Kicking the geekiness up a notch.
Youth recruitment for English clubs is highly competitive. Between the myriad of other clubs and career choices out there, it’s very difficult to find and sign the next best thing to your team, particularly when you’ve got to identify that player’s talent at a very young age. It’s one thing to find Wayne Rooney when he’s breaking every scoring record that exists for U-14 players at twelve years of age; it’s quite another to fill out the roster around your future superstar with solid youth players.
In England, that process is competitive and likely rather cutthroat. In the U.S., however, it’s relatively more laid back; the players simply aren’t as sought after by top tier clubs, making the whole thing a little less intense. It’s also a relatively unexplored marketplace; where professional U.S. sports excel at finding and grooming talent for gridiron, basketball, and baseball, there’s not as much of an emphasis on properly developing and grooming talent at a young age in this country.
Put another way: there’s talent here that can be had for cheap if you simply spend some time looking for it, and recently two major English that put that time in have signed two American high school students to their youth squads.
The first signing was a few weeks back, when Arsenal’s U.S. scout signed Gedion Zelalem from Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. This signing is interesting because Zelalem (who skirts the need for a work permit because of his German citizenship) is 14 years old; he’ll join Arsenal’s amateur program when he turns 16. Zelalem’s dad explains the decision thusly:
“My philosophy was to start with a smaller team and take it step by step. Arsenal felt like family, so we thought, ‘Why not?’ Gedion said to me, ‘Papa, I want to go to Arsenal.’ For him to become a professional at Arsenal, it would be a gift.”
The fact that he sees Arsenal as a smaller team notwithstanding, this is an interesting move: not many midfielders from the U.S. high school system end up training at Arsenal.
Not to be outdone was Manchester City, who today announced the signing of Raul Mendiola, a 17 year old playmaker from Arsenal FC in Alta Loma, California. Mendiola, who spent time with the Mexican U-15 team a few years back, is obviously excited:
“It’s one of the top clubs in the world. I’ve been told that there’s a possibility that I could be loaned out to (RCD Espanyol) in Spain for a year, or I could stay with Man City.”
Of course, there’re caveats to this: neither German-born Ethiopian Gedion Zelalem or Mexican youth product Raul Mendiola are, strictly speaking, Americans. They’re in this country, though, and they’re being scouted; it seems like it’s only a matter of time before a Premier League team is looking at signing some teenager from the Midwest to give him a shot.
Barely-related to this: When is MLS/USSF going to realize that the deepest and richest vein of US-based/US-born talent is in the inner city immigrant communities and not in middle class suburbia? In New England alone you could put together a decent squad just from the Brazilian, Azorean, Cape Verdean, and Portuguese communities in Boston, Bridgeport, Hartford, Providence, Fall River and New Bedford. I can’t even imagine the amount of talent that must exist “off the radar” in more populated areas with large Hispanic and European immigrant populations.
It sounds like Klinsmann intends to do just that.
Your average suburban kids have thus far had access to better coaching because their rich(er) parents can pay experts or foreigners (esp Brits) to coach their kids’ select club teams. I know this is true in KC from my refereeing experience. It’s SHOCKING how bad the teams from the lower-income schools are. 2 years ago, I refereed a sub-state playoff between St. Thomas Aquinas (Overland Park, KS) and Washington High (KC, KS) and Aquinas won 10-0 with the game ended about the 50th minute. And it’s not just a private school thing either, as there are several public high schools around the burbs that consistently win or compete for state titles both in KS and MO.
However, your point is valid bc the suburban kids wealth tends to mean they have more options in other sports and in school. Right now the lower-income kids are sticking to football and basketball, but one imagines there has to be a lot of untapped potential in the Hispanic and other immigrant communities. If they can get some decent coaching up there it could be a game-changer.
I coach inner-city kids, many of whom emigrated to this country. These kids have nowhere near the same advantages that suburban kids have. I’ve got some real talent in the kids that I coach, but they’ve never had a real coach. They’ve never been part of a real team. Rich kids play soccer. Poor kids don’t. That’s really what it comes down to. If you want to be part of the USSF, you’ve gotta pay, and these kids can’t afford it, so they get overlooked.
There’s one kid who I coach who is amazingly talented. He came from Colombia just 2 years ago, and he doesn’t speak a lick of English, although I’m trying to help him with that. He was able to get a tryout with the Philadelphia Union’s youth program through one of the other coach’s contacts. He had been playing all his life in Colombia, but he never played as part of a team, and that hurt him greatly. It was one of the things that was pointed out to him, but he couldn’t understand. He knew only how to play as an individual. His parents can’t afford to send him to any kind of camp, and there are no club teams that he can afford to join, and there aren’t really any decent club teams that he can work with near his house. Even if some suburban club were to take him on for free, he still has no way of traveling there. This is a plight of many of the urban youths that Klinsmann said he wants to find. There may be a ton of urban youths playing soccer who never get a look, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be any better than the rich, suburban kids who’ve had more opportunities than they’ve had.
I posted on a similar topic on this site quite awhile ago…..I’m a parent, and have become a fan of every level. The problem is complex. The U.S. Development Academy is too tied in to the traditional youth soccer club, where the coaches are making decent money. Some make phenomenal money. Completely funded by the parents. (Note: I do not fault these guys for making a living). By and large, most of these club teams are comprised of kids from upper middle to well off families, because mom and dad can afford to pay $$$. My son played on a “B” team at the 2nd best club in MI, and my bill for the year was @ $3500 all in. No way is somebody making >30,000 p/year going to be able to afford that.
If the goal is truly to field a more competitive national team, U.S. Soccer as a governing body needs to come up with a better system. there are 16 MLS teams in the U.S. There are 64 Development Academy teams, with maybe 14-18 having any kind of affiliation with a MLS senior men’s team. No organizational structure, development plan, in house talent pool to feed these MLS teams.
Making the Academy system more affiliated with MLS would help solve the issue of pricing for under privliged kids. Maybe have each Senior team have four “feeder” clubs where they can pull talent, share training philosophies, etc.
I think part of the problem where MLS is concerned is that it has- for the most part- built its stadia in these very same middle class/suburban areas. I can’t but think that the first club that builds a stadium in a “downtown” area is going to reap some serious benefits if they make the facilities and staff available to the local community.
You’re only partially right. Home Depot Center isn’t exactly in a great part of LA (it’s just south of Compton). Seattle & Vancouver have downtown stadiums; Philly built theirs in a rougher-but-gentrifying area; Portland’s is downtown but only white people live in Portland. Sporting KC’s park is out west, but it’s in KC, KS, which is highly Hispanic. The area of town where all the good high school and club teams are had a chance for the stadium and voted it down NIMBY-style. And I don’t think Harrison, NJ is exactly tree-lined suburbia either.
Dicks Sporting Goods Park is in Commerce City, which is far from nice, the area is sort of becoming a sort of nicer area, but it is a largely urban area, it’d be nice if the rapids could tap that resource, but the big money is down south and I feel like the rapids would be more apt to tap that