Good podcast on Pro/Rel from 3Four3 and my thoughts on how Pro/Rel makes a big difference at the grassroots level to help young players develop

I think Gary & Joey do a great job discussing how an open system changes soccer at the grassroots.

Most pro/rel discussion centers on what happens with the pros, so it was refreshing to hear someone talk about the effects it has all the way down to the grassroots at the local youth clubs and contrast youth clubs in the U.S. with youth clubs in pro/rel countries.

The podcast is available on iTunes and here: The Ongoing U.S. Open Cup Fiasco, Pro/Rel, and Are There Any Real Clubs in American Soccer?

I want to tie in a point another frequent 3Four3 guest, Kephern Fuller, made years ago on the podcast and I wrote about it here.

Fuller said, based on his experience, youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they want to go, while kids in the U.S. are just happy to be the best on their current team and are okay as long as the team seems to be having some success.

I believe the differences Gary & Joey discuss in this podcast are why youth players in Europe have a better sense for where they are headed.

Here’s why…

In the U.S. individual youth teams are insulated from each other and senior and pro teams. Even within larger clubs, players on a team might only get some visibility to one or two other teams — the teams they share a practice field with.

Kids are happy to be the best on the team, as Fuller pointed out, because this insulation provides no other good points of comparison.

They don’t pay much attention to pro games. They don’t pay any attention to their high school varsity games. Clubs, in fact, are forced by state high school athletic associations to not be involved with high school teams. The senior kids disappear from youth clubs during high school soccer season.

As a coach, I tried to get kids interested in watching the higher level teams so they could see where they were headed. It was a hard sell. They just didn’t connect with players they didn’t know.

What about competition, you might ask? Isn’t that a good point of comparison?

Not if the competition suffers from the same insulation as your team. You can tie 3-3 and think you are doing just fine, never realizing that both teams way behind.

Not having good points of comparison outside the team is why kids end up comparing themselves to teammates. That’s all they can really do.

The result is few youth players in the U.S. have a long-term benchmark for where they should be headed as a player.

Contrast that to the environment of youth clubs in Europe, where the local club’s senior team plays a similar role as our local high school varsity team, with a few exceptions.

One exception is there isn’t a divide forced between that team and the rest of the club by the state’s high school athletic association.

That has several positives that contribute to youth players in Europe having a better sense of where they are heading.

One is that clubs rely on those senior players to help coach younger kids to keep club costs down. This allows the younger players to get to know the senior players personally and develop role model relationships. A lot of these kids then develop a natural interesting in wanting to watch their coaches’ games, which gives them a point of comparison beyond how their current team and a vision for, where they are headed.

In that environment, whether a player is best on his U9 team or the team wins by 7 goals matters, but players also have another gauge on their performance. For example, they might more readily realize they won by 7 goals because the opponent was subpar, not because they played the style of ball or executed the positional roles like the senior team does.

Not so common soccer thoughts

I prefer playing with folks who know how to keep possession with a team over folks who don’t.

This doesn’t mean they have to be Messi. It just means they basic ball handling skills to trap, dribble and pass well enough to not turn it into a 50/50 ball or turnover more than half the time, knowing how to fall into some basic triangle and passing patterns (e.g. switch through back, switch, overlaps, give-and-go, back pass) and how to communicate.

American soccer tends to prefer players who hustle, run fast, run all the time and go in hard for tackles.

There’s a time and place for that, but I don’t think it’s all the time, especially when it results in giving the other team too many unearned advantages. It tends to do that that because it causes hectic, random, tired and unpredictable play.

When more of the team is good at keeping possession, you need a lot less hustle play to make up for the turnovers.

Another thought is that I believe converting balls into good balls is a vastly underrated thing in soccer.

Common on-field lingo is to say ‘good ball’ when a player does something with the ball that advantages the team, like slotting a pass through two defenders right to the strong foot of of one of your better goal scorers facing the goalie.

Many people reserve that compliment for high impact balls like that and probably think I’m weird that I also say it with simple play, like a simple back pass that takes the ball out of high pressure and puts it with a teammate that has time and space to think .

But, I feel like it’s treated like it’s nice when it happens, but not that big of a deal.

I think it is a big deal. I think it should be a top objective of a player and should be tracked stat.

When young players first step on the soccer field the coach should let them know that a key objective for them is to become a player that can reliably convert balls into good balls and better balls.

