What is (and isn't) wrong with soccer in the U.S.?

I have coached a variety of sports for the past 27 years. I think soccer, basketball, swimming, football, track, cross country, and robotics covers it. Though the last three, with over 60 seasons worth, constitute the bulk of my coaching experience. I have been thinking about doing more writing, and have been thinking about coming up with something like a coherent model for my coaching. Since it’s 2018, I naturally thought I would do something revolutionary and share my thoughts in a blog.

In any event, I am going to kick off this blog about my cross country and track & field coaching with some thoughts about soccer. Maybe not the best idea, but it’s where my head took me, so there I am. The World Cup in Russia is starting, obviously without the United States. And we just got the announcement that we will have a joint USA-Canada-Mexico World Cup in 2026. So soccer is on a lot of minds. Truth be told, it has been on a lot of minds in the U.S. for a while. Since we failed to qualify for this year’s World Cup, there has been a lot of soul searching, a lot of recrimination and a lot of finger pointing. There are certainly a lot of issues with professional soccer (MLS) that need to be addressed if we want to have top quality professional soccer here in the United States.

But I want to focus on the issues around youth soccer and developing players. There are two major themes here. One is self-evident to me, and widely critiqued, that soccer has mostly become a sport for wealthier, predominately white families and their kids. Related to that is that soccer is just not a sport that lots of kids play on their own. At least not in the way kids play basketball and football. We don’t see lots of kids getting out a soccer ball and playing 3v3 or 5v5 or 15v15 games. A lot of this has to do with the availability of fields. In our big population centers, where such open spaces are present, they are largely divided into ball fields and managed through largely online reservation systems. So you just don’t see a lot of kids going out with a ball a few friends and playing soccer just for fun. If you are systematically excluding a large percentage of the population from playing a game, it will be harder to develop great players.

The other major theme is that soccer is so fundamentally different from other sports that we can’t succeed in soccer using the same basic model that we use for basketball, football and other more traditional U.S. sports. Here I think there is a whole lot of assuming facts not in evidence. First off, the American women developed under largely the same system as a the men, and have experienced lots of success. And yes much of this has to do with Title IX and there being a lot more opportunities here, but the fact remains that the women have stayed among the top few teams in the world for three decades now, and are always a threat to win any tournament they enter. The American women also produce plenty of star players. And there are or more dominant in soccer than in any other team sports. So if you are going to argue that there is a fundamental difference between soccer and other sports you are going to need a lot of evidence, and not just evidence that the American men are not that great.

My next thought is that maybe we should look not at how youth soccer is similar to other youth sports and changing those things, maybe we should be looking at how club soccer is different than, say, AAU basketball. Because maybe those differences are part of our problem. Having coached both soccer and basketball at the middle and high school levels, I think I have a good perspective here. The single biggest difference I note is that the vast majority of AAU basketball players also play for their school team. It is unusual for a good AAU player not to play for their high school team. In soccer, on the other hand, it is not at all unusual for players not to play for the high school team. The next biggest difference I note is that on the average, club soccer games are a lot more lopsided than AAU basketball games. It is not at all unusual for an AAU team to play in a weekend tournament and play four or five really tight games. That is much less usual in soccer, where there are considerably more games in which one team completely over-matches the other. If my observations are correct, this means that the best soccer players spend a lot more time playing against opponents that are not really challenging than do the best basketball players.

Why is this a problem? Because you improve the most in any activity when you are challenged. When you are forced to improve on your weaknesses and make your strengths stronger. If you aren’t challenged you can simply play like you usually do and win. What causes this problem? Probably a lot of it is because it takes more players to make a soccer team. Thus if there are six great kids, six good kids, and 12 average kids you can make two or even three good, evenly matched teams in basketball while you probably only get one really good soccer team. (Note, the absence of a corresponding girls sport that has anywhere near the numbers of boys playing in football means there are more athletes to choose from and probably ameliorates this problem for girls soccer.)

The disparity in talent levels between teams has another, less obvious effect. It allows kids with more general athleticism to succeed because they are bigger, stronger and faster, without having to develop their skills and game intelligence. This gives a semblance of credence to the legions of soccer fans who argue that it is skill and not athleticism that matters in soccer, thus making soccer different. To my mind, this is pure crap. It is also an old argument. It used to be baseball (skill) versus football (athleticism). But there is absolutely no evidence or reasonable argument for soccer being fundamentally different from all the other team sports in this regard. It is absolutely a problem that bigger, stronger, faster kids can succeed without developing great skills. But that is a problem for all sports. Ask every 6’2” 7th grader who became a 6’3” 12th grader about it. In my view the problem is exacerbated in soccer, not because of the fundamental nature of the sport, but because of the talent disparities in youth soccer. (Note, it is almost certainly also exacerbated by the club sports model, where coaches generally can make charge more, and thus make more money, if they recruit the most athletic players and win the most. But that is a huge can of worms I don’t want to open in this article.) Let me just wrap up by saying that any “soccer person” who thinks playing offensive line doesn’t take a huge amount of skill development is pretty much in the same category of logic as the “football people” who think all soccer players are wimps.

Now a sort of relevant side note. Many argue that the U.S. will never be as good as some of the traditional soccer powers because too many of our best athletes play other sports. This is certainly an issue. If there are multiple sporting avenues for athletes to be great, you are going to spread out the talent pool. Furthermore, the smaller a country is, as long as it has reasonably plentiful economic resources, the more likely it is that the truly exceptional athletes will be identified. In the largest countries, and countries with a large degree of economic inequality, you are less likely to identify and develop the truly exceptional athletes. So while you will still have more of those “freak” athletes, you won’t have proportionally more than smaller countries do. This is why you would actually expect there to always be one or two small countries, like Iceland, to be way better than you would expect a small country to be. Just stop and think about it for a while. There are lots of small countries, and the odds are that at any given time, a few of them will, just by random chance, have a talent pool to compete at high level. This is not to denigrate all the development moves that Iceland has done for soccer. Those investments in its soccer future increase the odds of getting that talent pool and help develop the talent. In other words the moves Iceland made are necessary just not sufficient.

So what is my magic bullet? I don’t think there is one. I think that the two most important things we can do are to give more low cost / free opportunities for kids to play soccer and to change the youth/club soccer system so that there are more competitive games. Instead of trying to argue that soccer is fundamentally different from all other sports (and that this difference is only true for men) that maybe we should look at why we don’t get the same results. And we need to completely overhaul MLS. Promotion and relegation are an important start. But we need to not have it run like an organized crime family. In any event, I hope everyone has a good time watching the World Cup, even if we aren’t in it. Find a team and root for them. Enjoy watching the Beautiful Game.