re: Can someone explain to me why our youth system is bad?

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I agree 100% with your comments. And I feel developing skills is extremely important more so than any other sport. You can learn to run better routes or catch better way easier than you can learn soccer skills. My whole intention here wasn't to downplay skills or say they arent the most important thing. My point was simply to say that major sports in the US take away great athletes from soccer. In other countries, they can play soccer or nothing.

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You are correct on the “better athletes playing other sports” argument. You won’t get any love around here with it though. A great, instinctive, hungry young athlete trained properly for his entire life will succeed 99 out of 100 times as opposed to a lesser athlete. It makes all the sense in the world, but the soccer board lifers seem to have too much pride to admit that it IS a lack of elite athletes that is holding our national team back.

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I don't think soccer is competing for the same athletes. Generally the big three sports favor bigger players, and the demographic we need to focus on is the sub 6 foot demo, as there are plenty of great athletes in this demo who don't fit the profile of the big three sports. Many of the best players in the world are under 6 feet, and some our our best players ever are in this demographic. We should, if anything, focus on that

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You must not watch much American football. Our best cornerbacks, receivers, running backs that you see every Saturday and sunday during the fall are so far ahead of our current USMNT crop of players respective to their own sport it’s laughable. Those guys are perfect “soccer type athletes.” No one creates athletes or trains them better in the world than America. It’s not close. The problem is they are being trained to play different sports. The argument Mick is making is based on the idea that if the undoubtably superior athletes we produce here spent their lives preparing for a pro soccer career as opposed to baseball, basketball, and football, we would be living in a world where the US dominates soccer like we do in every other sport our country actually cares about. But that’s not changing anytime soon so it’s honestly a pretty frustrating exercise to think would could be.