FanPost

Why USMNT Scouting Fails and How To Fix It

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I'm going to be a dick to Gyasi Zardes in this post. Not because I hate the guy or anything, but because he's a perfect example of a lot that's wrong with USMNT scouting. Gyasi Zardes has a lot of positives. He's tall, 6'2", he's fast as hell and he's strong, he can dribble past unwary defenders. Gyasi Zardes also has a first touch like the Hulk, piss poor passing and frequently makes mental mistakes. And one last observation, like a lot of USMNT players, he burst onto the scene after making a splash in MLS. Gyasi Zardes is everything wrong with how the USMNT develop and find talent, it's not his fault though, it's the system's fault. Let's look at how the system failed Gyasi Zardes and the country together.

What's Wrong


A Lack of Resources

The USMNT senior team has just one full time scout (source) for a country of 330 million people. of which an estimated 24 million people play soccer (source). Now, it is worth noting that this was a "senior team scout" rather than reflecting the scouting of the entire pool, but even casual data mining shows the obvious gaps in our scouting processes, such as in this article from this very site. Even worse, we may be ignoring entire ethnic groups that might be interested in joining the USMNT, tournaments like Sueno Allianza should be swimming with scouts from the USMNT and MLS, and yet...Liga MX scouts are the most likely to show up and actually offer a deal; despite the fact that the tryout tournament tours the entirety of the United States. Simply put, US Soccer is not spending enough on soccer player development and scouting, while sitting on tends of millions of dollars and that is ridiculous. Germany (who are going to feature prominently later on) has 1,000 part-time scouts (who are also coaches) feeding their national team development program, the USMNT has 125 for a much larger country in terms of area with a much larger population. Oh, and each of those 1,000 scouts/coaches are UEFA B licensed coaches, making them licensed to be an assistant coach in all levels at Europe or to coach amateur or youth teams of any stature, it's not clear what licensing or certification that USMNT scouts have. It's not shocking that Germany has a better scouting, but it's daunting how large the gap is.

Institutional Racism and Classism

To be clear, I'm not accusing any individual in US Soccer of being consciously racist or classicist, but even a cursory look at the USMNT roster shows a huge problem, most of our players are white and grew up in a suburban family, often with higher incomes than the average US citizen. There are two major areas to point to as problems, the issue with hispanic outreach and the ongoing issue of getting kids in the inner cities into soccer programs, let's start by examining the issues with Hispanic outreach. Liga MX is the most popular soccer league in this country (source), El Tri is the most popular national team in this country (source), understanding the Hispanic soccer fan in this country starts with these two facts. Not all Hispanics in the US are of Mexican ancestry, but the majority of Hispanics are and most of them that are soccer fans retain some loyalty to the Mexican national team. That doesn't mean that outreach to the Hispanic community is impossible for the USMNT, it means it may require more effort, and in that department, the USMNT seems to be lacking. I mentioned above Sueno Allianza earlier, if you're not familiar with it despite it being one of the biggest youth tryout tournaments in the entire US, I'm not surprised, because it rarely gets much in the way of press here in the US. It's a tournament designed to help find young Hispanic talent in the US...and it works, take a look at this video from 2015 showcasing past trialists:

Pursue Your Dreams.

Those are American kids playing for Leon in Liga MX, recruited through a tournament held in the US. Ever heard of a Sueno Allianza player going to an MLS club? Probably not, because not many MLS clubs actually have a presence there, FC Dallas being one of the exceptions. We also don't get a lot of USMNT players from it (though the video does feature Dennis Flores, who has one U-23 appearance), despite the talent that has started in that tournament, including Jonathan Gonzalez who recently departed the USMNT for El Tri; for the most part the USMNT seems to ignore the try the Allianza tryouts. The issues with Hispanic outreach are not limited merely to the Allianza tournament though, the USMNT does little to reach out to Spanish or dual-langugage players, there is, for example, a US Soccer in spanish Twitter account, but it hasn't posted anything since April 8th (as of this writing, April 26th) while the main account has nearly daily updates. Despite Spanish being the second largest language in the US, many US Soccer coaches don't speak the language fluently. Perhaps the larger issue is that most hispanic players live in the inner city, and that brings us to the second half of this...

How many true inner city kids have played on the USMNT in recent memory? Gyasi Zardes and Eddie Johnson are the only two that really seem to have come from that sort of situation. The lack of inner city outreach is part of the issue of institutional racism in the US Soccer community, since children of color are often found most densely in inner cities. The ongoing failure of the USMNT to reach out to inner city kids is a well-known, well-trodden problem and yet US Soccer has seemingly not addressed it all. There are no major problems to try to expand US Soccer's reach into the inner cities, no official programs that I can find to try to bridge the gap. The biggest problem for young soccer players in cities in the US? No place to play soccer, it's a relatively simple problem to address with investment but US Soccer has done nothing to help.

To be clear, none of this is deliberate or malicious, nobody is trying to keep black or hispanic players off of the USMNT, it's simply that most US Soccer personnel come from suburban, white backgrounds. Without that background and the community connections that come with it, US Soccer has a massive blind spot. The fix is difficult and perhaps expensive, it means specifically making the effort to reach out to these undeserved soccer communities within the US and it means bringing in coaches and scouts that specifically focus on these inner city areas and hispanic communities; but failure to do so means ignoring massive swathes of the population that could potential give rise to our best players, maybe even world class players. These communities are often filled with kids with a determination to "make it" that players from more comfortable communities do not, failing to turn that determination into talent is the USMNT's biggest failure.

