Unless you play in Southern California! Our so called "weaker" teams can beat a lot of top teams in other states.
When does winning matter?
- Thread starter SoccerGuru
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Sheriff Joe
DA
Like you did in 2016.
You dick,
You know sheriff, this discussion has been thoughtful and devoid of degrading comments- until you showed up and added zero value. Maybe retur to your Covid / Conspiracy echo chamber. Please?
The problem with the clubs is the brackets. Pretty much all teams way back at U9 start bronze. But the clubs, for advertising, to recruit top talent, to recruit top coaches, and to make room for other teams down the ladder in later years and eventually to have elite teams (DA/ENCL/Gold), have to push those U9 teams to win since only a handful in the bracket will receive promotion every year. The parents view the brackets not only as status symbols, but also a means of college recruitment due to the reality that the kids at the top teams play the top showcases and get seen by recruiters.
The brackets were originally intended just to keep teams from blowing each other out 20-0. But they've become gateways, and that puts an enormous pressure on the clubs and coaches to win. So what you get among some teams is they move up, they use their winning to recruit top talent, they dump the marginal talent (rather than continue to develop long term and dance with the ones that brought them), they move up, rinse repeat and can be enormously successful (in wins at least) this way. My son's former team won state cup this year. I counted only about 7 of the original players with the team.
The issue is wayyyy too many clubs and club teams. It should all go away.
The elite should be identified and play at youth soccer academies and the rest should be in simple rec leagues.
Everybody should try to win. That’s the point of the game.
But if you are a youth soccer academy, you may well not take one kid who may give you more “wins” today in favor of a real prospect who is developing.
The elite should be identified and play at youth soccer academies and the rest should be in simple rec leagues.
Everybody should try to win. That’s the point of the game.
But if you are a youth soccer academy, you may well not take one kid who may give you more “wins” today in favor of a real prospect who is developing.
Agree. I've been wracking my brains on this for over a year but aren't there yet. At one point I leaned to a self-sorting model, but we'd have no bronze teams (I do think the pyramid is too heavy on the bottom). Ideally getting to a place where players (not the teams) are ranked. But the closest to that is the AYSO United/Extras tryout model which itself is very flawed (favoring older kids/early bloomers v. late calendars, favoring strikers over CB/GKs) and impossible unless all teams are under the same org. In the UK kids are sorted in a mixed team/level hybrid but it's got it's own problems. Not sure how to fix it. It's not easy....if it were it would be fixed already.
This is the UK model. The elite play academy, everyone else plays rec. One big problem is the girls (they aren't part of the new MLS league and are short changed in England too). If everyone plays rec, you'd have to tier it like in the UK. One of the reasons AYSO failed was because they had the future pro playing with the handicapped kids. Kids though were smart and learned if you give it to the weaker players, they are going to lose the ball. As a result, the pro wasn't developing (because no one could connect a pass to him) and the handicapped kid wasn't having a good time (because nobody passed the ball). The other reason is college sports distorts youth sports: it's not just a friendly game for fun as some people are gunning for college admissions and for scholarships.
One question is how you persuade your rec organizations to part with their top players.
Some club teams run their own rec feeder programs. That transition works pretty well, but it comes at the expense of attention to the rec program. They don’t have AYSO’s team balancing, for example.
AYSO pays attention to rec, possibly at the expense of player promotion. In my region, the select coaches viewed comp as the enemy. They wanted to win select games, and that means keeping the top kids within AYSO. So no help with identifying players who should move up.
Ultimately, I think rec would be more fun if the top rec kids were quietly nudged into bronze/united. I don’t know how you sell AYSO coaches on the concept.
Some club teams run their own rec feeder programs. That transition works pretty well, but it comes at the expense of attention to the rec program. They don’t have AYSO’s team balancing, for example.
AYSO pays attention to rec, possibly at the expense of player promotion. In my region, the select coaches viewed comp as the enemy. They wanted to win select games, and that means keeping the top kids within AYSO. So no help with identifying players who should move up.
