re: Iceland vs Croatia - Argentina vs Nigeria

When you learn Clint Dempsey’s life story, it’s a miracle he became a professional soccer player at all, much less one of our best players ever. His parents sacrificed a lot of time and money to drive 3 hours to Dallas multiple times a week for training and games. Imagine how many potential players we’ve missed out on because our country is just so damn big and decentralized. It’s much easier for tiny countries like Iceland and Uruguay to find and develop players, even if they live outside urban centers.

US Soccer needs to decentralize many more aspects of its youth development and hand over those powers to local associations. Big states like CA, FL, TX, NY, are way too big for a single association to manage, I don’t care how much money and resources they have.

I doubt true pro-rel ever happens, at least involving movement between MLS and other leagues/systems, but one thing we don’t have that would cause development to explode independent of pro-rel is youth training compensation. It’s so stupid that all the amazing talent Dallas produces gets poached for free by European clubs unless they’ve signed MLS contracts first. US Soccer needs to fix that shite quickly and I guarantee you’d see youth development explode all over the country. With proper compensation mechanisms in place, even soccer wastelands that will never have pro teams could still produce talent. Imagine how much money Pulisic’s youth club would receive, and what that would incentivize them to do.