OldSchoolSnapper

Nobody would pay for a service to watch the Bucks next season. And I don't even think they're going to be that bad, but there would be no way to market that this offseason given what's happened. This is a very smart thing for them to do.

I think this thread is proof of what actually ails American soccer and it's a topic Landon Donovan has touched on before. I have been coaching youth soccer here for a decade + but guys who watch every 4 years can diagnose the "real problem" and know it better than I do. The issue is that this thesis is common water cooler talk but it falls apart upon any critical thinking. "There isn't pick-up soccer in the US, the kids overseas learn from the street!" There is pick-up soccer in the US, my kids play it every week. The best players in the world are boarded in elite academies learning technique when they are 6. They are not grabbing Yamal from a street game when he's 12. And he's not playing 4 sports. To be clear I encourage kids to play multiple sports and put the soccer ball down for a season (can do 20 minutes of dribbling or whatever, but don't have to be playing) "It's just not a big deal in the US." It isn't the most popular sport...except it is in youth. And we have more kids playing than ever before. With better (not the best, but better) coaching opportunities. Better facilities...and yet...we're not getting better. "It's pay to play" This one is closer than the others, but all our sports are pay to play. And to be honest, I don't know of a single youth club that won't absorb the fee or work something out for a special kid. The real, actual issues I've come across are here, in no particular order: Specialization in a position too early due to an emphasis on winning youth games. All kids should be positionally rotated through age 12. The number of "defenders" on a U9 team is insane. You have to do it all to be a strong player. Aaron Rodgers doesn't have to throw 25% of his touchdowns with his left hand. In soccer you need to be able to use your other foot. Kids grow and change and when your cender mid turns 15 and suddenly isn't that fast, that's a problem because he doesn't want to go anywhere else and doesn't know how to play. But we need to beat Brown Deer this weekend so Ralph needs to play CM for 45 minutes. Running down the field faster than everyone works in American youth soccer. Those kids completely flame out when they have to have ball skills to succeed. Parents interjecting in development This one takes many forms. Can't count the number of times a Dad has asked me why Jonny is playing defense. "He's not a strong defender." Nope, he's not. That's why he's there. Or intervening to get their kids on teams with friends that they should not be on. Clubs usually cave to them. This is where pay to play actually hurts, not in the conventional way you'd think. Clubs don't want to lose registrations so the parents are actually running the clubs. If I want to teach 12 kids the Cryuff, I need 12 kids with the coordination to do it. If 4 just aren't there, I can't spend 1/4 of practice doing that. It's a waste of time for the 4 who aren't ready and the other 8 get bored. I'll coach those other 4 kids, but I need 12 of them then so I can develop training that's appropriate for where they are. Coaching has tons of red tape You don't have to have been a high level player to be an excellent coach, but we have all kinds of red tape to coach after rec that our other sports don't require. We lose coaches who don't have time or desire to get professional licenses, attend grassroots sessions etc., that are frankly a pain in the butt and provide little to no value when most of the best information is available free online.

Ehhhhh, yes and no. The data strongly suggests otherwise. If you don't have strong foundational foot skills by 14, you're not learning them. If you are playing rec soccer a few months a year and doing other sports, odds are very high you're not getting exposed to that level of training, you just have a well-intentioned Dad doing what he can to beat the neighboring town. You can definitely play 3 or 4 sports and have those foot skills, but soccer is going to be much, much, more difficult to get really into at 14 and be elite than something like American football, where your success is hugely determined by post-puberty growth and the technique basics can be learned in a season. It would be more akin to something like wrestling that has a very high technique demand and can't just be picked up at 16 for 99% of people. The technical requirements of elite soccer are simply too high not to specialize fairly young. You can watch just about any NFL game and see a good, starting player with poor tackling technique skirting by on speed or aggression. Not a chance you'd see something like that in the EPL. Getting the 7 /yos into academies absolutely matters, just not for the majority of kids. A ton of the great players in the world do exactly that. If we're talking about making good high school players, then sure, if we're talking about the best of the best, then yeah, unfortunately, they really do have to specialize in soccer early due to the extremely high technical requirements, The norm for the greats is that they are scouted by 9 and in those academies. 6 and 7 are normal ages for that to happen. The vast, vast majority are in fact in said academies between 5 and 8. Several players on the USMNT are birthright citizens or the children of servicemen who grew up in Europe going to those schools. The gap between Barcelona Youth and anything in the USA is staggering. Lamine Yamal's youth games are on YouTube. His team at 10U is more technically sound than any high school-aged team I've ever seen in this country. So, my TLDR is that for most kids moving on to office careers, who want to play college soccer, specializing doesn't need to happen. But if the goal is getting US Soccer competitive in Europe, then our best 50 kids should be in those academies.

As a whole, the US hosting experience has gone a lot better than I envisioned. The atmosphere at that game, as bad as it was, was incredible. I am already bummed there's no game today and the teams are dwindling. I think this is the best sporting event there is, and I can't wait for the next one. Four years is just too long.

Idk. Hard for me to feel bad for anyone giving up 3 goals in 15 minutes. Can't do that and blame refs.

Yeah, this illustrates the problem almost exactly. Starts at age 13 and is geared entirely towards getting your kid an athletic scholarship to play college soccer, not funnel to the USMNT exclusively. La Masia is taking 7 year olds who they find, there is no "applying." In these powerhouse soccer countries, everything funnels to the national team. Everything.

