We will never be great at soccer on a global level because we have too many sports to choose from. Our best athletes play football, basketball, baseball, etc..in many countries, soccer is all they have so all their best athletes grow up dreaming of playing soccer.
Are you new to this? Tiny countries have been running circles around US Soccer since the beginning of time.
811,238 total high school soccer players in the US…the lowest total since 2014/15. 1,093,234 play football. Over 500,000 play basketball. 482,160 play baseball. Then you have wrestling, track and field, LaCrosse, etc. soccer is not our main sport like it is in so many other countries.
High school soccer is leaking players to travel teams/private academies with coaches that don’t want them wasting time with high school games. If I was high school age now, I would have likely joined a club for better comp and coaching - foregoing high school games.
My point in this thread has been that we’re never going to be a global powerhouse in soccer because it’s not one of our top sports. Other countries are completely wrapped up in soccer, but we’re not.
There isn’t a kid in the college ranks that should even have come close to sniffing this roster…you’re totally misjudging talent if you think that there are. Also pretty much true in the pro ranks…unless you think that teams like Leeds, Fulham, Chelsea, Juventus also can’t identify talent.
I'm sorry--is this trying to claim there's more talent in NCAA and MLS than on the national team because...
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And depending on what parts of the country you’re in the normal soccer type athlete is now being taken away by lacrosse.
The issue to many then appears to be relatively unrealistic expectations…we’re probably about the 15th best team in the world, and we got knocked out in the round of 16. We were a coin flip to make it out of our group, but successfully did (and were the youngest team to do so)…expectations will increase in 3.5 years as we mature and have the advantage of playing at home.True. I think what hits the casual soccer fan is that they never pay attention to soccer until it’s an Olympics or World Cup type event. Then they get on board. It’s not because they love soccer but because they’ll support anyone who puts on a USA jersey at an international event (whether it’s soccer or Olympic curling).
Then you hear a lot of the soccer fans start talking about how US players play in European leagues and this year they have a real chance to make some noise and beat some teams and people get on the bandwagon…… only to be hit with the Lucy yanking the football from Charlie Brown episode again and again.
The bottom line is that it’s not a very popular sport in the US and the team is, frankly, just not very good compared to the better teams. It’s like putting Tulane who does well in the AAC into the SEC and expecting them to win.
There are certainly other dynamics to all of it, as some have outlined above but countries that kick our national butt in soccer have populations of a single American state.
There is some real insight here. Europeans I talk to about soccer indicate that kids there spend allot more time working on skills such as dribbling. American coaches at the high school level prefer big kids that can kick the ball hard and can do 'one touch' passing. Give a US HS coach a small kid who has speed, stamina, is creative, and can dribble like a wizard and the coach won't know what to do with him.
And we don’t develop players because we don’t care enough….that’s my point.There are certainly other dynamics to all of it, as some have outlined above but countries that kick our national butt in soccer have populations of a single American state.
Argentina has 6 million more people than California. You're comparing apples to oranges in the draw, which by all accounts should matter. Foreign countries don't kick our butt because we don't care, they kick our butt because they are better, with massively less people to draw from to boot.
If we were any good we'd win on numbers alone.
The US draws from a population of 330 million, France draws from 65 million.
Brazil is the only country in the world cup the US doesn't double the population at a minimum.
The US has twice the number kids in youth soccer than France....2.2 million to 4.4 million.
It shouldn't matter what our sport "priority" is because the US has the numbers to develop from. Usually massively larger numbers of youth players compared to soccer juggernauts.
Smallest and biggest nations at World Cup 2022 based on population | Sporting News
The Sporting News wraps up the biggest and smallest nations set to compete at the 2022 World Cup based on population size.www.sportingnews.com
That's baloney, development is up to the individual. If your talking about Team USA as a whole well then I'd agree to certain extent. But either way the people involved are training and trying their hardest....Dedicated and committed to being great players, coaches, trainers, administrators, etc like any other human on earth trying to do the same thing.
Most kids in this country want to grow up and play in the NBA, NFL, or MLB…not too many want to play in the World Cup. There just isn’t the commitment to soccer that there is to other sports in this country at any level.
This is part of it.
It’s not unreasonable to think that LeBron could have been a world class goalkeeper. That’s the position where size is most important and where ball handling skill is least. On the other hand, is there any evidence that the elite foreign-born NBA players like Doncic or Giannis were any good at soccer or goalkeeper growing up? I’m sure they played it at least casually. And if they weren’t any good at soccer, why would LeBron be?
“NFL and NBA have the ncaa and high school as good feeder systems.”
I’m not a soccer guy at all, but from hearing from others, the problem with US soccer is lack of skill. The problem is not that our best athletes play other sports as we don’t need guys who are stronger and faster. We have plenty of that already.
It's such a preconceived misconception of soccer in America that they think the only reason we aren't "great" at it is because we don't care. What a ridiculous claim. Croatia is one of the better soccer teams in the world and has a population of 3.5 million people. For someone to contend that the USA and it's 4 million youth soccer players don't have the drive or will to be an equal at soccer is is just wildly ridiculous. A kid who grows up and wants to be a good soccer player in Charleston, West Virginia certainly has more resources to become great than some kid growing up in Croatia or Portugal and it's 10 million citizens. The national sentiment would have nothing to do with who and what that player becomes in the USA, the kids work ethic, athletic ability, smarts and commitment would have everything to do with it.
So we have far more people to choose from, we have far more resources at our disposal, we have all these kids growing up wanting to play for the World Cup, yet we can’t compete with countries a tenth of our size because we lack the skill? That makes little sense. Why do we dominate in basketball, football, baseball, track and field, swimming, etc. but we can’t compete in soccer? It’s because in all these other countries all they want to do is play soccer. It’s like Norway and skiing. If it was just about population, China and India would dominate every sport.