Ultimately, I think rec would be more fun if the top rec kids were quietly nudged into bronze/united. I don’t know how you sell AYSO coaches on the concept.
Nope. There are exactly the right amount of clubs and teams in the US. I know that because the free market tells us that. The free market had decided that creating a great MNT is a stupid endeavor compared to other things that provide more value to society at large, and that is that. The free market has also decided that creating a great WNT is also a stupid endeavor, but a great WNT happens to be the fortuitous byproduct of the market’s determination that elite girls youth soccer is a great idea for colleges and kids who can leverage soccer to better their college opportunities.
If people need to move so their kids can play at one of these youth soccer academies, that is the dumbest idea ever, as has already been proven to be the case in the U.S. Leave the moving for the sake of your kid’s sports endeavors to the even dumber gymnastics and figure skating parents. It has never worked and will never work in the US for soccer.
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a. The USWNT is only a byproduct of our system because their isn't a robust pro market for women elsewhere in Europe/Latin America/Asia. It's why the academy model for women struggles in the rest of the world, but even so, some parts fof the world are catching up.
b. The free market for male players is distorted because unlike other countries our clubs are limited in their ability to get transfer fees and solidarity payments. This limits the amount of resources they are willing to put into players. Also, our pro players are restricted into entry into more lucrative markets due to immigration restrictions (and a European club is unlikely to use their waivers on an American without dual citizenship unless they can't get what that player brings at home).
c. The free market for male players domestically is also restricted because of the join ownership structure of the MLS. It basically levels out the salary at a low number for supporting players, making soccer an unattractive market for athletic players in comparison to basketball or gridiron football. It prevents a sugar daddy from swooping into a club and throwing a bunch of money at players for the prestige of winning instead of the profit. The LA Galaxy, for example, would if free too have dropped quite a bit of cash to crush LAFC in its infancy but couldn't due to various salary limitations imposed by the league, notwithstanding that AEG is corporation looking at the bottom line.
d. college athletic is also distorting the model for pay to play in pursuit of scholarships and admissions
a. The USWNT is only a byproduct of our system because their isn't a robust pro market for women elsewhere in Europe/Latin America/Asia. It's why the academy model for women struggles in the rest of the world, but even so, some parts fof the world are catching up.
b. The free market for male players is distorted because unlike other countries our clubs are limited in their ability to get transfer fees and solidarity payments. This limits the amount of resources they are willing to put into players. Also, our pro players are restricted into entry into more lucrative markets due to immigration restrictions (and a European club is unlikely to use their waivers on an American without dual citizenship unless they can't get what that player brings at home).
c. The free market for male players domestically is also restricted because of the join ownership structure of the MLS. It basically levels out the salary at a low number for supporting players, making soccer an unattractive market for athletic players in comparison to basketball or gridiron football. It prevents a sugar daddy from swooping into a club and throwing a bunch of money at players for the prestige of winning instead of the profit. The LA Galaxy, for example, would if free too have dropped quite a bit of cash to crush LAFC in its infancy but couldn't due to various salary limitations imposed by the league, notwithstanding that AEG is corporation looking at the bottom line.
d. college athletic is also distorting the model for pay to play in pursuit of scholarships and admissions
a. No. The WNT has put more distance between itself and the rest of the world than at any time in history. The WNT has lost one game in more than 3 years, and that was a pre WC friendly against France that they sandbagged for obvious reasons.
b. No. The free market is what it is. All this nonsense about solidarity payments and transfer fees is anti-free market. It does not work here. I know that because it does not exist here. Solidarity payments and transfer fees would only make a bad situation worse. I don’t have the time or inclination to explain why that is yet again.