I believe they should be reminded of this continuously and it should be stuff players talk about after the game.

We remember the player that scored. We forget the player who created a good ball 4 passes back that led to the scoring chance. Most times, even that player forgets it because the norm is to not remember it.

I don’t forget it. I’ve surprised lots of player over the years after a goal scored and I complimented them on the good ball they created a few passes back to enable it.

Their typical response is to say, “Huh? Oh yeah, I guess so.”

Has anyone asked FIFA why they let US Soccer violate its principles while being against the European Super League for violating the same principles?

I think it’s a strange world we live in where this basic and obvious question does not get asked of Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA.

Infantino played prominently in Apple TV’s four part series, Super League: The War for Football. It told the story of how top European football clubs attempted to form a Super League in 2021.

As head of FIFA, Infantino was a key figure in the saga who ended up standing with its member organizations in Europe to oppose the formation of a European Super League because it would violate the principles of sporting merit that they consider to be the very foundation of the sport.

Granted, the series portrayed him initially being on the fence and only took sides when it became apparent which way the wind was blowing.

But, still, it seems obviously inconsistent to be opposed to the European Super League on the grounds it violates sporting merit, while remaining silent about MLS, which violates this same principle.

It’s worth noting, that even the Super League retained partial sporting merit, as it reserved some slots for other clubs to earn their way in.

That is more sporting merit than MLS has.

And yet, MLS gets away with it and the European Super League does not.

A portion of the USWNT case dismissed…

…according this CNN article due to facts.

Key passage (bold mine):

However, Judge R. Gary Klausner wrote in his decision that members of the USWNT did not prove wage discrimination under the Equal Pay Act because the women’s team played more games and made more money than the men’s team.

The women’s team also rejected a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) where they would have the same pay structure as the men’s team in favor of a different CBA, Klausner wrote.

The women’s CBA guarantees that players will be compensated regardless of whether they play a match or not, while the men’s CBA calls for players to be paid if they are called into camp to play and then participate in a match, according to the summary judgment.

Klausner wrote that the women were asking for a court to conclude that the women were paid less than men because had the women been paid under the men’s CBA, they would have earned more than they did under their own CBA.

“This approach — merely comparing what each team would have made under the other team’s CBA — is untenable in this case because it ignores the reality that the MNT and WNT bargained for different agreements which reflect different preferences, and that the WNT explicitly rejected the terms they now seek to retroactively impose on themselves,” Klausner wrote.

Is what’s in bold a true statement?

If so, this should have been a key element reported in this story from the beginning.

So, this isn’t an “oppressed” (women players) / “oppressor” (USSF) story as it has been made up to be in the media?

This is a story where the women players were not happy with the deal they, or their predecessors, had made?

My guess is they weren’t happy because they did the math after the fact and realized they made a bad deal. Which is a story in of itself, but a different story than what we have been hearing.

Can the media give us the real story on anything?

Cuts have consequences

I saw this Tweet via Chris Kessel:

My letter I received after I tried out for the SJ select team. I didn’t make it, which led me to then try out for the @medfordstrikers and was determined to not let this failure derail me. pic.twitter.com/FLLEnNyykr

— Carli Lloyd (@CarliLloyd) April 29, 2020

Very cool Carli! Thanks for sharing.

Alex Morgan is another awesome player who famously wasn’t good enough to make the cut at her first competitive tryout.

Michael Jordan is another.

Not being picked is devastating.

But it lights fires in true competitors like nothing else and forces others to think hard about how much they really want it, and maybe realize it’s time to move on.

As a coach, I wondered if I ruined kids’ potentials with too much positive reinforcement. Most great athletes have that story of that one coach that said they weren’t good enough, and they’ve been trying to prove that coach wrong ever since.

After that thought crossed my mind, I then wondered if some of those a-holes coaches had also figured that and said that to every player to see which ones would prove them wrong.

Why do American soccer coaches hate juggling?

I see soccer coaches on Twitter and real life snipping at each other all the time about things they don’t think helps players develop.

It’s common to see spats about unopposed training, juggling, fake moves, kicking the ball against the wall, 1v1s, small-sided games, toe taps or whatever.

In my opinion, it’s all good and all has a place. It’s not either one thing or another. What sport is?

The fact that we even have these spats tells me the soccer culture is still in its infancy.

