Re: Regarding Player Development in the US
People who say the US is behind in soccer simply because our best athletes play other sports know nothing about youth soccer or even soccer in general. Lebron even if he focused solely on soccer most of his life, would probably make a mediocre soccer player.
Yes there are some common attributes that are shared across top athletes. But a great basketball player will not make a great soccer player if we're talking at the highest levels. Yes soccer players have gotten bigger and taller over the years, but there's still a ceiling. Someone who is '6'9 will not have the agility and center of gravity needed to have world class technical ability and change of speed of someone a foot shorter. There's always exceptions but just look at Peter Crouch. So it's not just about funneling all our best athletes toward soccer. They still need to have a proportional body type and posses exceptional balance and talent with their feet. Some kids you can throw a ball at their feet and after 15-20 minutes it almost feels like they were born with the ball at their feet. Other kids it sometimes takes years for them to look like a natural with the ball even if they are exceptional athletes.
Another huge thing and this is the biggest reason why we struggle to compete in soccer. Our whole youth and to pro system in America is based around high school and college. Generally you try to play well in high school so you get recognize by a top college. You then play baseball, football, or basketball at that top college and hope to get picked up by the pros. That's how it works for all the professional sports in America.
The problem is, this doesn't work at all for soccer. In the rest of the world, players get recruited at ages 7-9 years old and play at full-time soccer academies (often sponsored by major clubs) and then they turn pro around 16 or 18 at the latest. So in the US, the college system puts us at a severe disadvantage because they usually stay in high school until 18 and then spend another 4 years playing soccer at a college (which probably has mediocre to terrible quality soccer). American players don't get out of the system and turn pro until there about 22 years old. This puts us 4-6 years behind the equivalent European player. Imagine if Neymar wasn't at this World Cup but instead still stuck playing at Duke University coached by someone who doubles as a history professor.
If you look at the youth national tournaments, the US is actually pretty competitive with the rest of the world in the u17 age groups. But we just lose so much ground when the players are 16-22 years old.
Also in the US we have child labor laws where you can't sign kids to professional contracts. However in the rest of the world for the most part, there's no such rules. Clubs can have kids sign contracts and they own the rights to those 9-10 year olds. They in turn spend money developing those players, so hopefully when they get older they can sell the players for a transfer fee. It's a business and it's business that is incompatible with the US labor laws. So there isn't incentive to train little kids in soccer as intense in the US as in other parts of the world because there isn't a perceived payoff. Instead the Youth soccer system in America is "pay to play" and it's mostly composed of middle and upper middle class kids who can afford the club fees and travel.
This is the real reason why we are behind the technical curve with soccer in America. Not because Lebron is playing basketball.
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