We are expectant of victory and excellence in these Olympic sports with little consideration to the time, effort, and support these athletes deserve outside of their one shining moment every four years. Passive American dominance has sustained itself in sports such as swimming and athletics most likely because of our ability to maximize our talent bases in those respective sports, but we can’t apply and expect the same success in soccer. Soccer—a language of expression around the world—truly transcends boundaries and projects universally.
The ultimate failing of the past American soccer dynamic wasn’t necessarily the lack of leadership or talent in the players we possessed, but rather the lack of genuine passion for the game from all parties and our lack of embrace for soccer’s sociocultural power. Our previous soccer endeavours that tried to take the sport and “Americanize it” with clocks that counted down (rather than up) and offside lines at the 35-yard mark (rather than the centre of the pitch) ultimately failed because the end product was a caricature of what soccer was as a game and a symbol of life.
Just like we might say that Arena Football is a caricature of NFL football now, attempts such as NASL in the 1970s were shells of what soccer truly represented and embodied.
Soccer in America would meddle in nothingness after the collapse of the NASL until the country received the ultimate honour of hosting the World Cup in 1994. Arguably the best-hosted World Cup in history, the United States boasted vibrant crowds (and record attendance that still stand today), excellent facilities, and a determined team that experienced unprecedented success by reaching the knockout round and battling the eventual champion Brazil hard in its 1-0 loss in the round of 16. Perhaps that World Cup campaign was supposed to be the turning point in American soccer, but soccer wasn’t meant to be in America yet.
This wasn’t necessarily the fault of the American public, however, since the MLS was just founded the year before (1993) and was just getting off its feet. Because of the lack of a legitimate domestic league and no easy ability to watch overseas soccer on TV, soccer was still a cyclical sport in the American sporting culture with fair reason.
It was up to the 1998 American team to sustain the positive soccer-momentum accrued from the last World Cup cycle, then. From there, the MLS ideally could have ridden the coattails of the national team’s success and grown domestic soccer into American sportsdom.
But again, it wasn’t meant to be. The soccer gods, in fact, probably wanted to teach us the greatest lesson of all by humbling our team with a last-place finish in the 1998 World Cup. Swept away by Germany, Yugoslavia, and Iran, the team’s miserable campaign at the high-stakes World Cup finally encouraged the national federation to reflect on the team’s failures and change the flawed American soccer system from its core.
The national soccer federation, humiliated and relegated to the butt of global water-cooler talk, finally understood that it needed a long-term plan to make its national team consistently competitive and representative of the nation’s potential and human capital.
Putting a man on the moon again
The only way the United States could have improved its soccer plight after its 1998 World Cup disaster would be a complete reflection and overhaul of talent scouting, amateur development, and professional climate—i.e. everything. The national federation had managed to consistently cough up inferior talent out of a talent base of over 300 million people, which was clearly a sign that things needed to change.
Much like a large firm tapping into the brilliant minds in management consulting to improve business strategies and operations, American soccer needed some external “football man” to revamp the system.
Carlos Queiroz—now the manager of the Portuguese National Team— and close friend Dan Gaspar—now the long-time head coach at alma mater University of Hartford—would be two of the men tasked to draft the blueprint and pinpoint the change. Both cultured footballing minds equipped with experiences in Mozambique, Portugal, Japan, South Africa, England (Queiroz with Sir Alex Ferguson) and the United States (Queiroz as the coach of the NY/NJ Metrostars in 1996 and Gaspar as player and coach in the American system) among many others would be tasked with changing the American soccer paradigm.
The end product of their meticulous work would be the often cited but incompletely understood Project 2010.
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PROJECT 2010 was a blueprint created in 1998 by the U.S. soccer executives to ensure that the U.S. Men's National Team would become a real threat to win the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
This was a $50 million developement plan to create a world-class U.S. soccer team.
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| Carlos Queiroz - Project 2010 |
While the stated (and clearly ambitious) goal of the report was to turn the United States national team into a team that could seriously win the World Cup in 2010, the product was more or less a blueprint for the American federation to create a consistently competitive and legitimate national team.
Even through Queiroz et al. recognized that turning the United States into a legitimate soccer contender was a behemoth of a task—the cover of his report featured a picture of an American astronaut on the moon holding the World Cup trophy with a soccer ball at his feet and was titled "We Can Fly"— he and his co-author Gaspar foremost stressed that simply making professional ambition a foremost priority would be the starting point that would make everything else much easier.
Professional ambition would permeate itself into every aspect of American development, since professional ambition would command athletes to enter academies earlier (at ages 13-15 rather than 17-18), train harder, and prepare for the rigors of life as soccer professional. The report listed a litter of detailed suggestions, but they all revolved around the fact that the United States had to get serious about soccer in order to become what it wanted to be.
