How race unlevelled US playing fields

Several factors that need to change US Soccer's mediocrity on the International stage;

Breaking the pay to play mentality as the only way to achieve success in soccer.

Accessibilty to fields. Start building more fields in the impoverished communities.

Convincing youth players from diverse communities to play at a young age and developing them with knowledgeable, quality coaches.

From my perspective, Blacks do not have much interest in soccer because there is no money at the professional level, as compared to football or basketball.

For the amount of Hispanic kids that are playing in leagues not sanctioned by USSF, it is a shame they are underrepresented on the national team.
 
reno114 said:
Several factors that need to change US Soccer's mediocrity on the International stage;

Breaking the pay to play mentality as the only way to achieve success in soccer.

Accessibilty to fields. Start building more fields in the impoverished communities.

Convincing youth players from diverse communities to play at a young age and developing them with knowledgeable, quality coaches.

From my perspective, Blacks do not have much interest in soccer because there is no money at the professional level, as compared to football or basketball.

For the amount of Hispanic kids that are playing in leagues not sanctioned by USSF, it is a shame they are underrepresented on the national team.
Click to expand...
Well said!

Adding on to your points is that USSF and MLS wants to make the most money with the least amount of investment and to be honest they blew it during the elections for a new president.

- USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)

- Understand why each demographic top athletes are playing other sports! Top white athletes are not playing soccer at the professional level either.

- MLS to pay a sustainable salary to non-star players. Baseball, basketball and hockey scrubs get pay 5-10x the salary of their soccer counterparts. Where is all the profit from MLS going? You can't just dissapear a free $150-200 million dollars new teams are paying to go into a league.

- USSF gets a very good cut of the profits when the MX plays in the US, invest it in the poor communities that are not subject to gentrification.

- As long money talks the US will continue to be mediocre in the international stage of soccer.
 
The question that needs to be asked; Is there a Messi, Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona
somewhere in the U.S. that hasn't been discovered yet? or Can there ever be?

coachsamy said:
Well said!

Adding on to your points is that USSF and MLS wants to make the most money with the least amount of investment and to be honest they blew it during the elections for a new president.

- USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)

- Understand why each demographic top athletes are playing other sports! Top white athletes are not playing soccer at the professional level either.

- MLS to pay a sustainable salary to non-star players. Baseball, basketball and hockey scrubs get pay 5-10x the salary of their soccer counterparts. Where is all the profit from MLS going? You can't just dissapear a free $150-200 million dollars new teams are paying to go into a league.

- USSF gets a very good cut of the profits when the MX plays in the US, invest it in the poor communities that are not subject to gentrification.

- As long money talks the US will continue to be mediocre in the international stage of soccer.
Click to expand...
 
Meh. At tournaments these last 2 weekends (both as a ref and spectator) I saw a ton of '08 (and '07 and '09) teams playing bootball a year after the buildout line is removed. Didn't matter if they were mega club teams, or local small clubs. The Hispanic clubs did it, as did the white majority clubs. The pay to pay clubs did it, and the Extras teams did it.

There are a lot of minority clubs in the San Fernando and Oxnard areas. Some of the coaches don't take salaries putting them on par with Extras fees. The bigger problem for these clubs, as I've written before, is transport to and from practice. One of the clubs my son tried out for was minority-majority....great group of players, some with real talent that had been playing since they were 3...practices though were constantly getting cancelled because of rides and car breakdowns. Fields are a close second, particularly when lighted fields are needed in the late fall/early spring.

But ultimately after much though I come down that we have 3 big problems: our soccer culture (there isn't much of it, we don't have a lot of qualified rec volunteers, and what we have of it is very win oriented at the early ages), the college system (which has limited soccer training, limited scholarships for boys, and much of the scholarship money is tied to grades which can be difficult for boys coming from inner city schools...America has one of the top education systems in the world if you only take our suburban schools), and the MLS (whose salaries aren't competitive enough to draw top local talent away from the college system). Until those 3 get fixed, the US will never be a soccer powerhouse. There are other problems too, but those are the big 3 reasons IMHO.
 
- USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)

Free? Maybe in your neighborhood it is but in ours it is closing in on club fees. School districts keep cutting and cutting. No longer paying for uniforms, busses, anything outside of the coaching stipend(which is about .45c an hour).
 
Socal United said:
- USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)

Free? Maybe in your neighborhood it is but in ours it is closing in on club fees. School districts keep cutting and cutting. No longer paying for uniforms, busses, anything outside of the coaching stipend(which is about .45c an hour).
Click to expand...

California also increasingly has a free rider problem with school activities. In California, the spend on these activities are increasingly being crowded out because of pension and required education spends. Under California law, schools and support orgs cannot require parents to pay a fee to support a team or club...all kids need to have access regardless of whether they pay or not. The school or support org can ask for donations, but those donations must be entirely voluntary. So you have a problem that if you have a band of 40 kids, and 25 families are not paying, why should you pay even more to cover the costs for those 25 families. It's not a problem in well off areas where maybe only a handful of families won't/can't fork up the voluntary donation, and a local business might sponsor and support to make up the difference. But it's becoming really hard in the urban schools because after a certain proportion says they have to opt out, the organizers tend to lift there hands up and say maybe it's not worth it, and rely entirely on the school's budgeted support (which as you note is sometimes just the coaching stipend).
 
