Riseupfromtherubble

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I’d add it would likely be as important IMO to have a good chunk of the 5’6-5’10” 140-165 lb athletic boys give up the dream in football and basketball and focus on soccer earlier.

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I know a former bodybuilder that’s like 5’7” that was also a sprinter at Alabama. Can do a standing backflip among all sorts of other tumbling stunts. He grew up surfing and skimming. No doubt would’ve been a great little winger if he’d been born in Brazil.

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Everyone plays the game, especially immigrants. There is a mass cultural love of the game and a robust academy and club setup that is much more appropriate to their size/population than what we have here (we are slowly getting there, don’t forget Europe had a 100 year head start). There are open fields (some small side, some synthetic pitches needing minimal upkeep) throughout their cities so it’s accessible. People are always playing. I lived in Marseille and the level of the average player there was so much higher than anywhere else I’ve experienced.

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I think of it how baseball is our national past time. You can go to any ball complex around the southeast on a spring saturday and there are 500 kids there playing travel baseball.

You can also go to your community rec field on a Wednesday night and there are 80 grown men playing slow pitch softball. Dozens of balls will leave the yard and diving catches will be made. We grew up playing it, and we have for 100 years. It will never- repeat never- be ingrained in our culture like that.

But it's not ingrained in Morocco's culture like that either, or Norway's culture. It wasn't engrained in Greek culture when they won the Euro's.

We are the only sport loving country on the planet with the luxury of a sheer surplus of amazing athletes that there is still a path for us to get to the mountain top without the 100 year head start or the need for a massive cultural shift. But we can't keep doing exactly what we're doing. This process could be expedited. We could turn the sport on its head within 15 years, but I don't think we will, so it will take another 50+

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What’s your logic here?

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We scored two goals in the group stage at the last world cup.

Drew England 0-0, Drew Wales 1-1, Beat Iran 1-0. There's just some living on the edge going on when you lack any bite in the attack. I think the Paraguay match looks wildly different with Gregg considering how they looked the rest of the tournament.

I'd put Alex Freeman in the stock rising category. If he stays fit he'll start in 4 world cups for us, potentially even 5 but I hope by 2042 we'll have enough talent on the back end that the 37 year old isn't forced into a starting role

There should have been a bag of cash on Noahkai Banks doorstep this morning

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That doesn't mean we would have won. Belgium is a better

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If you watch the first 10 minutes of the second half after we switch tactics we looked like the better team. We didn't change anything we did from the group stage and Belgium came in with a plan tailor made to counter what they'd seen us do the last 4 matches and it worked.

We looked every bit ready to find an equalizer early in the second half until Freese made the dumbest play of the tournament. We go down 3-1 after a run of great play and it just totally deflates everyone. That's not a team that beats us 9/10 times. We had 57% possession of the ball and 89% pass accuracy to their 83%. Their chances weren't generated as much as they were mental lapses by our guys. They just didn't frick up, which is the hallmark of an experienced European side along with clinical finishing.

I think there's a decent chance that Gregg doesn't get us out of the group. He wasn't exactly known for his front foot tactics. A Gregg team isn't putting 4 in on Paraguay. I don't know what the hell happened last night aside from the guys just realizing quickly that Belgium's plan in the first half was stifling our plan. Yes, some individual quality was at play, but part of their plan was to have Courtois send it long to whoever Ream was marking and bypass our whole team. That's not exactly a tactical masterclass, it was route 1 Burnley football for 45 minutes, but it does beg the question why Ream went the full 90 when he was clearly a marked man to pick on.

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but Tim team not getting his leg to that shot is fricking absurd

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It's a matter of athletic ability that he does not possess. The first two were just not properly reading the game. The third one was a 38 year old man that was never a great athlete showcasing that he is now a well below average athlete

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Messi went to Barcelona at 13.

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And he was the best 13 year old there the day he arrived.

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But soccer is a skill sport

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A huge part of that, the technical ability, is developed without coaching. You can find any random brazilian male on a beach in Rio that's never had formal coaching that can keep the ball up for 100 touches. Soccer is also a rep sport and most of those at a young age happen away from formal coaching. Dominicans are good at baseball because by the time they're 18 they've hit a million bottle caps or black beans with a broomstick.

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If you want the best possible U.S. soccer team, the solution is a handful of extremely exclusive academies across the country that get the best players in there by 10 years old

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Fine in theory, but multiple issues with this line of reasoning:
1. How are you going to identify the 50-100 best 10 year olds in an area nearly 4 million square miles?
2. Many of the best 10 year olds flame out, and some of the average 10 year olds become global superstars

The solution I proposed is that MLS teams have an academy in every 100-150K metro within an X mile radius. So Miami has an academy in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, Miami, West Palm. Orlando has an academy in Tampa, Gainesville, Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Panama City, Pensacola.

That's how you do both, you identify the best players in a workable area and let them play together. The best 2 or 3 from each metro eventually moves to the "main" academy for said club and go from there. You don't cast the others to the side, you continue to develop them in their competitive environment. OCSC Panama City plays OCSC Pensacola twice a month. The goal becomes develop instead of win because you're all the same organization. It's a hyrbrid version of European academies and minor league baseball.

The hang up there is that all of that stuff costs money. Now, in theory, if that's happening across the country you've eventually built a Ligue 1, Eredivise type league full of uber talented 18-23 year olds that you can sell to Spain and England for a boatload of money. One elite player being sold can fund 5 years of overhead for an entire academy. Nothing similar will ever be implemented with an ROI though

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Elite athletes don’t matter, look at Messi

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I really wish people would stop making this comparison. Messi is an alien. He's 1 of 1 and no one before him has ever possessed his entire skillset or footballing brain. I think we need to operate under the assumption that we aren't going to produce one of those.

Elite athletes do matter. Kyle Walker, Virgil Van Dijk, Sergio Ramos, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe... I mean the list goes on and on and on. We've got the largest population of sporting age males in a multi sport nation. It's simple math that if you took the baseball travel ball structure even in the southeast and snapped your fingers and all of those kids were now playing soccer, we'd be a world power within a decade.

The difference is that there is no structure, so even if you had 1,000 kids in every county playing the game from a young age, they aren't getting quality coaching.

The flip side of that coin however is that from that 1,000 a handful of them are going to figure it out on their own to an extent and be obsessed with it and always have a ball at their feet. A percentage of those kids will grow up to be elite athletes.

The math is the math, but until it's a widespread game played by 12 year olds instead of 5 year olds, then the only pathway to the big boy table is to make sure the 12 year olds that are playing are getting proper coaching

It stands to reason that there are thousands of 6'5"-6'7" guys in this country that grew up playing basketball that were never good enough to play past a small college. Now imagine those genetics in goal. Now imagine the ones that were good enough to make it into the NBA and imagine those genetics in goal. The argument is a tired one and usually presented as a stupid one, like we should just start teaching Lebron James how to stop a 75 mph free kick form the top of the box. The real hypothetical to me is what if some of these guys that won the genetic lottery, which America has more of than any other nation, starting playing when they were 5 and took it serious. That's how you become a global power. It's not going to get to that point without structure though and I don't think we can have our cake and eat it too. Any rise of soccer is going to coincide with a decline in american football, I don't think the two can coexist and the long term injury data is going to damn the future of football in the long run

I think Spain is good but overrated. Doesn’t matter though, France rapes either one

1-1 game with Noahkai Banks in for Tim Ream

Freese you fricking idiot