This talk about wanting to take soccer more seriously is easy, of course. Every young athlete at one point or another dreams of becoming a professional athlete, and they all surely dedicate themselves to that ambition if it were genuinely attainable. The American development qualm exists because the country as a whole simply doesn’t treat the world’s largest and grandest professional sport as serious as it should. The United States relegates to sport into the lower tier when the sport’s natural state does not belong there— other small sports may not have widespread appeal, but soccer does.
Soccer’s cosmopolitan nature and early professional entrance age almost contradicts the American ethos. There is universal illusory Stateside that college is an important stage of sporting development when that is not entirely true. A college degree or pseudo-likeness is almost a prerequisite to the American sporting world, when it truly isn’t and shouldn’t be.
While American football prospects may need the collegiate platform to grow physically and transition into the rigours of professional life and basketball prospects the need to similarly transition into professional life, college soccer athletes aren’t afforded the same development luxuries.
“College soccer is good for a student-athlete… Once the student-athlete graduates, [he/she] can either give professional soccer a try or find a career with their college diploma,” Coach Gaspar said in a recent interview with me. “Players with [national team] aspirations need to train and play games though… and college soccer [might not be] the right environment for that.”
College soccer unfortunately is a non-revenue college sport with heavy restrictions on games student-athletes are allowed to play and practice and a condensed seasonal schedule, so it is not a very good option for professional development. Many soccer commentators stress the importance of ambitious players playing many games and devoting their lives to soccer, and college soccer falls a bit short in that description.
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| Dan Gaspar at the World Cup 2010 in South Africa |
“President John F. Kennedy said to the world that the United States was going to put the first man on the moon. He said that with conviction, and the reason why he did was because he collected the best resources that this country has to offer,” Gaspar said.
“If we’re going to develop elite players, we need to provide the best of the best. You need to put them in a nurturing environment where they are exposed to good mentors; not with people who have read what it’s like to be a professional, but people who have been professionals and lived and breathed alongside world-class players.”
A certain but unsure path to glory
The United States Soccer Federation has undoubtedly made steady progress since the publication of Project 2010 in 1998. American players have more opportunities in Europe, the MLS has grown dramatically (even more so recently with the captures of Thierry Henry and Rafa Marquez), and the overall quality of American soccer has improved.
However, the USSF hasn’t necessarily followed the suggestions of Project 2010 to achieve what it has to this point. While Queiroz and Gaspar recommended changes to the youth development system that would emulate European training conditions and circumstances, USSF president Sunil Gulati has followed a different path.
In a piece by soccer writer Michael Lewis, Gulati was quoted saying, “I don't think there were a lot of specific things that we said, 'OK, we'll take these 20 things and implement them.' It was really a long-term view and what he thought were deficiencies and where we might be able to improve. And in that sense, Project 2010 has really been a vision and goal that has been filled in along the way with any series of quantifiable actions.”
Gulati’s lack of willingness to follow Project 2010 verbatim is good in some senses and negative in others. Almost every soccer man or commentator accept that the circumstances are just different here, and different circumstances merit different treatment.
“The United States has a great challenge because it is not looking for players within a country, but [essentially] a continent,” Gaspar said.
Because of the United States’ vast size, creating an efficient development system is extremely important. While Queiroz and Gaspar envisioned a special youth development program more involved and deeper than Bradenton (i.e. the IMG Youth Development academy for U16s and U17s), Gulati has worked to improve what is already in place.
Whether or not Gulati has taken the right steps in a heavily path-dependent world of youth development is left up in the air, however. There are certainly are better and worse methods of spotting and developing talented young players; the USSF needs to be receptive to positive changes.
Unfortunately, our youth system has been more effective in finding quantities of players rather than quality players. The talent-spotting network is still grossly underdeveloped and must be improved.
“We’re a nation of 300 million people, we must be able to find the [23] special ones [who would represent our national team].” The scouting process and identification network needs to be there… for us to meet our dreams and aspirations,” Gaspar said. “You can have that sense of a great player, and we need to be able to find them.”
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| Dan Gaspar and Kaka at the 2010 World Cup |
Considering Gaspar experienced the rise and development of Portugal’s Golden Generation—which included Figo, Vitor Baia, (Leicester City manager) Paulo Sousa, and Nuno Gomes—so he can attest to the U.S.’ need to find the special few who make the international cut.
Reforms such as implementing professional youth leagues (i.e. U-19 reserve leagues), special coaching networks, better and tougher coaching badge standards, and technical departments are commonplace around the world and would help improve American youth development. While conformity shouldn’t always be the name of the game, there are reasons why people and groups do things in certain ways.