Socal United said:
- USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)

Free? Maybe in your neighborhood it is but in ours it is closing in on club fees. School districts keep cutting and cutting. No longer paying for uniforms, busses, anything outside of the coaching stipend(which is about .45c an hour).
Click to expand...
Sounds like poor leadership from the school district. Our school kids conduct fundraisers for some of these expenses, plus the AD does a good job taking care of the none big sports as much as he can. The point is that USSF has many venues to properly invest in the youth, but rather take the easy money to be made.
 
@coachsamy,

There is no oversight (control) of "High School soccer" by the U.S. Federation. So when you say "USSF needs to use and glamorize their FREE venue to get people playing soccer which is High School Soccer (Clubs will hate it!)" you are making a factual assumption that is untrue. The US Federation has oversight of club soccer through its Youth Affiliates (US Youth Soccer/State Associations (i.e. Cal South), US Club Soccer, AYSO, etc.) but High School soccer has no connection (whatsoever) to the USSF. As such, the USSF has no influence over high school soccer stadiums and high school soccer for that matter.

If the argument is that the USSF needs to wrestle control of High School soccer from the hands of the NFHS (National Federation of State High School Associations) and the NCAA at the college level ... then that is a whole different discussion.

@reno114,

When you write "Breaking the pay to play mentality as the only way to achieve success in soccer." I want you to consider that in every European and Latin American country "soccer" is a pay to play sport. The difference is the people paying are the fans and supporters of the clubs and ultimately the players themselves and not just the parents. While parents do pay nominal amounts for training youth accepted to various academies, these players are viewed as investments that will be monetized by the clubs at a later date through solidarity and training fees.

The U.S. Federation at the urging of the players (idiots) have stripped Article 19 - Solidarity and Training fees from the U.S. model. Read this: http://www.socalsoccer.com/threads/...-payments-and-the-pay-to-play-scapegoat.4920/

@Grace T. - I agree, especially with the comment regarding no soccer culture and limited scholarships.

For any kid that finds themselves impoverished and genetically disadvantaged (i.e. unlikely to be a H.S. football or basketball star), soccer represents a potential path to college.

@coachsamy, as far as the MLS goes its not ready for primetime yet and is a break even venture at this stage. Its purely a long term investment and a bad investment given the short term risk factors in my opinion. I believe the structure of the MLS will ultimately result in its downfall, especially when the new TV contract is negotiated IF the USSF decides to abandon the joint MLS/USSF rights. Those new team entry fees are the only thing keeping some teams in the black. Explode their salaries by paying the average players more and you might just kill the league. See, https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2...jor-league-soccer-marketing-usa-mexico-canada
 
Just for the record, I abhor this concept of "race." Race is nothing more than a social construct. There is an insignificant genetic disparity between the so-called races and virtually all disparities and societal reactions are based upon socioeconomic factors. We do a disservice to ourselves and any discussion by dumping populations into buckets based on the amount of melanin produced by that individual or group.

That said ... I get it, its easy (albeit incredibly lazy) to ignore the socioeconomic factors that motivate certain actions and conditions and just slap the race label on it.

With regard to the article cited by @Vin, the author/reporter himself breaks the cardinal rule of reporting by doing nothing to verify the statement “If you were a white team they wouldn’t ask you for addresses,” he says. “I don’t think the white teams have to pay upfront.” Really? How do we know this is true? I'm not saying it isn't, but the lack of confirmation is disappointing.
 
MWN said:
as far as the MLS goes its not ready for primetime yet and is a break even venture at this stage. Its purely a long term investment and a bad investment given the short term risk factors in my opinion. I believe the structure of the MLS will ultimately result in its downfall, especially when the new TV contract is negotiated IF the USSF decides to abandon the joint MLS/USSF rights. Those new team entry fees are the only thing keeping some teams in the black. Explode their salaries by paying the average players more and you might just kill the league. See, https://www.starsandstripesfc.com/2...jor-league-soccer-marketing-usa-mexico-canada
Click to expand...

I agree with your assessment of the current MLS, and that's a great article. I disagree, though, that removing the salary caps will cause the league to collapse. The salary caps act as a way to keep parity in the league...because each team is limited to 3 DPs, no team is every going to excessively overpower another. We can't have a Real, a Barcelona, or even a Liverpool here because teams simply can't pay enough to gather that type of talent. The only reason past-his-prime Zlatan is even with the Galaxy is because of his exit fee from the PL and the funny business with the Galaxy TAM money. If you remove the caps, you give some interested owners the chance to build really a world-class dominant team by importing European talent to play with the American talent. And if you have players the caliber of Ronaldo or Messi playing for US based teams, the European (not to mention the American) interest will follow.

