Why soccer sucks in the US

Brian Costin does a great in this interview describing how monopolies hurt and competition helps in soccer.

Interview With . . . Brian Costin

I especially liked the following:

…the top 50 metro areas are significantly underserved as well. Greater Manchester in England has roughly the same sized population as Chicago, Illinois, 2.8 million. Manchester has seven professional soccer clubs in just the top 4 tiers of sport (Tier One: Manchester United, Manchester City, Tier 2: Wigan Athletic, Tier 3: Bolton Wanderers, Rochdale, Tier 4: Oldham Athletic and Salford City). All of these teams have aspirations to make it to the top tier of the sport, and five of the seven have played at the top level at some point in their history. Two of these clubs are super clubs regularly competing in major continental competitions. 

On the other hand is Chicago, with one professional soccer club which happens to be the worst non-expansion team in MLS over the last decade despite having the country’s third largest economic market all to themselves. If the United States had an open soccer system like the rest of the world I would not be surprised to see a half dozen professional soccer clubs or more competing in different levels of the pyramid in Chicago within a few decades, not to mention many more clubs in the full metropolitan area which totals 9.5 million people. Selfishly, as a Chicago resident, I’d like to think one of these teams would have a little bit more ambition than the Chicago Fire. Competition tends to do that.

People steeped in American sports tradition don’t understand this.

Salman Khan and Soccer

I like this quote on education from Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy:

The traditional model [of education] penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but does not expect mastery [e.g. time to move onto next subject even if you only mastered 90% of the last one].

We encourage you to experiment.  We encourage you to fail.  But we do expect mastery.

I think this applies to how we’ve structured youth soccer in the U.S., too.

Being overly focused on results at young ages penalizes experimentation and failure. So, we get kids who have won lots of games, but never acquired the competencies to play 11v11.

Soccer then graduates these kids to 11v11 based on their age, rather than their mastery of things needed to be competent in 11v11.

This results in a lot of kids making it to the 11v11 game lacking the basic mastery needed for the game.

Many never catch up or even realize they are behind.

In 11v11, they do not get enough time on the ball to make progress. I’ve seen kids who had been making good progress move to 11v11 and stagnate.

The few hundred touches they get on the ball in team training each week and the 50 they get in their weekly game is about 1% of what they need to get better.

What’s worse, they are placed into brackets of similarly incompetent players, so it’s never obvious that they lack these competencies.

What are these basics?

Receiving, shielding, dribbling and passing the ball with 60-70% or more effectiveness (i.e. keep the ball with your team at least 60% of the time it comes to you). I see too many kids in 11v11 who are 20% or less effective on these and everybody seems okay with this.

Stopping an attacker from making progress to your goal with the ball. This should be in the 80s or 90s, but too often I see players less than 50% on this and that seems acceptable.

I’d also expect players to have some basic communication down pat before playing 11v11, like calling for a pass (drop, square, through) and help teammates make decisions (time/on turn, carry, leave).

When I see players playing 11v11 incapable of these things, I think of Khan’s quote. Somewhere along the way we have said mastery is not an expectation. That needs to change.

Good handout for new soccer parents

One of the best things I read on the internet recently is Chris Kessell’s first handout to new parents in his soccer club.

pic.twitter.com/c5Dnb18HYp

— Chris Kessell (@THEChrisKessell) October 31, 2020

It’s well written and efficient. I’ve tried to write about a lot of these concepts so they might be understandable to folks new to soccer and I know how tough it is. Chris did a great job.

Just a couple nits…

I agree with one commenter to his post about word-smithing, “Encourage your young player to make mistakes.”

I might suggest adding, “…and learn from them.”

In my experience, when I’ve ‘encouraged mistakes’, I’d see repeated mistakes without learning. When I asked why I keep seeing the same mistake, they’d respond, “You said mistakes are okay.” Adding the expectation about learning helps with that.

My other nit is that #9 should be #1. It seems like common sense, but it’s not in the soccer world.