Everyone and their mother has an opinion on it: Bill Archer has a pretty harsh one, ridiculing the idea of the Cosmos fielding an “Independent All Star Team” that has apparently been mentioned, though it’s worth noting the NY Cosmos’ official site does not mention that at all. Instead, the focus is on making the Cosmos a key player in elite youth development and an announced effort to bring the Cosmos to MLS. Those two ambitions are where the real play is being made here.

It was actually on 28 August 2009 that we first noted the “The New York Cosmos are back!” and took a skeptical view of Paul Kemsley, the former Tottenham Hotspur director who procured the rights to the Cosmos brand and is now the Chairman of the club, using the same infamous photo of Kemsley with Pamela Anderson as Archer does. As we said at the time, Kemsley had earned a “reputation for overstretching himself” and has a troublesome history of lost investments in recent years.

But while Kemsley might appear to be a bit of a joke on the surface of it, what about the rest of the folks behind this venture?

The key figures are Carl Johnson, the CEO and Terry Byrne, the Director of Soccer (I really should make my job title “Director of Soccer for Pitch Invasion”, shouldn’t I?). The latter name you’ll recognise if you’ve been paying attention to David Beckham in recent years: in Grant Wahl’s excellent The Beckham Experiment, his backroom influence on the Galaxy earns him a few pages of infamy answering the question “Who was Terry Byrne?” and explains his rise “from cabdriver to David Beckham’s best friend.”

Byrne played a key role in the establishment of the David Beckham Academy in California a few years ago. Similarly, a crucial part of the Cosmos’ revival announcement was that the club will be fielding U-12 to U-18 teams, and will be a part of the high quality US Soccer Development Academy set-up, by virtue of their partnership with BW Gottschee, a long-time youth soccer club in Queens. Due to this partnership, Gottschee announced they were now making their Academy free (something most elite academies nationwide are currently having to consider doing to attract the top talent, in competition with MLS clubs’ numerous free academies). This year, Gottschee finished bottom of the “Liberty” division of the US Soccer Development Academy at U-16 level, and third out of six at U-18 level. Their status in the US Soccer Development Academy system and long track record of stability is extremely important here.

This is because Byrne and Beckham’s ambition to make it big in US youth development failed in LA: The David Beckham Academy in Calfornia closed its doors this year February. But despite its failure, this effort (along with everything else that went into The Beckham Experiment) tied Byrne to a very, very important figure in American soccer who will be one of the key players if the Cosmos are to join MLS: Tim Leiweke, President and CEO of AEG, owners of the Galaxy and at one point half of MLS’ teams. In The Beckham Experiment, Leiweke says “I started with Terry on this whole thing a long time ago. And Terry’s been my partner since day one, someone I loved.” Leiweke is, very importantly, currently the Chairman of MLS’ Board of Governors.

Still, Byrne’s connection to Leiweke has had its ups and downs due to his tight relationship with Beckham, a friendship with serious roots for both Englishmen. Byrne earned David Beckham’s undying affections by being there to cradle him at his most traumatic moment: following his red card against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup, with the rest of the England bench ignoring him, Byrne (England’s masseur) was there for him in the locker room when no-one else was. Shortly after, Byrne got his first “Director of Soccer” gig with Watford, not long after leaving that to become Beckham’s full-time personal manager, and ending up as a paid consultant to the Galaxy following Beckham’s move to MLS in 2007, becoming the genius behind the disastrous hiring of Ruud Gullit as the foreign superstar coach Leiweke believed the Galaxy needed — and creating a curious situation, with Beckham’s best mate and business associate (through Simon Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, Beckham’s agency) Byrne pulling the strings at the Galaxy.

The experiment proved to be a disaster, and in August 2008, Gullit was ousted and Byrne was booted from his role as a Galaxy consultant, with 19 Entertainment effectively put in their place by AEG. Bruce Arena was brought in as Galaxy General Manager, with Leiweke fuming at the fumbling that had taken place. As Grant Wahl put it, Leiweke’s message to 19 Entertainment and Byrne was: You had your chance, and you screwed it up. Now I’m taking my team back. Leiewke told Wahl: “I think what David and his people will tell you is they’re probably not a huge fan of mine based on Bruce. I didn’t ask them. . . are they happy with me? No. Now Simon Fuller and I have a very strong personal friendship. Terry Byrne and I had a friendship. I think we still do, but am I real popular with them as it relates to us owning this team and the decisions we have made [recently]? Absolutely not.”

