Youth_Soccer_Nerd
SILVER
Does anyone have any ideas about a league where there is relegation and promotion league?
Ideas for a league where there is relegation and promotion
- Thread starter Youth_Soccer_Nerd
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Coast Soccer League has pro/rel, but it is a league that has lost most of its teams, so it's just a shell of what it once was
Since players are not tied to a team or club from year to year, when a team gets relegated its better players often migrate to a higher-placed team, and teams that get promoted often look to recruit the better players from a relegated team. That reinforces the promotion/relegation judgments in a perverse way.
Looking at it from a different perspective, it's kind of like what happens in the pro leagues that use pro/rel scheme (basically, everywhere except USA) so it imitates the behavior the adults do.
As a result the coaches then tend to use short cuts to try and avoid relegation and secure promotion because they know parents will react this way. Those short cuts harm development especially at the earlier ages. These include recruiting taller older faster players to just outrun the other players, booting the ball forward instead of trying to connect passes, having the big legged player boot goalkicks, focusing on tricks in practice and 1v1s instead of passing, teaching boot the ball tactics on shooting to put it over the gk head instead of placement to the corners, etc.
The short cut coach 100% hurt soccer. Boot the ball over the Mids and let the faster and bigger player chase it down for easy goal.
All the thinking in youth soccer (except somewhat in the true academies…though even then they don’t act like Europe) in the us is short term thinking. I don’t see how to break that model within the pay or play system but pro rel makes it worse. Where we should have pro rel is the professional leagues, but we don’t…..
Pay for play soccer is real and it's why we're going backwards in a hurry. If you put up $500M for a franchise, you will not lose. If you help sell more franchises, you get a cut in that plus a cut in everything else, like TV deals. I am happy that many of the women can now play full time and not have to work a part-time job. They still have to deal with a Doc or coach trying to date them though. WSL, I think said half of the coaches are dating one of their players. The NWSL had at least 8 or so coaches sexually harassing their players, usually the player trying to make a roster. This takes Pay For Play to another level and it's not good or professional. At the youth level, I think it was said over half of the Docs and coaches were in a relationship with at least one mom. I still remember a GK dd was #2 GK. However, coach started dating the mom of the #2 GK. #2 became #1 and was promoted to starter and the old #1 was regulated to the bench. This is not how Pro/Reg is supposed to go down but that's how SoCal Youth Soccer is being played.
The reason pro/rel works at the professional level is because everyone is under contract to play with specific clubs. So while yes if a club gets relegated the players will likely leave the team. Other clubs will need to buy them and pay the club a transfer fee. Which allows the relegated club a chance at getting promoted again. Getting promoted again drives clubs need to find homegrown talent. This also drives the need to develop players faster.
See how the cycle works? You can either buy your way into the top league or you can develop your way into the top league. (Or a mix of both) The cool part about true Academy soccer is development and selling top talent can occur at any age and from any club. Here's an example if we had true Premier League type soccer in the US people could make lots of $$$ starting up feeder clubs in places like Oakland where we all know talent exists but they're not able to pay for high level development. If you setup a "feeder" club in Oakland identify talent at young ages and sell them off to bigger academy clubs via transfer fees you can completely fund 100s of other players development. This is why people in other countries view soccer as a "poor" persons sport.(talent doesn't come from the suburbs) It's all about identifying and developing players and bigger clubs buying top talent.
My kids never had a coach that did any of that. The closest to any of those was telling the big keeper to take advantage of the fact there is no offside on a goal kick. That's not a shortcut - it's advanced, sophisticated play.
Except that half the refs don't know that rule...
We never encountered that. Isn't that on the referee exam? Restarts where no one is offside -- goal kick, corner kick, and throwin -- are there more?
And, as a favor to the referee team, our coach informed them before the game that we played a timed offside trap, where the sweeper would step up to put the most forward opponent(s) offside just before the other team took long free kicks. The ARs really got into it once they understood what was happening. I recall one game where we could hear across the pitch at half-time the coach of the other team shouting to his players "They're doing it to you on purpose!"
With the build-out line, it's an exceedingly rare occurrence that a striker can lurk in an offside position while an 8 year-old bombs it past everyone, so I don't really see it as a law with much relevance in practice.
Maybe now, but they didn't have a build-out line when my son was playing u-little and sometimes the fields were so small and the kids so strong, a team would have to build a wall at kickoff.