Unfortunately, I see that attitude rub off, which takes away the players’ chances to discover what they can make out of these activities and how much it can help them.

I have never heard a basketball coach complain about kids playing OUT or practicing dribbling on their own.

I also bet soccer coaches in Europe or South American don’t complain about their players wasting time juggling.

So why do we?

I farted around on the basketball court a lot as a kid. Basic games like Around The World or OUT got me started. Over time we built off those basics using our creativity to come up with versions that were even more fun for us.

For example, I had a few different versions of Around The World that I played that kept me shooting when my friends weren’t around (like the Superman, which was flying around the world 7 times as fast as you could go).

I do the same with these basic soccer games. For example, I have a handful of juggling game variations that I cycle through. I started with the basic one that all American kids, except Christian Pulisic, and some coaches seem to hate with passion (how many can I get in a row?), learned a few version from others (e.g. how quickly can I get to 100) and made up a few of my own (e.g. left vs. right, my left wins more often than you might think).

The key isn’t WHAT activity.

The keys are doing an activity, having fun with it and being invested enough to use creativity to mix it up and make it even more fun.

It’s through all of those variations that kids might come up with fun versions that end up going viral and doing more to improve American soccer than the USSF, club or coach could ever do.

Rather than poo-poo’ing these things, we should let it happen.

Interesting podcast on youth soccer in Spain vs. U.S.

In this episode of Coaching Soccer Weekly, host Tom Mura speaks with coach Mario Zuniga about a range of topics, including the difference between youth soccer in the U.S. and Spain.

I recommend listening to it. Here are some of differences that I can remember…

Simplicity

According to Mario, youth soccer in Spain is much simpler. Mario said it took him two years to learn about all the different organizations and associations in the U.S. and how to navigate them.

In Spain, everything is under one FIFA umbrella and all teams, at all age levels, are connected through the pyramid. You could be a small club in Barcelona and if your U16 team is good enough, it will play Barcelona’s U16 team. There isn’t a separate league or association for them.

Mura characterized this as “more centralized” than the U.S. I think a better term is more competitively connected.

I don’t get a sense that the umbrella Mario refers to makes heavy handed, politically-based decisions like a centralized authority (though maybe they do) so much as it acts like a central bank ensuring the currency used by its citizens has credibility. But, in this case its citizens are clubs and players and the currency is on-the-field results.

Maybe those in-charge of such a system are open to the idea that they don’t have all the answers to what is a good team and what is a good player and the absolute best test, by a long shot, for getting those answers is opening up the competition, rather than carving it off. You just never know what coach, club or player is going to break through, so they maintain a system that lets them.

Cost

It’s a lot cheaper for kids to join a club. But, it’s not a big money maker for coaches, which is one reason Mario came to the U.S., where he could make more money coaching.

A follow-up question I wish Tom had asked, what motivates so many coaches to do it, then? Is it purely love for the game? Are there other incentives, like hoping to move up the ladder to more responsibility?

Futsal

Mario says that there isn’t a person playing soccer in Spain who hasn’t played futsal. For him, futsal was interchangeable with pickup soccer.

I may have over interpreted, but it sounds like futsal is a key developer of skill through pickup games at young ages, but clubs also start kids in futsal before they make it onto a soccer team to develop their skills.

Mario mentioned a couple times, “I just played futsal with my friends,” but we don’t really call it futsal. It’s football. It’s about the same. We just can’t always get 22. There are some differences, but those differences help you get better. Learning the control the ball on a different surface is good.

Part of that reminds me of something I told a parent once. Her son was practicing on their driveway. She was worried he’d get used to that and wouldn’t be any good in grass. I pointed out that any practice is good and multiple surfaces is good. We play basketball on several different types of surfaces, too. The ball bounces a little different, our shoes grip a little different, but we learn to adjust and that’s good.

The season and pace

Mario said the season runs from September through May and kids have one game each weekend. The weather helps, as they play outside the whole year in most parts of Spain.

I have a hunch that that more consistent and steady pace leads better learning and less burnout and maybe even more desire for kids to play pickup on their own.

Three beliefs in soccer in the U.S. that need to change

ONE

Current belief: Talent is developed.

What this should change to: Talent is discovered.

 

TWO

Current belief: We need to identify the top level talent and focus on making them better.