Over the last year, since the publication of Wahl’s book, there’s been a lot of fence mending by everyone embarrassed by The Beckham Experiment. Leiweke and Byrne and Fuller and Beckham are probably best buds again. And the Cosmos are obviously the vehicle Byrne wants to control and prove he can make it in American soccer with, from youth development to MLS. Beckham’s name is not yet officially attached to the Cosmos, but many have already noted he has the option to purchase an MLS franchise once his playing career ends. The question, is how much faith does he have in Byrne given past failures: what does that hug in 1998 still buy Byrne?

If we dig into the various connections Byrne can call on through Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment, we find a very interesting one, if only for historical irony: Ed Bleier is the Chairman of CKX, Inc., one of the world’s top “entertainment content” companies and owner since 2005 of Fuller’s 19 Entertainment. 80 year-old Bleier previously spent 34 years working for Warner (rising to become its president in 1986), the company that founded and owned the original New York Cosmos under Warner president Steve Ross, an investment Bleier worked closely on for Warner.

It was Warner who, as Gavin Newsham puts it in his book about the original New York Cosmos rise and fall Once In A Lifetime, had a “relentless drive to publicise the team”, and it was Bleier who was chairman of the NASL’s Television Committee and warned against the NASL’s television deal with ABC signed in 1979 that saw nine league games telecast per year from 1979-1981, believing more imagination needed to be used in how the content of the sport was presented, wanting a highlights show that would have “standings, players, saves, goals, player of the week to build all the intrinsics of the sport and only put the Championship game on television. I got outvoted.” Within five years of the deal, the NASL was dead despite ratings on ABC that MLS would kill for. The Cosmos played their final game in 1985, a year after Warner had pulled the plug on the growing losses and handed the club to Giorgio Chinaglia and Peppe Pinton, who became the self-appointed “curator”of the Cosmos brand until Kemsley came along.

And that’s how we ended up with the latter standing next to Sunil Gulati (President of US Soccer), Kemsley and Pele yesterday. Which is kind of funny, as just three years ago, it was a frustrated Pinton saying that “I don’t think they [MLS] have good leadership to be honest with you. They don’t come from the world of soccer. They have no clue. It’s sad what they do in the league office … not just the league office, the headquarters of the [U.S. Soccer] federation too.”

But, hey, that old conflict is nothing a little slick Cosmos marketing can’t fix to get the club the buzz needed for investors to fund it for MLS (and to build the key missing element in all this, an MLS ready stadium). So take a look at the CEO of the new Cosmos, Carl Johnson:  the founder of a very successful marketing company Anomaly, named in 2008 as #24 in the “World’s Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company magazine, the only creative agency on the list:

Instead of claiming to reinvent advertising, Anomaly shirks the ad categorization altogether. In 2004, DeLand set out with four former colleagues from Chiat\Day and Wieden+Kennedy to build a new kind of company: part branding firm, part design shop, part innovation think tank, part VC firm. Anomaly has created a model that attacks the fundamental flaws of the agency machine. Most ad agencies still earn their paychecks from time sheets and media spend, which means they’re motivated to be inefficient and to produce ideas that are wedded to expensive media. Anomaly takes a different approach, negotiating upfront either a predetermined fee or, better yet, royalties or an equity stake in a product. So when a client comes in with an advertising problem, Anomoly addresses it more broadly as a business issue, analyzing everything from design to product development. “They have a talent that goes beyond your typical artist or creative,” says Brian Kelley, president of Coca-Cola’s Still Beverages, a client. “It’s an eclectic group of people who think about driving every piece of your business.”

In thinking about their own business, the partners recognized that as branding experts, they could just as well create original products too. “We would rather invent the next VitaminWater than do the ads for VitaminWater,” says partner Carl Johnson. So while half of Anomaly’s business is doing client work, the other half is building brands from scratch. “What we’re really doing is generating profit from clients, then reinvesting in a venture fund for our intellectual properties,” Johnson says.

Anomaly’s Sand Hill Road–meets–Madison Avenue approach isn’t yet ubiquitous — or dominant — but it is showing results. Profitable in its first year of business, the New York–based agency has doubled its revenue every year since. In 2007, Anomaly brought in nearly $20 million, with new clients including Converse and Bluetooth-headset maker Jawbone.

The thinking is obvious: Pele is the star power, Byrne does the soccer development and develops elite players that can be sold for bagloads of money down the line (and brings in Beckham), the same thinking that everyone has right now about tapping into the huge US youth soccer market for future profit. The Cosmos brand has the shit marketed out of it by Carl Johnson and his savvy associates: the Cosmos also hired Dan Cherry from Anomaly as their Executive Director of Marketing (how many youth soccer clubs do you know that have two of the leading creative executives in the world on their staff? Someone does have some money in the Cosmos here, if we consider that they’re also investing a fair bit in making the Gottschee Academy free to play in). Kemsley, who appears to have a talent at getting people to throw money at his ventures, gets the big investors lined up behind the Cosmos to get them back into MLS, presumably leveraging Byrne’s connections to the likes of Beckham, Fuller and (wishfully for the historical symmetry) Ed Bleier. The Academy breeds players for the MLS team and they’re then turned around and sold for a lot of money. Hey presto!

