re: This guy makes an excellent point about our talent pool

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The players that are that technically brilliant are already prodigies well before that.

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And a lot of them choose other sports because they are also really good athletes there is more money in it for them.

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Here, it's a middle class and rich kid's sport. We're ignoring an entire demographic in America.

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it's also a latino sport which is a growing demographic segment. Even if inner city urban youth don't embrace the sport you still have a large population of caucasion and latino youth to embrace the sport. About 15-20% of the population is urban youth who are almost always going to embrace football and basketball over soccer. It is what their athletic traits are more geared towards anyway. That still leaves a large population of 250 million, a population 5 times greater than Germany or Argentina, countries that do quite well without hardly any urban youth. We need to focus on getting the youth who don't have the athletic traits to make it in football and basketball to embrace soccer. PLayers who have great athletic ability that is geared more towards soccer to play soccer along with some African americans youths is a mix that seems to work well for the rest of the world. If soccer was a sport like football or basketball where pure athletic ability was the larger component then countrys such as Ghana and Nigeria would dominate.