c. Wrong. The MLS system is the free market system at its best. It is the only way to build maintain a financially sustainable domestic league here. Trying to do it your way has been tried and failed repeatedly because it does not work here with a free market. If soccer here was such a great idea for sugar daddies to create a league and just buy teams and waste millions, it would have happened. But the reality is that no one does that. Only Russian oligarchs and middle eastern princes can, and the premier league presents a much better option for that kind of vanity. Even there, there are a lot of limitations on how much they can throw away for fun. Creating a soccer league pinned on the hopes that enough (let alone any) foreign sugar daddies will just fund teams without regard to losing millions is literally the worst and stupidest business model I’ve ever heard of. Much worse than GDA even.
d. God you are stupid. College is the only reason the WNT is successful. It is also the only reason that makes financial sense for a family to spend so much time and money on their daughter’s soccer odyssey. There is no “distortion.” There is only the free market working in glorious splendor, with clubs making money and families paying for the benefit they are seeking - college opportunity. There is only “distortion” when people start doing stupid things that try to disrupt the free market and make no financial sense. Like GDA making clubs and even USSF engage in operations that are guaranteed to lose money. Like creating a league that only works if Russian oligarchs are willing to throw away hundreds of millions of dollars.
Does anyone else notice he sudden reversal in philosophy and economic theory between items b and c?
Yes. He seems to prefer the “free market” which leaves us as a mediocre soccer nation with a mediocre league (MLS) to the free market which results in the best teams and best leagues that win and make more money.
It is somewhat confusing.
I'm sure Mark Cuban, the Buss family and Robert Kraft would take exception to your characterization that all sports oligarchs are Russians and Middle Eastern princes.
You leave so much to choose from<<<sigh>>>, but I think most obviously here's a primer on college athletics and the lack of a free market. So, the United States is (almost) the only country in the world where university programs offer robust college athletics. Now, some might argue that the reason this is so is because international governments hand out free tuition for students and so wouldn't want to spend it on luxuries like sports, and therefore is antifree market. But that ignores that even in some private universities (like Oxford and Cambridge), the same course wasn't really followed in athletics which remained, even before mass government funding went into effect on the Continent, a largely amateur affair. It certainly has something to do with it, but it's not the entire story. And indeed, in the United States there is a robust market for college sports for gridiron football and basketball, but not the other sports, and certainly do not to justify the spend by colleges on those other sports which are not profit making centers. Moreover, it doesn't explain, even if you write away scholarships, why the colleges would consider athletics (other than football and basketball) in their admission decisions.
And so we get to it...the reason why the pull of college soccer exists, particularly for the girls, is because of government intervention. First, because of the government grant and student loan programs (at subsidized interest rates), the government has created a large supply of cash in which to finance amenities (everything from college spas to the latest computer centers). So colleges, rather than compete on price, compete on what ancillary programs they can offer students. It's why tuition prices keep rising at the rate they are rising. Second, because of the scholarship limitations imposed by Title IX, colleges are required to funnel some of that money into women's athletics and soccer (with its larger teams than gynmnastics or figure skating) makes a good target for that money. Third, because of the discrimination and affirmative action debates of the 70s and 80s, and because of government pressure towards principles of diversity and equality, schools have moved away in admissions from a strict testing-admissions based process (which BTW is the way they do it in Europe) and have settled on a more holistic approach...sports becomes a way they can cook the admissions numbers (which is also BTW which you got the Lori Laughlin admission scandal....it's a way to bend the admission rules put in place via government policies whether to favor the rich, minorities, or just interesting kids that make a great fit for the sports program). There are others, but government intervention has created market distortions, because otherwise colleges would likely only have large football and baskbetball programs and intramural for everything else. There are others, such as the government visa program which has created a large influx of foreign born students competing into the admission pool, but those are the big ones.
These artificial government interventions, in turn, have created a market for club pay-to-play soccer, which is geared largely towards creating college athletes instead of professional athletes. If soccer wasn't considered in admissions, and soccer scholarships were not offered, it is very doubtful that so many people would be willing to pay the fees some clubs are demanding. And indeed, players considering a professional career would have a more stark choice: give up soccer and go to college, or go directly into the MLS or Europe.