I’m not saying Kemsley and Byrne don’t have a questionable track record and there’s a huge question mark about the club’s MLS ambitions given the need for serious investment and a stadium. But at the same time, there’s a plan in here that makes some sense from a business perspective: the upside here may well make a big enough fish bite.

The American roster named by U-20 coach Thomas Rongen has nine professional players on it: six of them play overseas, including Molano in Croatia, three players in Portugal (Samir Badr at Porto, Greg Garza at G.D. Estoril Praia and Gale Agbossoumonde  at S.C. Braga), Ernest Nungaray and Adrian Rueles in Mexico (Monarcas Morelia and Santos Laguna respectively) and three domestically in Major League Soccer, Juan Agudelo from the Red Bulls, Fuad Ibrahim from Toronto FC and Francisco Navas Cobo at the Houston Dynamo.

There are only six players on American college rosters on the 18-man roster (and interestingly, only one of them is a midfielder or forward). That’s six more college players than you’ll find on most other countries’ U-20 rosters: but it’s also about half the number of college players from the American roster announced for the 2005 Milk Cup, that included the likes of Charlie Davies (Boston College) and Sasha Klejstan (Seton HallUCLA), and had only a couple of professionals on it. The decline in the number of college players represented on the US U-20 national team is a trend, but the country is still set apart by this route of youth development.

Rongen has been coaching the US U-20 team for almost the entire past decade. And in an interview this week with Zach Berman of the Washington Post, he alluded to this change:  “If you look at it from a purely objective standpoint, [college soccer is] not an ideal soccer development for a critical stage of a player’s development between ages 17 and 21.” He went on to suggest that college soccer was not the best way to develop elite players.  “I don’t care what college coaches say. You cannot replicate a professional environment. There’s too much down time, there’s not enough games. And if there are games during the season, there are too many of them in a short amount of time, which means most teams pretty much have starters end up recuperating between games and not training.”

In an excellent article at the Huffington Post a couple of months ago, Beau Dure looked at other problems of the college game as a key development area for men’s soccer in the United States: the limited number of full scholarships, for example, that limits the diversity of the intake, and the non-traditional rules that see revolving substitutes, encouraging a fast, physical and aggressive game that bleeds into MLS:

The scholarship numbers also limit the player pool. Partial scholarships may not be enough of an incentive for needy kids to go to college. Instead, the pool of players is more likely to live up to the clumsy stereotypes of American soccer as a game for wealthy suburbanites.

The NCAA also has loose substitution rules, a departure from the standard rules of allowing only a few substitutions through the game. A talented player can find waves of tough guys taking turns hacking at his ankles. Some of them find it difficult to lose these habits upon making the pro ranks, giving MLS a sad reputation as a “physical” league rather than a skillful one.

But as long as MLS remains “physical,” a tag reinforced by some coaches’ tendency to recruit foreign players who can match the Americans foul-for-foul, the college game is good preparation.

“I didn’t come from a very physical style of soccer,” Colorado forward and Harvard grad Andre Akpan says. “That was something I got used to in college soccer.”

Akpan is part of a disappearing group of players who excel in international youth play — in his case, a stellar run with the U.S. Under-20 team in 2007 — and spend four years in college. Many of those players are tempted by — if not pushed toward — the pro ranks of MLS or Europe.

MLS is still playing nice — just about — with college soccer. All MLS teams are now required to have a youth academy, a majority of them free to play in, but a vast majority of those players will still go on to play college soccer. Most clubs are careful to ensure college eligibility is not ruined for players with the NCAA’s byzantine rules in mind — though importantly, thanks to a rule change earlier this year, MLS clubs now have first option on players from their academies when they leave college to play in MLS.

This is an important balancing issue for American soccer. The player development systems elsewhere may be vaunted for their production of players — but how about for the production of, well, people?  Nine out of ten talented youth players in most countries of the world end up putting all their eggs in one basket, in the hope of turning professional at 16, and end up at a dead end. Education is often, if not always, an afterthought. In England, for example, Watford were recently touted as an outstanding exceptional model for their focus on school and sports:

Watford have gone even further. Cox says: “Like all clubs we wanted to increase the contact time with the kids but we decided to go about it in the opposite way to most: not to get them out of school, but to put them into one.”

