The men of Madison United gathered around a table at the Klassik tavern after a hard-fought match with Corinthians in a local league. They eat, drink, and enjoy talking about the game that has brought them all together. A bunch of old guys (along with some young ones) from many different countries, all they could do while I sat among them was reminisce about how far soccer has come in the United States, and discuss how far it still has to go.
It is an often-repeated trope in the USA that the beautiful game’s popularity in this country has exploded in the last 10-20 years. This means that when Americans talk about how the sport has finally come to stay in the United States (as Larry Stone wrote in the Seattle Times on June 10), we see it from a perspective that hardly knew the world’s game beforehand. To get a different perspective, we must turn to foreigners, those who came from a place where the beautiful game was omnipresent to a land where you wouldn’t even know it existed.
Leeds native Keith Binns, author of Alive and Kicking, and sometimes called the father of Madison soccer, gave perhaps the most telling account of soccer’s growth in the U.S. “When I came to Madison in 1955, I couldn’t even buy a soccer ball,” he said. He had to personally start Madison’s first soccer club the next year, gathering a total of 14 players. This past year, he says that around 25,000 played in leagues across the city. Another Englishman, Ian Leggett, mentioned that when he came to Madison in 1982, he couldn’t find a soccer goal anywhere in the city, whereas these days, you can’t go anywhere without seeing one. Media coverage has improved, too. Currently, ESPN covers the USA national team and the World Cup, Fox covers the UEFA Champions League, and NBC covers the Barclays Premier League, along with many American websites dedicated to the sport. A decade ago, hardly any of this was present.
And yet there is still more to do, as these men compare US Soccer to the way the game is played in their native countries. Abe Jawara, a Gambian, said that the advancement of the sport in the USA has been a series of “baby steps.” And all the men agreed that where these baby steps are required most is the development of young players.
In some areas of the world, young players hone their skills by playing soccer constantly, on the beaches, in the streets, everywhere (the “Latin American” method). In others, they are trained in academies, run by professional clubs like Ajax Amsterdam, from extremely young ages, developing individual skills until they are eventually integrated into the senior team as a fully-fledged professional soccer player.
In the United States, however, this is not really present. While soccer is by far the most common game for our kids to play, it is not played nearly as frequently as it is by many Latin American children. Possibly more importantly, the existing avenues of player development (such as playing for one’s school) can serve as big roadblocks. For example, the emphasis on the team’s success means that, especially in high school, smaller players with more potential are sometimes benched for bigger, stronger players who will help the team win now but don’t have as much of a chance at a career in soccer later.
In addition, the fellas claimed that college soccer is not nearly as heavily scouted as the “big money sports” (football and basketball) are. To get noticed, you have to be a standout player at a major institution, and this lets potential talent slip under the rug. They brought up the story of Wisconsin native Jay DeMerit, a defender for the Vancouver Whitecaps. DeMerit had led Illinois-Chicago to the NCAA playoffs, but when no MLS club signed him after college, he had to go to England in search of playing opportunities. DeMerit started off by playing for a 9th-tier English side, eventually worked his way up to 2nd-tier Watford, and finally found himself on the United States squad for their Gold Cup-winning campaign in 2007, six years after graduating from college. Three years later, DeMerit went to the World Cup with the USA, and started every game. Imagine how much greater his career could have been if he had been noticed while still an undergraduate. It is these types of players that the men of Madison United fear the USA is missing out on.
Still, as Abe said, the advancement of US Soccer is a slow and steady series of baby steps. Improving the system of developing youth talent will take another round of baby steps, but, as Abe said to end the night, so long as the USA keeps going, they will eventually be up there with the best in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment