2.5 BILLION dollars needed to pay all those coaches.

Okay, let's say I'm off by a factor of 10 in each direction. What if there were 5,000 professional coaches in the USA and they were each paid $50,000 per year for their services? That's $250 MILLION in salaries. Looks like we are going to have to hold another Copa America or two.

I just don't see the money coming in and bypassing the coaches in order to be paid into the USSF.

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Most travel and youth coaches are people parents

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You don't think there are 5,000 coaches in the USA worth $50,000 per year?

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holding back soccer, but not baseball, basketball, football

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Not sure it's been mentioned yet, but soccer is more skill based than football or basketball. If you're a great athlete, you can pretty much step on the field/court in football and basketball for the first time and be a good player. Soccer not so much.

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This is false as frick.

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It's not that false. There are guys who are starters in the NFL who didn't start playing football until recently. There's all the basketball tight ends and several defensive ends. Oneyata for the Saints started playing football five years ago. He's solidly in an NFL d-line rotation.

Same with basketball, at least for shot blockers/rebounders. Even some perimeter guys, Giannis didn't start playing basketball until his teens. He might be the best player in the nba in a few years. Olajuwon didn't start playing until he was 17. And these are all-nba type talents, not just serviceable players.

Athleticism is not nearly as much of an equalizer in soccer as it is in other sports, both because of the unnatural skill, doing stuff with your feet, and because in-game intelligence is so important in soccer. In football probably about half the players on the field at any given time can be micro-managed by the coaching staff almost every play, or at least every series. Basketball too, it's not that difficult to tell a guy to go stand by the rim and block shots/rebound. Having in-game intelligence helps a lot, but it's not nearly as important as in soccer