Three years ago, they offered 34 young players places in the local secondary school in Harefield, which, driven by the former Olympic figure skater Haig Oundjian, a governor at the school and at the time a director of Watford, was being reinvented as a comprehensive academy with a focus on sport. So unlike Dutch clubs or residential programmes for young footballers such as France’s acclaimed Clairefontaine model, Watford have integrated their academy players into a mainstream school, securing more time with their charges while saving on cost and preserving a healthy sense of normality among aspiring footballers.

Cox says: “We pick the children up at around 7am and they then do all the normal subjects but also have scheduled coaching throughout the day – at times when they are fresh – then we drop them home at 7pm. We get to do about 15 hours of football with them a week, up to three times more than most other clubs in this country.

“And not only do kids not have to sacrifice their education, we find that they actually perform better in the classroom as well as on the pitch because the environment is more stimulating and they are more driven in everything – they know if they are not doing their best in the classroom we can take away the privilege of training. We have 50 kids here now – before, they might have been in 50 different schools and we would have had no idea what they were doing for 95% of their time. Here we can take more responsibility for their development, both as players and as people.”

Most Americans at MLS youth academies keep enough focus on school as almost all want to have the grades to be able to go to college: for now, anyway.

Andrew Guest made an eloquent defense of the important of American college soccer to people and communities, including for the development of the game here in a broader perspective than solely churning out talented youngsters, on these pages last year.

All this is aside from the ultimate point of college soccer—to promote the game as part of an education that produces the citizens who may one day be leaders in their communities.  Of course that point is not always adhered to as college sports struggle with the tensions between the business of elite sports and the values of education—I have many concerns about issues of access to college and I worry about many of college sports administrative policies.  Further, in defending college soccer I do not want to suggest it should be the only option for youth players.

At the same time, however, one of my biggest concerns with dismissing college soccer in favor of increased professionalization is the social implications of creating a youth system that is focused on finding a few great soccer talents at the human cost of thousands of others.  If we continue pushing for a system that forces people to specialize at earlier and earlier ages, both in terms of sports and in terms of education, we will likely have more success identifying 18 players for a World Cup team sheet while simultaneously creating a generation of individuals who devoted their adolescence to soccer at the expense of the many other potential contributions to their communities.  The things we think we want to do at 15 are often very different from what we think we want to do when we are 22.

I must admit to having a vested stake in this issue: I played college soccer, coached college soccer in graduate school, and work at a University where soccer is the most popular sport.  As a general rule, I think colleges are good things.  I also had the opportunity to play with University affiliated teams on two other continents (when studying abroad in Ireland and when on a Peace Corps stint in Malawi), so I know well that American college sports are an odd breed in global perspective.  American college sports make sense to Americans, and make very little sense to anyone else.  But it is partially for that reason that I think it worth considering college soccer as part of the solution rather than as part of the problem.

In much contemporary discussion about growing American soccer there is a recognition that our system needs to do a better job of gaining acceptance and interest beyond niche groups of hardcore fans.  Creating professionalized youth systems for elite 15 year olds will not do that, but college soccer might help. One of the best things about my own college soccer experience was how at a small liberal-arts college in rural Ohio we managed to build community around soccer.  Our American football team was no good, the soccer team was very good (by the relative standards of NCAA Division III), and on Saturdays in the Fall the whole school and town turned out for our games—bringing picnics, throwing Frisbees, mingling, cheering, and loving soccer.

Years later I ran into a classmate who had grown up as many Americans do with no interest in soccer.  Now living in Boston, she told me that some of her fondest memories of college consisted of those Saturday soccer games—to this day when the leaves turn color and sunshine comes with the cool bite of Fall in New England, her first thought is “it’s a great day for soccer.”  In the United States that thought, made possible by college soccer, is all too rare.

Could we, then, find ways to improve college soccer’s value to the sport and youth development, rather than cutting it out entirely?

Henry Winter put it at number one on his ten point plan “to save English football” following the World Cup:

1. Build Burton. For the £50 million-plus that the Football Association has spent on England managers in compensation, wages and pay-offs since 2000, the National Football Centre could have been up and running and nurturing home-grown managers, ensuring the FA did not automatically have to look overseas. This university of football should finally be open by 2012, allowing England to adopt a more intelligent approach to developing players and coaches, and focusing on conditioning, preventing injuries and sports science. It will be the home of all the national age-group teams, fostering more of a Team England philosophy and continuity between sides.

Club England Managing Director Adrian Bevington called the centre, to be known as St George’s Park, “England’s university of football”.