As with everything, there is a price to be paid. It would mean a handful of teams will dominate the MLS year after year, like they do in the PL, La Liga, the Bundesliga. For the others, we'd need a system of relegation to give the games interest (and an official secondary league). We simply don't have any good American teams and never really will....3 DPs is not enough to build a really good squad. So we'll continue to have games like the Quakes-Galaxy game my son and I went to, where the keepers just engaged in a big game of boot ball knocking the ball with punts and long goalkicks into 50/50 situations and that's what the coaches and kids will imitate. The only other way forward is pushing the kids to go to Europe (not England)...and that's hard given the immigration laws, our tax laws, and the more alluring safe choices of college.
 
Grace T. said:
I agree with your assessment of the current MLS, and that's a great article. I disagree, though, that removing the salary caps will cause the league to collapse. The salary caps act as a way to keep parity in the league...because each team is limited to 3 DPs, no team is every going to excessively overpower another. We can't have a Real, a Barcelona, or even a Liverpool here because teams simply can't pay enough to gather that type of talent. The only reason past-his-prime Zlatan is even with the Galaxy is because of his exit fee from the PL and the funny business with the Galaxy TAM money. If you remove the caps, you give some interested owners the chance to build really a world-class dominant team by importing European talent to play with the American talent. And if you have players the caliber of Ronaldo or Messi playing for US based teams, the European (not to mention the American) interest will follow.

As with everything, there is a price to be paid. It would mean a handful of teams will dominate the MLS year after year, like they do in the PL, La Liga, the Bundesliga. For the others, we'd need a system of relegation to give the games interest (and an official secondary league). We simply don't have any good American teams and never really will....3 DPs is not enough to build a really good squad. So we'll continue to have games like the Quakes-Galaxy game my son and I went to, where the keepers just engaged in a big game of boot ball knocking the ball with punts and long goalkicks into 50/50 situations and that's what the coaches and kids will imitate. The only other way forward is pushing the kids to go to Europe (not England)...and that's hard given the immigration laws, our tax laws, and the more alluring safe choices of college.
Click to expand...

@Grace T., I don't disagree in principal, but it will be years before the MLS puts out a product that is worth watching.
 
MWN said:
Just for the record, I abhor this concept of "race." Race is nothing more than a social construct. There is an insignificant genetic disparity between the so-called races and virtually all disparities and societal reactions are based upon socioeconomic factors. We do a disservice to ourselves and any discussion by dumping populations into buckets based on the amount of melanin produced by that individual or group.

That said ... I get it, its easy (albeit incredibly lazy) to ignore the socioeconomic factors that motivate certain actions and conditions and just slap the race label on it.

With regard to the article cited by @Vin, the author/reporter himself breaks the cardinal rule of reporting by doing nothing to verify the statement “If you were a white team they wouldn’t ask you for addresses,” he says. “I don’t think the white teams have to pay upfront.” Really? How do we know this is true? I'm not saying it isn't, but the lack of confirmation is disappointing.
Click to expand...

Race, or whatever else you want to call it today, can easily be identified by genetic markers.
 
espola said:
Race, or whatever else you want to call it today, can easily be identified by genetic markers.
Click to expand...

Yes and no. What I'm saying is better articulated by the team of scientists in Philadelphia and New York that argue there is no such thing as race from a biologically genetic standpoint. Read this: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/race-is-not-biological_us_56b8db83e4b04f9b57da89ed

Ultimately, the "human race" (homo sapiens) succeeded in supplanting the neanderthals as the dominate homo species. All of us sprang from the original homo sapiens in Africa about 195,000 years ago (which means technically we are all "African-Americans" assuming one lives in America). What we typically define as "race" is nothing more than subjectively picking a few diverse phenotypes and calling it good. The subjective picking is flawed and has little to no scientific relevance. Biologically, the species to too genetically diverse to categorize ourselves into meaningful racial buckets.
 
reno114 said:
Several factors that need to change US Soccer's mediocrity on the International stage;

Breaking the pay to play mentality as the only way to achieve success in soccer.

Accessibilty to fields. Start building more fields in the impoverished communities.

Convincing youth players from diverse communities to play at a young age and developing them with knowledgeable, quality coaches.

From my perspective, Blacks do not have much interest in soccer because there is no money at the professional level, as compared to football or basketball.

For the amount of Hispanic kids that are playing in leagues not sanctioned by USSF, it is a shame they are underrepresented on the national team.
Click to expand...


Do you have a plan to accomplish any one of these ideas? Let's review: 1."Breaking the pay mentality..." Who's going to pay for coaches, field rentals, uniforms, league game fields, travel, on and on....
2. "Start building more fields"... Who's going to build these fields? How will they buy the land? Pay for the construction? manage the fields? Some benevolent soccer God is going to do all of this?
3. "Convincing young players..." Parents tell most kids what to do, and where to sign up, parents are also 99% responsible for who they play for, the basic knowledge they attain while young,. So in other words clueless parents, are going to "convince" their children of something? And who's going to pay a qualified coach without a payment plan in place?
4. There's no $ in soccer in the US for any ethnicity. High dollar contracts are going to foreign players. Every professional sport in the US pays SIGNIFICANTLY more than all US soccer leagues.
5. This is the only point that makes any sense.
Pipe dreams, rainbows and unicorn wishes wont change anything, and it's easy to point out problems. Finding solutions are the hard part of any real world endeavor.
 
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