I think that's sort of myth. All these top guys overseas are plucked into elite academies at very young ages. Even the best Americans are. The old wives tale that they're learning on the streets of little towns is just not what's happening. Messi was undersized at 11 so Barca paid to relocate him to Spain and pay for his HGH treatments. Plus, all these sports that America is great at have the same club situation going on. Bigger factor honestly is just losing our best athletes to those other sports. If anything, honestly, I'd say the opposite is more the issue. In the US it is extremely accessible but you're coached by someone's dad until you're 13. France, Spain, Germany, England? The best kids are getting academy training at 6. By 10 they don't even really go to school. They board at a football academy.

There are a lot of problems in US Soccer but one is just America in general and the way we idolize a forward every WC. That's a very American thing. Pulisic, Donovan, etc. are ok. They're ok. These aren't even top 50 world players. It's hard for me to get U13 players to even want to play defense. It's a cultural thing, our obsession with points and being the guy who scores, we would never glorify a player like van Dijk or Saliba in the US. We've fallen off at GK because GK has changed. It's not about elite shot stoppers anymore. Not coincidentally, shot stopping isn't a skill you'd need to be in Spain to develop as a youth, and a lot of it can be trained in a solitary manner. We were able to do that just fine because it was the one position very different from the others. The best ones now have excellent foot skills, play 30 yards off the goal and are essentially part of the offense. All things that other places do better than we do.

Brutal night. I was one of the suckers that flew out to SEA for the game. I wanted just to see a game with a home USA crowd, so I got to do that, and was fully resigned to losing this game, but the manner in which they did is the worst way it could have happened. It pretty much erased anything that happened prior, this is what their '26 team will be remembered for. They won a group that saw 3/4 advance and Paraguay went down swinging (perhaps literally). To make themselves a story with Balogun and then have him, and everyone, do nothing, was ouch. I am not so delusional to think him playing turned any kind of tide though. These squads weren't even close to each other. Our one goal was fortunate. I think reality is somewhere between they are still a long way away from European standards, and they had a bad night. Not sure they are as terrible as they looked, but they definitely had some artificial wind going in the sails. I'm not sure the casuals who hopped on realize how much worse Pulisic is than the best Belgians. That Pulisic is who he is in the US says a lot about where our program is. And that's okay, because honestly, he's had a very solid overseas career. But De Bruyne is one of the best midfielders of the last couple decades - in the world - not just a guy who stars for his national team and scores a few goals in Serie A. Not hating on Pulisic, he's the best we've produced, but that's the reality. And Belgium is a huge underdog against Spain. The goalie and backline are in dire straits right now. They have a back who's older than I am and there's not much to say about the goalies. US Soccer lacks a development pyramid that weeds out bad players. And an MLS problem. I think this level of play is about as much as this current system is capable of achieving. They're just nowhere close to that top tier. The crowd certainly did their part. Even though it was clearly going one way and we looked awful, they were still standing and screaming all the way through that 3rd embarrassing goal.

Had the US lost to Bosnia playing 10 v 11 we'd be the ones up in arms and the result couldn't be changed. They had to play 1/3 of the game down a man due to that ridiculous card. That was already unfair as it is. FIFA is terrible, no argument there. But this is nothing as far as "unfair" is concerned. Belgium can win the game with the roster at full strength and all is well for them. It'd be weak as hell to whine about him playing when his foul had nothing to do with them anyway.

Balogun isn't the best player on the team. I'd say it's the Packers having to beat a team that's maybe a bit better than they are and without Christian Watson. Balogun, like Watson, gives them something nobody else on the roster does. He's an elite finisher. They were sorely missing that in 2022. His story is pretty interesting. He is a birthright American due to his parents being told they couldn't fly back to London when his mom was 7+ months pregnant due to safety concerns with the pregnancy. Belgium is a tactically superior team but not as athletic as the US. Their best players are getting up there in years and they will be 4 days off playing a 120-minute game. Seattle is the best city in the country to have a home soccer crowd. It's a winnable game. But the USMNT has shown to be capable of playing horrible games against bad teams, which Belgium is not. I am hoping the energy in the air carries them through. If the US can dictate the pace and turn this into a footrace, they will win. If they go behind early and Belgium can sit back, it'll be tough. They will probably need another moment from somebody like Freeman, Tillman, Pepi. If he'd been playing, I really felt like this was going to be a huge night for US Soccer. A mild upset, getting to the quarters, a matchup with powerhouse Spain. It would be a big step forward. I don't see it as a sure thing without Balogun.

I like offsides but a simple change that would be consistent with the rest of its rules (ball must be completely out, ball must be completely over the line) would just be making it that the entire player has to be offsides, not his finger tip.

.1% I'm guessing they don't even file any kind of injunction. Because it's FIFA the most likely way he'd play is if Trump directly bribed them.

Atrocious night of officiating even outside that laughable red. I really liked their chances to beat Belgium in Seattle. Without Balogun that's very hard to see happening. He is by far their most dynamic goal scorer. Just an awful thing to happen on a truly terrible piece of officiating.

Either Dyson and Shark aren't what they used to be or these things have limited use for certain homes. I've yet to see a robo vac that actually replaces a good full vacuuming of the house. Last time I went on vacation I set the thing up to go as I left. I wasn't even out of town before my phone lit up that it was stuck. Checked camera and sure enough, it was halfway off the top of the stairs having a seizure. It gets stuck on cords under sofas or a piece of fabric on a chew toy all the time. Even when I'm home and run them, I almost always end up having to kick it off of something. The actual vacuuming they do is great, but they are just not that smart despite the name. When I visit my brother in a medium sized apartment, the thing is great because he has nothing on the floor. For most families with kids and a good amount of stuff, I just don't find them all that impressive unless it's a controlled environment that you prepped for them - which causes my doubts about the lawnmowers. In the picture above it looks ideal for the little guy to do his thing, but I think most suburban homes would spend a lot of time cleaning up what it missed. I just don't see either as set it and forget it quite yet.