Trevor Brooking, the Football Association’s head of youth development, said “St George’s Park will be something to be proud of – a symbol of national pride and hope for the future.”

The centre is today facing a legal challenge from local residents, causing a stir as journalists like Henry Winter pronounce England’s World Cup woes should override any concerns. As he put it on Twitter: “worldcup woes proved need for National Football Centre. Local concern over 28 new homes or national fear for #ENG? Easy. NFC must be built”. In fact, the Telgraph’s leading football writer fired off four increasingly hysterical tweets about the need for the centre, as suddenly it became the cure to childhood obesity, to the economy, to the revitilisation of the region and more:

“So much at stake with Burton. NFC would help #ENG, would help tackle schoolkid obesity, would help economy. 28 new houses small price to pay”

“Government says it wants a strong #ENG so Whitehall must help FA and E Staffs council in dismissing planning complaint over NFC”

“Burton area lacks great landmarks. So it would be sad if a few individuals ruined area’s chance to be site of world-renowned Home of England”

“Burton area needs investment in construction & jobs. At a time of economic crisis, National Football Centre will help 1000s in the region”

The National Football Centre was first supposed to open in 2003. At best, it will now open in 2012. The failure of the FA to get it opened since then and the unsurprising failure of England to win the World Cup in the period sense has made the non-existence of the Centre a symbol of English football’s problems, and the need for it to exist deemed as imperative.

But what if the NFC wouldn’t actually do much for the development of young players? Rob Freeman at Two Hundred Percent argues that its impact on producing better talent would be minimal, because it would only take in the already identified elite national team players from the age group of U-16 and up:

If the NFC opened it’s doors today, the youngest player who would get the benefit would be probably be fourteen year old Sheffield United goalkeeper George Willis, Manchester City midfielder Shay Facey would be the only other player born as recently as 1995 who would get any access to it. The NFC is for the England squads from the national side down to U16 level. The suggestion is that Burton would become the equivalent of the Clairefontaine Academy in France, however Clairefontaine is not a national academy. It’s one of eight regional one, and in twenty years, it has produced ten French Internationals (as well as three full Internationals for other countries), but these include Hatem Ben Arfa, Jimmy Briand, Philippe Christanval and Jerome Rothen. Rather than group all their talent into one place, the French Football Federation spread it around. Fabio Capello has suggested that the NFC is needed as an equivalent of the Italian Coverciano, but the Coverciano doesn’t produce players, as the FA are claiming that the NFC will do.

As Brooking mentioned above, this is a university, a finishing school at the elite level, not the key to developing talent at the critical younger ages nationwide. There’s a strong suspicion that this is more about spending a lot of money to build a nice training facility for the England national teams than for the purpose of youth development, something Sam Wallace also pointed to in the Independent this January:

The site for Burton, where the England team will be staying once the project is complete, is 105 miles from Wembley. Someone tell Shaun Wright-Phillips to make sure his PSP is fully charged because that could be one long journey. Either that or shall we start playing England internationals at the Pirelli Stadium?

There will be a sports science department at Burton and there is a hope that as well as making it available to the six junior England teams from the Under-16s to the Under-21s (those hotel staff won’t know what’s hit them), it will be a teaching base for coaches. The Italians have Coverciano, a kind of university for football managers, and the FA want Burton to be something similar.

Otherwise, all Burton seems to be is a rather inconveniently located base for the England team that is used when the national team happens to be playing at Wembley, on average about six times a year. The Coverciano idea is a nice one, but is it worth the money and pain that has been poured into Burton from the start?

The English FA is pretty much alone among national football associations in owning its own stadium – and given the debt on Wembley “owning” might not be the right word. The historical connection with Wembley meant it was right that the FA built the £757m stadium, however painful it was at times. To build a six-times-a-year training ground as well seems excessive.

Fabio Capello says that Burton is essential and what Capello wants he tends to get. But just because Capello studied at Coverciano and just because he finds the Grove hotel a little too lacking in privacy at times (HM Wormwood Scrubs is more his idea of an ideal team base camp) does not mean he is right. Chances are that Capello will not be in the job when Burton is finished.

Italy’s Coverciano facility, like France’s Clairefontaine, has become mythically important as a model. This breathless BBC News article on Coverciano makes it sounds like Verrocchio’s workshop:

Coverciano is about more than sporting facilities. There is the museum, where an array of memorabilia celebrating Italy’s footballing heritage is displayed in a permanent exhibition, and a lecture theatre where seminars and courses on the arts of football coaching are conducted.