What this should change to: “Push up the bottom to push up the top” – Tom Byer

 

THREE

Current belief: We know what a good player is and what a good team is.

What this should change to: Maybe we don’t.

 

In future posts, I write in more detail on how the current belief holds us back and how the new belief could move us forward.

Preventing injuries in soccer

The last Coaching Soccer Weekly podcast with health care professional from the HSS Sports Safety Program about sports injuries is worth a listen.

It’s the first I’ve heard anyone support my pet theory that sports injuries are caused more by improper body positioning than overuse. The HSS program offers a free 10-15 minute online course (at the link above) to teach proper technique for accelerating, decelerating and changing direction.

I’m going to check it out.

I explained my pet theory last year in my post, The case for juggling.

It’s all about forces. When your body is in proper position, game forces are spread across the body evenly. I think proper position is shoulders, hips, knees and toes are contained within a rectangle.

Reaching outside of that rectangle results in concentrating game forces into smaller areas of the body and are more likely to results in breaks or tears in muscle tissue. That might be someone reaching out with their foot to make a tackle and concentrating all the force from the ball and player behind the ball into the ACL, for example.

It just so happens same position is also most effective for executing soccer’s skills.

You will win more tackles if you aren’t reaching because you will have your body weight on your side.

Staying in that position improves everything — dribbling, passing, receiving and even defending.

That’s one reason why training proper technique on soccer skills is important. It not only makes for better players that can make it to higher levels, but it also reduces the chance of injury.

I also think that the perceived ‘rise in sports injuries,’ (if there is one), is more due to having more teenagers in the sport who don’t know proper ball technique. Bad technique + the weight and strength of teenagers = damage.

The podcast host offered another theory to explain the purported rise in sports injuries: kids not getting a lot of free physical play time as kids, and never learning the motor skills to keep them in proper position.

Anyway…I enjoyed that Coaching Soccer Weekly podcast and I recommend it.

How U.S. Soccer is like the school cafeteria

Jon Townsend does an eloquent job in his article, “Deconstructing the American Game and the Problems So Many Thought Never Existed,” of laying  out the key issues in U.S. soccer.

Here’s a key issue:

The United States has no shortage of resources, players, fields, minivans, orange slices and participants. What it doesn’t have is a true culture on a large-scale basis. Vital elements like self-play, recreation games, and street football are not woven into the fabric of society in ways that basketball, American football and baseball are.

Too many people believe systems and coaches develop players and that’s where they spend a good deal of their energy.

They overlook a key truth: Culture develops players.

That’s been true of the sports woven into the fabric of our society forever, but it’s a cause and effect that’s hidden in plain sight. Few notice.

Near the end of the article, Townsend writes:

There is unlikely to be a single solution that operates as a panacea for all the ills and deficiencies of the domestic game from the youth to professional levels. If there is one, it is a truly open system where player development becomes an industry. Where investment in all tiers of the game is not a Ponzi scheme but a truly open and free market. Additionally, incentivising player and coaching development must be key drivers. Creating and fostering football as a cultural pillar is paramount.

Yes.

It’s tough for many folks to imagine the difference in outcomes between open and closed systems, but it’s big.

Restaurants are an open system. From it we get a lot of choices on where and what to eat, as well as when.

If restaurants were run like soccer in the U.S., our dinner choices would look more like school cafeterias. Decent, but mediocre, at best.

Of course, we wouldn’t know because we wouldn’t be able to imagine what we were missing.

For those pushing for an open system, we’d hear critics say, yeh but…some restaurants will fail, and that will put people out of work, and nobody will invest in a restaurant if there’s a chance it could fail. These are the types of reasons advocates to keep our closed soccer system.

But, imagine replacing your favorite restaurants with school cafeterias. The quality and selection would be meh. Hours of operation might be shorter and they may not be as conveniently located. The atmosphere may not be as nice. You may not be able to get your favorite cocktail or that one dish at that one place that you look forward to each month.

You may still not be able to imagine all that you’d be missing.

I remember visiting a family member in a different state. I couldn’t get beer after 10 pm because all the state liquor stores were already closed. When I went out the next day, I had to drive a good distance to get the beer.

At home, where the liquor market was more open, there are a dozen or more places within a short drive where I could get beer at any time.

Those that lived in the closed system were used to it. They didn’t know what they were missing.

I’ll keep my open system, thank you. Most will after experiencing it.