Relying on MLS to Do Its Scouting For It

It's possible that US Soccer thinks that inner cities are covered, after all they have MLS teams in the largest cities in the US and each one has a development academy, but that idea is a mistake. For starters, not every MLS development academy is well-run or well-funded, teams like DC United, the Houston Dynamo, New England Revolution and Philadelphia Union have large metro areas with diverse populations to potentially draw from, but they've all largely failed to generate "homegrown" (aka academy developed) players good enough to play in MLS, much less the USMNT. All of these teams have (or had in the past) ownership that was either not interested or unable to invest in a proper academy; many MLS academies are still "pay to play" until a player reaches a the more senior academy levels.

Even if a team really does get a look at every talented young player in their area into their development academy, there's no guarantee that will generate USMNT talent. For one thing, MLS teams may be looking for different aspects in a player, than what the USMNT necessarily want; the local club might want big, tall and strong center backs to win headers because they have a strong contingent of cross-creating midfielders, but the USMNT may care more (at that time) about defensive positioning and passing out of the back. Additionally the homegrown player may not even be interested or eligible to play for the USMNT, many "homegrown" players for FC Dallas are originally from Central American countries and may play for those national teams instead. Getting those "homegrown" players to join the USMNT is part of recruiting (which I've previously written about) but sometimes a player may not be eligible. Handwalla Bwana, for example, is a promising young midfielder originally from Kenya is a refugeee whose status as a citizen of the United States is not settled. Until his citizenship is sorted out, even if Bwana wants to play for the USMNT, he can't for 3 years past the point at which he was officially granted citizenship.

To be clear, I'm not saying MLS is bad, nor that their academy system is bad, I'd argue that both have been good for the development of the USMNT in fact. What I am saying is that relying solely on MLS to scout certain areas is a bad policy and bad idea; US Soccer has largely failed to invest in cities and they can't continue to shirk their duty if they want to develop great talent.


Just Plain Old Bad Ideas

Bio-banding is a shitty idea backed by bad pseudo science, but but don't just take my word for it. It's not the first bad idea that the USMNT, their history is littered with bad ideas, from Team America, to bringing back Bruce Arena or well, this...

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US Soccer doesn't necessarily need to do everything the way "the rest of the world does it", but it sure would help if they at least learned from stuff that worked and why it works.

How to Fix It

How Germany Can Show Us the Way

First, a little required reading about the current, reigning World Cup Champions (TM): How Germany Went from Bust to Boom. A few things pop out at me from the article, for starters, at age 12 at the Freiburg academy they are replicating league play with a promotion and relegation system for teams within the academy, the sheer number of coaches in Germany, the importance of education and finally that they're willing to give young players a chance. Altogether, ti's a blueprint the USMNT would do well to replicate.

Trained and Talented Coaches Are Vital

As the article makes clear, none of this works without good coaches. There are 1,000 UEFA B licensed coaches running the training programs, about 1 coach per 83,000 people in Germany, which is extremely impressive, you'd need about 4,000 coaches to cover the USA to a similar amount (by population). Perhaps more key, these coaches are clear that they are there to teach and coach kids, not win games so parents can feel good. And while it goes unsaid (since the piece above is written from a British perspective) but there are training grounds and spaces for the trainees to learn how to play too. Good fields are often lacking in the US, or are shared with other sports that may make the grounds poorly suited to playing quality soccer. In short, there's a major investment of time, money and effort into just creating spaces and systems for kids to learn within.

Start Young

In the German development systems, ,players start academy training young, as young as age 9, this isn't all that novel in Europe or South America though. What is novel is the idea that they play in a training league as early as age 12, albeit with a reduced schedule, getting used to the idea of having to struggle and scrap over a whole season, instead of just playing in a tournament from time to time. Mentally, this prepares the players for the rigors of being a professional footballer, where you need to be consistent and view it more as a job that needs to be done on a consistent basis, instead of an occasional burst of talented showmanship. Admittedly, such a setup requires more effort to setup and to keep kids from being too focus on football, but that sort of attention to detail ties back to having talented coaches as I mentioned above, but it's surprising to see such a system place such an emphasis on regular competitive play so early.

Work With Professional Clubs, But Not Too Closely

The cooperation between the DFB and Bundesliga is fairly well known, but to be clear it's not necessarily a relationship that is based on financial integration. While the clubs and the DFB discuss how they want to guide German football, and footballers in the future, they're still separate financial entities. The DFB, the equivalent of US Soccer in Germany, doesn't solely rely on Bundesliga clubs to find their talent either, they work together but sometimes Bundesliga clubs find their talent through DFB training programs instead. The end result is that both the DFB and the Bundesliga work together to find talent, by working together, but in different areas, they can find talent that the other group miss.

Embrace Immigrants

While some people in Europe view the large influx of immigrants from the Middle East as a problem, German soccer saw an opportunity. The fact is that whatever your political leanings, migrant children are a huge potential source of undiscovered talent for football clubs. What's more, migrant children are often highly motivated to succeed in their new home country, giving them the mental edge necessary to be a professional footballer. Regardless of how you view immigrants and immigrant law, as a soccer organization failing to spread as wide of a net as possible means ignoring or missing talent.

None of This Will Be Easy

It's easy for me,or anyone, to sit here and claim that all US Soccer needs to do is follow my blueprint, or the blueprint of this or that country, but the fact is it's easier said than done. The problem is that US Soccer doesn't seem to be making any real improvements. The Bio-banding idea is simply the latest and greatest in a line of ideas supposed to fix problems in the system. It really isn't as complicated as US Soccer seems to want to make things out to be, and it doesn't need to be that complicated. Good coaches, a competitive training system, an investment in the inner cities and a close but not incestuous relationship between MLS and US Soccer is really all that is necessary to improve, it's on Carlos Cordeiro to implement these fixes and quickly now that he's president or his tenure will end in failure like his predecessor.

This is a FanPost written by a member of our blog's community. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the feelings or beliefs of the blog itself or the staff.