Nearby is the library, where books and periodicals dedicated to football are stored, and where visitors are given an insight into the intellectual development of some of the sport’s most famous names.

Vanni pulls out a dusty pamphlet entitled ‘Il Futuro del Calcio: Piu Dinamicita’ – ‘The Future of Football: More Dynamism’. It is the original thesis that Carlo Ancelotti wrote when studying for his Master Course here in 1997, full of charts, diagrams and conclusions.

Next he shows us Fabio Capello’s study of “The Zonal Marking System”, a piece of research he completed in 1984 when a student here. Next is Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini’s 2001 pamphlet, “Il Trequartista”, dedicated to examining the role of the attacking midfielder.

Coverciano is so much more than simply a base for Italian football. It represents a belief; that the art and science of football is a discipline that can be studied and mastered, and then shared for the benefit of the whole sport.

Its role is not to develop young players, the Serie A clubs have responsibility for doing that. Rather, it is to provide the ideal conditions in which coaches of every age-group can come to learn their craft, go back to their clubs and aid the development of the game’s players.

Lovely. And sure, it’d be nice to have such a place that sets a national tone for coaching beyond mud and spittle. But of more urgency than that, and perhaps worth spending some of the £100 million that St George’s Park will cost, are these alarming raw numbers from Owen Gibson this June:

New Uefa data shows that there are only 2,769 English coaches holding Uefa’s B, A and Pro badges, its top qualifications. Spain has produced 23,995, Italy 29,420, Germany 34,970 and France 17,588.

Between them those four nations have provided eight of the 12 finalists at all the World Cups and European Championships since 1998. England, meanwhile, have not appeared in a tournament final in 44 years.

There are 2.25 million players in England and only one Uefa-qualified coach for every 812 people playing the game. Spain, the World Cup favourites, have 408,134 players, giving a ratio of 1:17. In Italy, the world champions, the ratio is 1:48, in France it is 1:96, Germany 1:150 and even Greece, the Euro 2004 winners, have only 180,000 registered players for their 1,100 coaches, a ratio of 1:135.

Where are the questions about how coaching nationwide in England is going to be developed to improve these raw numbers? The system as it stands clearly has something very wrong with it, as this piece by Les Reid (a former FA Technical Director) indicates, looking at the “Approved Centres” that coaches train at. It seems to be a system that is more about keeping itself in business than anything else:

The counties or licensed, approved coach education centres governed by a company called First 4 sport deliver coaching courses from level 1 to level three. They employ (at the candidates expense) Tutors, Assessors, Internal and external verifiers who monitor the courses. The majority of these do not coach players or teams or have not done so for many years. It is financially more rewarding not to. Other than courses for professional players, delivered by the PFA, all of these courses are delivered by part time tutors. It is these courses that aspiring Academy Coaches have to attend before being allowed to take the Youth Coaches Awards or Academy Directors License.

While St George’s Park might be a worthwhile facility for English football to have, the danger for England is that the overwhelming focus and funding expended on this diverts the conversation from the need to do more than build a finishing school for a small number of elite coaches and players already at national team level.

You might also be surprised to learn the tournament dates back to 1948, and it is, as far as I can tell, the longest-running junior competition in world soccer (CONCACAF’s equivalent U-20 competition began play in 1962; the AFC U-19 tournament began in 1959; the South American Youth Championship was founded in 1954; the African Youth Championship began in 1979, and Oceania’s OFC equivalent started in 1974).

Indeed, it even pre-dates the existence of UEFA (Europe’s governing body was created in 1954) and was originally organised by FIFA, hence its original name, the FIFA junior tournament. That first tournament in 1948 took place in London, with 8 teams taking place. The final was held at White Hart Lane, England defeating the Netherlands 3-2. Indeed, England have been extraordinarily successful in the tournament, perhaps suggesting junior performance is no guarantee of senior success, holding the record with 9 wins (though none since the class of 1993, a team that included Scholes, Gary Neville and Sol Campbell; suggesting in reverse that a lack of junior success is now a predictor of future failure).

England did not defend their title successfully the next year, though: they “lost” to Northern Ireland in the first round following a 3-3 draw in an era that pre-dated penalty kicks following a coin toss. France won the competition held in the Netherlands, beating the Dutch 4-1 at the final in Rotterdam.

England soon embarked on a remarkable run of success at youth level, winning the tournament five times in the course of a decade from 1963 to 1973.  But few household names emerged from these teams, Trevor Francis (1973) and Harry Redknapp (1964) rare exceptions. England’s 1975 champion team, though, was packed with talent that would light up English football in the 1980s: the final XI that defeated Finland in the final that year contained Ray Wilkins, Brian Robson, Glenn Hoddle and John Barnes.

