Agree they are misleading the 99% but they are making a calculated effort in doing so. The rest is just marketing to keep the troops in line. They’ve been very upfront that the goal is to develop pros so they are perfectly willing to sacrifice 99% to get that rare diamond in the rough. The European program, if anything, is even more ruthless because other than go play college soccer in America there is no safety valve. You can’t do both the academic and academy track within the time allotted and once you are off the academic track you are written off. Europeans don’t have the same notion that we do that everyone should go to college.99% are being told they can be part of the 1%, which doesn't benefit the 99%, or the 1%. Everyone gets put in to the same system.
I think we miss players because we identify the wrong ones, not so much that the best ones don't make it to an academy program due to financial or physical barriers to entry. Soccer IQ just doesn't carry much weight in American soccer. Instead our coaches think they can take the biggest and fastest pre-teen kids and teach them tactics, wrongfully believing that tactics are the same as soccer IQ and decision making.
I agree the selection for the academy slots is off. If you look at the u13s generally picked they all have in common that they are tall and early bloomers. If you look at an mls next team at u15 v a flight 1 team, you’ll notice on average the higher level players are all bigger. Europe has a similar bias too according to the statistics. The advantage they have is that academies start as young as u7 and u8 so they have a lot more time to smooth out the edges. By the time our coaches get them at u13, the pool already doesn’t favor high iq players, and to the extent the system even produces any boys who are both early bloomers and high iq, that is a very small pool. And if you are playing Latino league in stead of strikers, forget it you are too far behind.