Midwest United, Wolves, Indiana Fire, Chicago Fire. I was most impressed with Indiana Fire, but every time I've seen one of their teams I've been impressed.
One thing that was odd - seems like they're still figuring out competition rules. 2x35 is pretty standard for that age grouping, but it was 2x40 and one of the coaches said the game they had in Indiana the day before they played 3x30. U13 kids should not be playing 3x30 at all, let alone on schedules that have them playing on consecutive days. Especially since they have limited substitution moments.
On the girls side, they were a big pickup for the ECNL and a loss for the GAL in the wake of the USSF GDA ugliness.
Chicago Fire and Indiana Fire are excellent programs. I think these new platforms will get it figured out. While evidence mounts that the sudden and unexpected transition from DA to MLS was in planning for many months, the timeliness of Covid advanced those plans (and led to the re-creation of the BDA which I do not think was what was intended originally). I think that, despite MLS greed, the people who are doing the day-to-day will get the platform where it needs to be.
I've said before that I think we've hit a tipping point where complaining about pay to play and "the best players play other sports" has lost steam as soccer hits the mainstream. I think we're going to see the level of boys from the MLS and girls from ECNL and GAL get much better in the next five years. (Vested interest as I'm excited to see the future for my '07 girl.)
The numbers in youth soccer had actually been in decline over the last few years until last year when levels finally increased a bit but did not reach the level of where they were several years ago. Despite the massive success and popularity of the USWNT that hasn't seemed to translate into in increase in numbers for the girls. They have been declining as well. I do think the better TV coverage (and thus increase in popularity) will help, but we're still a ways away from any kind of tipping point.
And as for pay to play, the huge obstacle still exists insofar as youth recreational soccer is relatively cheap and easy to access. Club soccer is not. Talented kids are more or less discouraged from playing school soccer in favor of club soccer. Whereas the talented kids can play the mainstream sports at their schools for free.
IMO, until clubs see schools as part of the overall development of players at the youth level, we are still many years away from the kind of numbers needed to hit the kind of tipping point you reference.
I'm far from an expert, but it seems like one of the major factors in our USWNT success was the U.S. having a head start, both with excellent college teams (which seem more relevant for the women's game than men's where they often go pro very young a la Messi) such that the dream of the "Bend it like Beckham" protagonists was to go to Santa Clara, and the early women's pro leagues. The supermoney coming into the women's game - EPL, La Liga, etc - seems like it should be great for the sport, and many of our American players will deservedly benefit too, but it also seems like it may be an equalizer with European players staying home and developing.
I can't tell if it will be like the WNBA where players may play both in the U.S. and abroad, or if they will focus on the big money Euro deals, and my fear is that it could be kinda like ND football where we had our own network but now everyone is on some sort of TV whether conference or ESPN-7, Fox Sports-Central Missouri, etc. Overall, I think we will still be fine and it's great for the players & sport, but our days of coasting are over, esp as shown by not necessarily winning every WC and Olympics anymore
Free college was a nice incentive for families that probably didn’t otherwise care about women’s sports. But if the USWNT teaches us anything it’s that success doesn’t particularly bring in the kind of revenue that men’s teams generate. So despite the ability to home grow good players I think we’ll continue to lose players to teams tied to big clubs. And those countries will likely catch up because of the pay to play restrictions on the overall player pool in the US.
It is the Illinois High School Athletic Association that bans kids from playing both club and high school during the high school season. ECNL allows kids to play high school.
My own experience with my older boy is that high school soccer is a mix of the following:
1. Politics of playing seniors over better freshmen and sophomores
2. 5 day a week 2 hour practices (which is absolute lunacy)
3. Coaches who also happen to be the [insert class here] (usually the math teacher)
4. Coaches who bristle at the concept that a club coach might be smarter than them
5. Games against players of varying ability including some who are unskilled and are out there to intentionally injure because it is "fun" and "funny" to do so.
High school soccer may be free but in my opinion, it is soccer below the rec level. I would NEVER put a high end (ECNL, MLS, GAL) player on a high school pitch. Never.
Referees who are really just football officials who took a 2 hour online pass/fail class to work soccer matches.
Ha!
Essentially, USA soccer and the clubs have to put together a model that supports making school programs better. You can't have tens of thousands of kids quitting the sport every year because they can't pay a club and their school doesn't care about the sport.
the schools don't care about USA soccer nor do they want to help soccer players. The only way they would is if they benefited from pay to play. So until that unlikely event occurs, high school (and college on the men's side) will never be part of the development pyramid. Hence, we have the system we have now.
