By Mac Engel
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Four young kids kicking a soccer ball on a beach in Portugal partly explains why America is where it is with the beautiful game.
The group of four became six. Then eight. Then nine. Girls. Boys. Men. Women. No cones. No lines. No goals. No nets. No officials. No coaches. No sanctioning fees. No schedule.
Just a ball.
Dribbling. Bouncing. Bending. Passing. Tapping. Even to the untrained eye the ball control, and eye-foot coordination, looked damn near perfect.
Similar anecdotal examples are all over the place in Portugal, a modest nation of 10.4 million people. A person in America with its population of 336 million may go years without seeing such a scene here in the United States.
“You can’t force a kid to play on the streets here,” FC Dallas youth and boys’ academy directory, Chris Hayden, said in a phone interview.
America and its relationship with soccer has only been solidified since the early ‘90s. That’s roughly the time when we decided to care about a sport that is deified in every other nation on earth, and the game has grown steadily here ever since.
Americans who grew up in the ‘80s, or before 1995-ish, could not have conceived the state of the game would be where it is today in this country. A viable, stable professional league. A growing market to watch the leagues all over the world. Hosting World Cups. American players playing in the top leagues overseas.
America is good at fútbol, and still not even close to the best. The results this summer illustrate where we really sit. One month after it failed to get out of pool play at the Copa America tournament by losing two of its three matches, the U.S. Men’s National team lost 4-0 to Morocco in the quarterfinals of the Olympics.
(Men’s soccer in the Olympics is a 23-and-under tournament; it’s this way to essentially protect the value of FIFA’s cash elephant that is the World Cup).
This is a men’s national team issue that is in neither crisis nor is it an embarrassment. The USMNT should be a bit better than it’s played this year.
The U.S. women’s team has no such issues, for now. It’s at the top of the food chain, due primarily because this country heavily invested in the sport for girls ahead of the rest of the world. The U.S. defeated Germany 1-0 on Tuesday in Paris to advance to the gold medal match.
The rest of the world is catching the U.S. women, a development the sport needs. It’s hard to see the U.S. ever catching up to the rest of the world on the men’s side.
“We have improved and we’re getting better, but the challenge is the bar continues to be raised,” Hayden said. “And that bar is being raised by countries that had a 100-year head start (compared to the United States).
“It’s a little bit like basketball. You’re seeing European players all over the NBA now, and countries that haven’t been really playing for that long really improving, but they’re still behind the U.S.”
Hayden said the days of a kid “coming off the beach” in Europe and South American to immediately take to their youth national teams and dominate are “a thing of the past.”
Any country that has a dime to spend is mimicking some of the American system of development, and investment. Because nearly every team in these countries is a “selling club;” they’re developing talent with the goal of cashing in the lucrative “transfer fee” game.
One of the persistent challenges that the American system faces is the American-born player knows how only to play with a coach in their ear. When the American kid plays, it’s most likely a practice outlined by a coach, or game that follows a “plan.”
There is little room for the player to adopt a natural, individual, feel for the game, like a kid on a basketball court.
“The player in some ways has never been better, but it’s a double-edged sword,” Hayden said. “It’s not organic the way it was in the ‘70s or ‘80s. You’re seeing some of that now in Europe, too.
“Clubs are now trying to develop those areas for ‘free play.’ Because you do need that. The free flow and the creativity. You don’t want to coach those qualities out of them.”
It’s hard to coach it out of the American kid because they likely didn’t have it in the first place.
The net result of this is the state of the game has never been better in the United States, but the same can be said of France, Spain, Italy, Germany and the rest.
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