When implementation of these things—which Queiroz and Gaspar recommended in the report—is clearly positive and way the rest of the footballing world operates, they should be implemented. Gulati, or whoever occupies the national federation leadership, needs to understand this and embrace opening American soccer to the world as the world’s game opens itself to us (with the greater TV exposure and World Cup hype).
“From the date that we’ve written [Project 2010], we’re really had no involvement with it unfortunately, no further consultation regarding that dynamic document,” Gaspar said when asked about his thoughts on Bradenton and the progress of American youth development.
It’s discouraging knowing that the national federation has been unable or unwilling to continue its partnership with cultured and good soccer men. The USSF and American soccer are on a journey to make the country a better football nation, and it consequently needs to gather as many partners as they can do assist in the journey.
Gaspar commented that the overall dynamic of U.S. soccer—from the players to coaching staffs to the fans to the domestic league—has improved and that the country is “starting to get it”, but that there is still a long way to go.
“Soccer is a truly American sport if you think about it,” Gaspar said. “While [American] football and baseball are structured, soccer is a sport that captures what our country is about—freedom and creativity. The players on the ball have the ability to do special things.”
He commented that the lack of money in the league was more disconcerting.
“But the wages are still paltry in the MLS compared to abroad… That needs to be improved if American soccer wants to grow. [Players] need to be given the incentive to stay in America,” Gaspar said. “I have no doubt that the MLS can be a top league… The United States offers an unparalleled lifestyle; the money just has to be there.”
Gaspar commented in our interview about the growing financial stakes in the Premier League and Cristiano Ronaldo’s £80M transfer to Real Madrid and indicated that the MLS needs to eventually gain that financial clout and grow out of its current salary cap and player ownership setup.
It will take time for soccer to grow into a true money sport in America—both on the fan and ownership side of things—but that day will come. American sports owner Robert Kraft rejected a purchase of Liverpool because of the lack of a salary cap in the EPL, but fellow owner Randy Lerner has done wonders at Aston Villa (for the most part).
Once people realize that soccer is an amazingly special sport and a vehicle of love, growth will skyrocket.
The MLS under Don Garber’s leadership has already shown its commitment to bringing brand-name talent with its designated player statutes, and a commitment to youth with its establishment of club youth academies of the European mould.
Considering MLS youth academies—most of which opened last year—have already produced the likes of rising MLS star Andy Najar and talented Porto reserve goalkeeper Samir Badr, things are looking brighter for American soccer. There’s still plenty of room to improve, but maybe American soccer is figuring it out.
It’s ultimately about the greenback
Jürgen Klinsmann has often spoken of his distaste of the American “pay-to-play” model of youth sports, stating that our system disables opportunities when other countries enable opportunities and development through their systems. Soccer has always strived to be a sport blind to race and socioeconomic status, and much of its brilliance is derived from its demonstration of these ideals.
The Zidane’s and Cristiano Ronaldo’s of the world came from humble abodes. Imagine if these world-class footballers weren’t able to cultivate their natural footballing talent because the system was flawed and disenfranchising. Although many talented young footballers had to make sacrifices to advance their sporting career (just like any parent and athlete would do here)—such as Didier Drogba moving to France alone as a teenager to train professionally—they at least were not burdened additionally with the heavy costs of club football.
The biggest concept American soccer fans have to understand is that the United States does not have problems getting athletic kids to play soccer as is often implied (so no, having LeBron-like athletes wouldn’t be as grand as you’d think), but rather the inability to find suitable talent for international competition. We have 23 players who can fill the spots on the 23-man roster. What the team lacks, however, are 23 suitable players that can comprise an elite squad capable of winning the World Cup—what Coach Gaspar coined “the special ones”. The fact that those 23 kids could be talents left rotting on the streets because they weren’t able to advance in the club system or spotted by talent evaluators is not good.
Luckily, MLS clubs have become financially secure enough to build youth academies, as previously mentioned. Many youth products are now receiving continental-style and professional training and learning how to be true soccer professionals in a country that is devoid of them.
These professional youth academies, unfortunately, are still too few and far between. Anyway, academies as geographically-limited in the US and can only ameliorate the disenfranchising money factor so much. Money and the United States’ vast geography will always come into play.
Ideally, the USSF and American leaders (not necessarily political, just leaders in society) will realize that athletes are special pieces of human capital. Even though the United States “spans a continent”, the United States is also the only country that has the resources build a soccer power in this country. The organization of youth soccer is steadily improving, and it’s now our imperative to make the major investment needed to spot and cultivate elite talent.
The geography conundrum, however, can be improved without drastic investment and capital campaigns. If you visualize the United States as a continent (like Europe) and each state as a separate entity (like each individual European country), player development doesn’t seem as difficult as it’s made to be in America.