What we do have though is parents who are more sophisticated. We have way better coaching today (no longer does an Eastern European, English, or South American accent get you a coaching credential like in years past). We have platforms that are adapting to the needs of the kids (the GAL is allowing some high school play in most some parts of the country).
The biggest change will come with solidarity payments. Eventually, the MLS will realize that they have a gold mine in the young players they can sell off to the rest of the world (on both the men's and, based on recent changes in the European Women's game, on the women's side). That will be the true turning point and the USA will zoom from there.
There will indeed come a tipping point where the worldwide popularity of soccer catches on in the us and more kids will want to play soccer and schools will not be able to ignore the sport anymore. We just aren’t there yet. And the decline in the overall participation in youth soccer proves that. But the growing popularity is quite new. But it’s significant. And while football isn’t going away it’s popularity is taking a hit and the head injuries are a concern. When the next wave of kids come from millennials come along I suspect that we’ll see the kind of numbers where schools will start supporting the programs. And clubs will have more players when the pool gets larger. I believe there will be a day when clubs and schools coexist like aau.
Particularly kids that don't play football because their parents think it is too dangerous will move over to soccer. What has been happening is those kids have moved over to lacrosse.
As for overall numbers, most sports are down across the board by overall numbers. But, I blame that on specialization that is happening at younger ages now more than ever. You wouldn't believe, actually you probably do, the pressure that is put on parents and kids by coaches to specialize in one sport over the other in light of teams of all sports (outside of football) moving to all year travel teams. It is absurd.
Sure, kids will play other sports. Including lacrosse. And hockey. But if soccer suffers from being a white suburban sport, certainly lacrosse is much more so. I live in Fort Wayne, the second largest city in Indiana and roughly around the 100th in the US. A handful of schools offer the sport as a club. A colleague that recently moved here from NE has to commute 90 minutes or so to Indy in order for his daughter to continue to play competitively.
Moreover, nearly every community across the US has some form of youth soccer program. So when you're talking about Millennials seeking alternatives from football, soccer seems the obvious next step for a significant number of them.
But, I also don't think you right in the sense that youth soccer is at some tipping point of acceptance at the millenial level (though I might be misunderstanding your point).
Youth soccer has been at about the 3 million or above participants since the late 90s (likely from the 94 WC games). I'm not sure what else can happen for it to grow more.
I lived all over the place growing up in the US. I always played soccer and baseball in every place I lived until 7th grade. It was just something to keep me busy. In 7th grade, my parents finally relented and let me play football. I then moved to MD and started playing lacrosse. So I guess what I am getting at is that if soccer isn't at some tipping point, I doubt it ever will. This isn't to say soccer won't be part of the sports landscape but that other sports come along. I know flag football has exploded in the last 10 years so while the thought is it might be soccer as the move for many parents - my guess is kids will go to something else...as I said lacrosse or flag football or who knows.
This generation of parents will be the first ones to really live through the growth of the popularity of professional soccer in the US. Games from the top leagues, in particular EPL, are easy to access and the stars like Messi and Ronaldo are household names.
Soccer is easily the most popular sport in the world. It stands to reason that it would catch on at some point.
I'm personally not sure participant growth is that related to development of professional level players. It isn't unrelated, but I tend to think the key factor is a combination of soccer match attendance, eyeballs on games on TV, and realistically for today's media market views on social media. That can drive the money which can incentivize development of future professional players as compared to incentivizing pay for play.
To answer what can change for soccer given flat long-term participation, one possibility is a new generation can make it a sport they follow similarly to the way other big sports are followed in the US. Of course, people have been talking about this for a long time.
in the spring with soccer in the fall. Much to my chagrin (thankfully my daughter still loves soccer), while he likes to play and likes his teammates, he definitely doesn't "love" soccer. Based on his build, he would've been a stud in H.S. football but mom and dad kept him out of football. When Lacrosse came along freshman year he looked at me with a wry smile and said "I want to hit someone". He loves lacrosse. He plays soccer.
I agree with everything except the parents being more sophisticated. I think it should have happened, but with my youngest, the lowest common denominator among the parental understanding of the game seemed to win out.