Indeed, the champions over the next few years did predict senior success in the 1980s well: the Soviet Union won in 1976 and 1978, with the senior team then reaching the final of the 1988 European Championship; Belgium won at home in Brussels in 1977, and finished in fourth place at the 1986 World Cup; Yugoslavia were champions in 1979, and developed a fantastic team that reached the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup; England were winners again in 1980, and the senior side reached the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup.

The next year, in 1981, UEFA made another change to the competition, making it a U-18 event and renaming it the European Under 18 Football Championship, because in 1978, UEFA had created the UEFA European Under 21 Football Championship, and wanted more variance in the age levels between its junior competitions.

Future success at senior level was again predicted that year with West Germany (1990 World Cup winners) triumphing, and the strong state health of Scottish youth development at that stage was indicated the next year with their victory at the final that year in Helsinki, with future Celtic and Scotland midfield stalwart Paul McStay starring.

UEFA tinkered further with the tournament from 1984 to 1994 as it was briefly made biennial before returning to its usual annual format in 1993. France were the most successful side in the 1990s, ahead of their 1998 World Cup win.

And UEFA made a further change in 2002 that brings us up-to-date in the tournament’s format, again making it a U-19 competition, perhaps because of the growing prominence of the FIFA U-20 World Cup, with the tournament serving as the qualifier for that global event.

Its first staging as a U-19 event again saw Spain win, eight years ahead of global glory, with Fernando Torres the top scorer with four goals, and one Andrés Iniesta their creative force in midfield.  As an aside, Dean Ashton scored three times in the competition: eight years later, one wonders if England’s World Cup fortunes might have been different had he been in South Africa as Rooney’s foil. That is the intrigue of these youth competitions: what injuries, what fortune, what acts of chance will determine these players’ futures, with the world at their feet at these times?

Italy won in 2003 at a tournament rather remarkably staged in Liechtenstein, Sampdoria’s Giampaolo Pazzini — who made his debut for Italy’s senior team last year — scoring in the final.

Perhaps the tournament is a predictor of forthcoming senior success: if you were investing in futures on football, you’d want to take a close look at this competition to see the future of senior national teams based on recent history. The most successful two teams in it in the past two decades have been Spain and France with five titles each: both, of course, have in the past 12 years held both the European Championship and World Cup aloft.

Interestingly, in that regard, neither has reached the final in the past two years: in 2008, Germany defeated Italy 3-1, and in 2009, Ukraine won the competition for the first time, defeating England in the final. Keep your eye on Dmytro Korkishko, then, folks:

Perhaps the more interesting result came in the second game: North Korea defeated Brazil 1-0, a result you might think is quite an upset. But, really, it’s not. North Korea reached the final of the previous U-20Women’s World Cup, losing 2-1 to the United States in the final, and won the previous edition of the competition in 2006, as well as the 2008 FIFA U-17 Women’s  World Cup.

It’s worth taking a brief look at the history of this tournament since it began in 2002 to get a sense of what we can expect in Germany this month.

The tournament has been a bright spot in women’s soccer, since the first final in Edmonton, Canada drew a crowd of 47,784 at Commonwealth Stadium to see the home team go down 1-0 to the United States in September 2002. That crowd was no aberration: much like the 1999 Women’s World Cup that saw the US draw 90,185 fans to the Rose Bowl for the final, the home crowd got behind their team, 37,194 watching the semi-final as Canada defeated Brazil on penalty kicks, Chrstine Sinclair playing a starring role and a young Marta on view in Commonwealth Stadium.

The decision to stage games at Commonwealth Stadium, a vast venue in Edmonton built for the 1978 Commonwealth Games, was controversial: FIFA officials, visiting in 2001, had warned games would be played to an empty venue. But though some games were poorly attended, Commonwealth Stadium averaged a healthy 19,841 per game. Considerably smaller crowds attended smaller venues in Vancouver and Victoria, but an overall average of 11,351 per game for the duration of the competition far surpassed FIFA’s expectations.

That, again, was an echo of 1999: FIFA had wanted the Women’s World Cup games to be played at small venues on the east coast of the United States, but the American organising committee, gutsily led by Marla Messing, went for huge stadia and the decision paid-off: it felt like a big event, and became a big event.

Similarly, that 2002 U-19 Women’s World Cup in Canada, featuring 12 teams, received extensive local media coverage  according to FIFA’s technical report. The final was watched by almost 1 million viewers on Canada’s Sportsnet station. Not unimportantly, the tournament also provided vital experience for young referees: 12 female referees and 12 assistants from 20 countries officiated the 26 games, most of them making their debuts in official FIFA competition. Only two red cards were issued in the entire tournament.