Much like Queiroz and Gaspar suggested in Project 2010, development programmes need to be organized in the right scope. Centralized organization has proven ineffective for national team youth development so far, so maybe it’s time to truly decentralize and organize youth development by smaller regions or states.
Following suit, the national federation must build national academies throughout the nation. The USSF and its partners opened Bradenton, FL in 1999 hoping to mimic France’s highly successful Clairefontaine youth academies—a group of 12 national youth academies that train the nation’s best 12 and 13 year-olds– which cultivated the likes of Nicolas Anelka (Chelsea), Thierry Henry (NY Red Bulls), and William Gallas (Tottenham).
Bradenton—which accepts the best 16 and 17 year-olds— has been fairly successful, producing the likes of Donovan, Onyewu, and Michael Bradley among many other national team members. However, the emotional costs of attending Bradenton are steep. Since teen players board at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, from all over the nation, the toll of being put in a soccer-only environment away from family and friends does turn some potential talents away from the program.
Parents and kids would probably embrace training with the national team if the sacrifices weren’t as steep, and that’s where geography comes in. Imagine all of the talent that could develop with national academies in California, Texas, and other states; and ask why national satellite academies haven’t been instituted. Parents even would probably be more willing to let their children train at 12 and 13 years old at a national facility if it was closer to home.
“There should be satellite venues [like Bradenton],” said Coach Gaspar when asked about the similarities between Bradenton and Clairefontaine. “There should be soccer ambassadors who should be identifying [and recruiting] the best of the best… and making them better players.”
A U13 club player and frequent at UVA soccer games shared a similar sentiment.
“[Our club team] travels across the states for tournaments,” the U13 player said. “Our [game count] is inconsistent thought… we will play four games in a weekend for a tournament and play fewer games in less busy times.”
“If a player is good enough, he will practice with the Olympic Development Program (ODP) once a week on Fridays… and more if you do well with that team,” he adds. When asked if he thought one practice a week with a national youth team was enough he responded, “probably not. [We should] be practicing more, but it takes time and commitment [and money] to practice with the ODP. Our club is building an academy, and hopefully I’ll improve more with that.”
Gaspar stressed the importance of centralization and further hierarchies in player development.
“We said the an Elite Player Development structure should be created to run parallel to ODP. So now you can identify the best of the best of ODP players or from other arenas and have them be challenged by the best mentors and resources available. There is no professional development without a professional system to develop these gifted players. We need to create an environment equal to or better than proven soccer nations. The rest of the world is not going to wait for us to arrive and catch up. They will continue to grow and improve. We need to create a vertically integrated process,” Gaspar said.
Keeping our identity— American grit in the world’s flair
The 2010 World Cup was undoubtedly successful from the American perspective (in terms of interest and TV ratings), and a huge contributor to this success was the US’s never-say-die style of play. The nation’s reaction to the team’s last-grasp victory over Algeria off Landon Donovan’s extra-time goal was stunning, flamboyant, and finely patriotic. We’re suckers for underdogs and the dramatic, gritty victory. Much like the Miracle on Ice, we could somewhat relate with the players on the US national team, savour the stories of Jay DeMerit, and singularly laugh at Giuseppe Rossi for choosing to play for a national team that did worse than us at the last World Cup.
We also expect dominance from our national teams, however, and it’s clear that the US national team isn’t ready to break though with players like Jonathan Bornstein and Robbie Findlay. The team is creeping closer to the elite tier though, and the next big challenge for the national federation will be to figure out a way to develop elite players without compromising everything that makes each player distinctly American—a player can surely be a midfield maestro or a box-to-box legend and possess the uniquely-American desire to win and never-say-die.
The onus is on the USSF to realize its humble stature and behave accordingly. American soccer is something long in the works, a path-dependent dynamic screwed up by those in the past and in need of prompt improvement and a heavy dose of medicine.
American soccer is a budding start-up, and it must respect the partners and capitalists that put time into the cause like any other start-up business. Leaving people who have contributed so much to American soccer via Project 2010 is not fair and not right.
“[It’s time we not just mince words, but create a force of action. Where those who are involved are obsessive with the idea of creating world-class stars. Every component of the process from the kit manager, medical staff, specialized coaches, administrators, security, marketing to the individual managing this project must have one focused in mind, identify and produce the best players in the world,” Gaspar said. “Anything is possible if we are ambitious, passionate and surround the process with quality people who live and understand the winning business of soccer.”
Perhaps Luis Gil (Real Salt Lake), Eric Lichaj (Aston Villa), Sebastian Lletget (West Ham), Gabriel Agbossoumonde (Braga) will render all of my complain-speak moot come the next World Cup cycle, but until then, this essay is fair game.
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