The question is whether the MLS and anyone else can really make a grassroots model work for them financially and administratively. Can they help local leagues, have networks of effectively scouts, keep youngish soccer more local, to make it more feasible to cover costs? I always figured a lot of the travel at young ages was a bad feedback mechanism with pay to play - more travel made it seem like more pay was justified. As said above, you need the money from selling players to have a chance to make it work. One worry I have is I think you might be able to compete in MLS just by utilizing all the other talent in Central and South America, etc. I would like to see a really good USMNT in my lifetime.
The parents I have met at the highest levels (ECNL and DA and now MLS and GAL) seem to understand the system and the pyramid. They club hop in an opportunistic way, but they are not blinded by "our club won this many games or tournaments". They look at who is the coach, how many players are they taking, how much time is there to go around, how much training is there compared to games, etc.
The USSF and US Youth soccer had an opportunity to put their MRL league into an amazing position when the DA folded. Instead, they sat on their hands and eventually barfed out the "club v club" model which is really just a poor-man's platform for also-ran clubs that allows them to sell exclusivity to (here I go) UNSOPHISTICATED parents (maybe you are right!)
We need a legitimate pyramid. We need kids to "travel" locally until age U14. At that point, we can get into the true travel that comes with playing teams from other states.
The mega-clubs (Eclipse, Rush, Surf, etc.) gobble up the little, community based clubs with empty promises and that's where the system falls under its own weight. In Chicagoland, there were a ton of great little clubs that were eventually gobbled up in merger after merger that, ultimately, had the effect of helping to create B and C teams to subsidize the A team (A team travels to six tourneys and the B team does 1, etc.)
As for your last worry, I think Don Garber is counting on the fact that the other non-US talent exists so that he can keep selling new franchises. MLS=all about the $$
My main story about parents is - as I switched to my youngest in the earliest little kids soccer, and there were younger parents who had grown up playing soccer, I hoped it would be better even before there was some selecting out of the more talented players and motivated families. But I found that without these knowledgeable parents being a real clear majority, lower common denominator stuff still tended to win out.
I agree pay to play is a big problem. However, schools don't seem like the answer to me. For one, the only sport where schools matter even some is football. Everything else is out of schools. Basketball is AAU, baseball is summer ball, hockey has its own structure, etc. And football is different because you don't have to start young to be great at a lot of positions.
My experience is also biased by very poor HS soccer experiences for my kids, and many of the kids our family has known through club soccer. You can (and I have) think about all the parts that are poor - from practices to social pressures on playing to tactics, etc., but really the fundamental reason is no one cares much about how the HS (or junior high) soccer team does.
To upend pay to play so it is worthwhile to find and develop talent beyond ability to pay, I think the financial incentives need to be there. I have the sense the success in recent youth development might be encouraging more movement in this direction, but it has a long way to go to have a broad reach.
Essentially we're talking about football and basketball. To some extent baseball, but that's becoming harder for kids these days too. But there are decades worth of minor league baseball that make it hard to compare with anything.
But with football and basketball kids are able to play competitively at their schools in middle school or before. AAU has learned to co-exist with high school basketball. Steph Curry, Kawhi, Lebron all played HS basketball. AAU picks off talent from HS, but they still play.
Schools don't care about soccer in the US. And the clubs generally don't want kids to play for their schools. And to be fair, it's because the experience will probably be what your kids had.
My point is that the school experience has to get better. If the structure was there where kids were playing soccer and the clubs were pulling the best talent from the schools, then USA soccer would improve dramatically. Instead, the club structure belongs to the kids that can afford to play it and the handful of kids found (usually in some hispanic community playing for free) by a club that they put on a scholarship.
A couple of our friends kids play there and one of my buddies (former Butler player) coaches u13-14 girls. Grand Park’s facilities are amazing and they do an great job with coaching and development.
or working VAR.
In other fun MLS news, DC United subbed in a player at halftime that wasn't on the team sheet. Took about 10 minutes to get sorted out. It was high comedy. Article linked.
So...I'm not sure what the interpretation was here, because Cavallini clearly went into the back with the shoulder/arm. Even if you think the foot contact that came after was a foul (I don't think it was), the attacker still committed a foul first.
This one reeks of a referee who tweaked a decision instead of correcting it, because he was so over-the-top wrong with the initial one.
... being up 3-0 at the time, it didn't really matter so long as the red card was rescinded.
Also, if you watch the replay, his positioning was awful when the incident occurred.
And that's saying a lot. How they didn't judge that to be a foul on Cavallini is beyond me. He went through his back. No way was that a legal, shoulder-to-shoulder challenge.