Your economic philosophy is really hard to pin down. On the one hand you rail against oligarchs, but then you support a closed ended crony capitalist cartel like the MLS (which is really just a giant classic pyramid scheme when it comes down to it....). Your claim to free markets is almost Trumpian, but some of what you spout would make you equally at home with Robert Reich or some of the other hardline technocratic pro-management left. But the short answer is in a truly free market, pay to play doesn't exist...and we can see it both on the university and professional level in one country: the UK which doesn't have club soccer (which is ironic considering how otherwise government controlled some other sectors are in the UK).
For fixing the lower levels, I am hoping AYSO does more to expand into bronze/copper.
For low level comp, an extension of AYSO makes sense. Bronze/copper of play isn't much different from select. The select coaches I've met are about as good as bronze/copper coaches.
We just need to get out of the pay to play mindset and back to trying to organize fair, fun games.
For low level comp, an extension of AYSO makes sense. Bronze/copper of play isn't much different from select. The select coaches I've met are about as good as bronze/copper coaches.
We just need to get out of the pay to play mindset and back to trying to organize fair, fun games.
I'm not sure this is really true. I'm sure there are great select teams out there, but when my son was starting out the extras/select teams they faced couldn't really keep up. United is a different story, but it's also contributed to the thining of Extras and select teams by picking off the cream of the talent.
The problem with the approach you suggest is that AYSO is under its own umbrella, insisting on its own philosophy and licensing, and so it's very hard to incorporate into the pyramid structure (which is why its started to tier itself). The other problem of course is an incentives one...the select coaches are in it for love of the game and personal glory, so there really isn't an incentive to do much more by the way of coach training. The club coaches are paid so there's some accountability there. Indeed, one of the problems United has identified is "accountability", in their words, of volunteer coaches....whether having some of them a little too focused on winning v development, or behavioral issues, or failure to take the required training. In Socal, this had led to United trainer's taking a more centralized one-club approach and taking away some independence from the local club DOCs.
You are right that united is more what I am thinking.
United plays in the bronze tournaments by us. They do just fine. Last one I reffed, they came in 3rd and 4th out of 8.
Philosophy is a huge barrier. Why have united if everyone is equal? Some regions won't even touch it.
Did centralizing united coach training help, or is it too early to tell?
d. God you are stupid. College is the only reason the WNT is successful. It is also the only reason that makes financial sense for a family to spend so much time and money on their daughter’s soccer odyssey. There is no “distortion.” There is only the free market working in glorious splendor, with clubs making money and families paying for the benefit they are seeking - college opportunity.
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Investment in womens' college soccer is driven by Title IX, not by free market forces. It is more like welfare than capitalism.
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Investment in womens' college soccer is driven by Title IX, not by free market forces. It is more like welfare than capitalism.
Dos Equis
GOLD
In addition to Kraft, better American examples would be the Kroenke Family and Malcom Glazer (or Lamar hunt in his prime). The first two actually play in that league of Russian Oligarchs, and do it well.
Sure. MLS exists in its current form because that is the only way that a free market allows for a sustainable league in the US. Solidarity payments don’t work because they do not make financial sense. They also artificially restrict mobility of labor. There is no inconsistency. The market has determined that a pro soccer league can only work here if it is structured the way it is. The market has also determined that solidarity payments and transfer fees don’t work because they restrict the flow of labor.
it is so weird. I’m arguing what actually exists in a free market, while you are arguing that fantasyland is what works in a free market. To prove that I am right and you are wrong, all I need to point out what is actually happening.
Where the dumb people get lost is in their thinking that MLS distorts “the market” because they can’t see that “the market” is not soccer. The “market” is pro sports. MLS is competing with MLB, NFL, etc. The MLS structure is the only system that allows a pro soccer league to compete in a sustainable manner with other pro sports leagues for consumer dollars.