The next U-19 Women’s World Cup was held in Thailand in November 2004, won by Germany, adding that title to their Women’s World Cup win the previous year in the United States, and pre-cursing their second senior world title in 2007. As in 2002, attendance was very strong for the host nation’s games, with 40,000 attending Thailand’s opener: though unfortunately, they faced Germany, and were thumped 6-0. Thailand was clearly not ready for this level of competition, losing their next game 7-0 to Canada, and their tournament ending with a 5-0 defeat to Australia. This is surely the worst performance by a host nation in the history of FIFA competition. Still, the crowds for the latter stages were decent, with 23,000 attending the final, Germany beating China 2-0. Brazil were eliminated at the semi-final stage, but Marta still took home the Golden Ball for best player. An overall average attendance of 11,089 was a positive.

The 2006 U-20 Women’s World Cup saw it move to a third different continent, hosted by Russia, and it would feature a surprising winner, with North Korea taking their first FIFA trophy: though perhaps that shouldn’t be considered a surprise, as the North Koreans had been dominating Asian competition in recent years. Indeed, the rapid development of women’s soccer in Asia as a whole, seen in the history of the U-20 tournament, is a remarkable story.

The age limit for the World Cup had been raised by one year to make it a U-20 event, with FIFA also instituting a U-17 FIFA Women’s World Cup, beginning play in 2008. The tournament was also expanded to 16 teams. Interestingly, the average age of players was almost exactly the same as in 2004 (18 years and 11 months), despite the new age limit. The tournament was a bit of a disappointment; European teams were weakened by it nearly coinciding with the UEFA U-19 competition, and attendance was extremely poor, barely reaching four figures for most games.

The hosts, Russia, went out at the quarter-final stage to China. The final between China and North Korea, the first between two Asian teams in global FIFA competition, was unfortunately a mudbath, played in pelting rain. According to the official report, the players were “enveloped in mud”, but “the Koreans, however, were not deterred by the conditions in the slightest and they attacked relentlessly with great determination.” The Koreans crushed the Chinese 5-0 in front of 8,500 soaked spectators. Curiously, no North Korean was named in FIFA’s top three players of the tournament, China’s Xiaoxu Ma taking the Golden Ball. Overall, with an average crowd of just 1,644 per game and a total of 52,630 spectators for the entire tournament, the U-20 Women’s World Cup had taken something of a step back.

Chile, 2008 U-20 Women’s World Cup host, presented a much greater success: the tournament saw more goals than ever (3.5 goals per game), and a decent enough average of 6,749 fans per game. More importantly, the host nation used the tournament as a springboard for women’s soccer in Chile, now in strong shape (one of its clubs, Everton, came fourth in the first Women’s Copa Libertadores staged in 2009). The Chilean government, then led by Michelle Bachelet, affirmed its support of the competition by rebuilding four stadia for the event and by supporting a new league championship for women. Unfortunately, results did not go well for Chile, losing all three games and exiting at the group stage, but the seeds were sown for future growth: surely the point of the competition existing. The United States won the U-20 Women’s World Cup for the first time since 2002, defeating the defending champions North Korea in the final 2-1 in front of 12,000 fans.

That brings us to 2010, and the tournament in Germany, which has a particular importance with the senior Women’s World Cup to be held there in 2011. Strong crowds and interest in this U-20 competition could presage what should be the most successful Women’s World Cup in terms of global media attention and attendance since USA ’99, given the strength of women’s soccer in Germany and the lack of any major competing global competitions next summer.

One should be wary of generalising too much from a sample of five games, but Germany’s tremendously successful World Cup so far and the quality of its young players, with its youngest-ever team at the tournament averaging out at 24.7 years-old, has sparked plenty of understandable interest in its youth development system.

That system seems to be the product of far-sighted planning based on disappointment with the quality of players the country was producing at the turn of the millennium, coupled with the priorities of the elite professional structure reflecting a recognition of the benefit of development for the national team along with a strong economic incentive to prioritise young domestic talent.

We can draw these conclusions from two articles in the past few days, by Jamie Jackson today in the Observer and by long-time translator of the German game for an English-language audience, Raphael Honigstein at Sports Illustrated.

Between them, we get a picture of German soccer at a crossroads in the late 1990s. The World Cup winning team of 1990 and the fruits of reunification produced surprisingly diminishing returns as the decade wore on: disappointment at USA ’94 was followed by success at Euro’96 in England and a quarter-final exit at the ’98 World Cup. A very rare group stage exit at the 2000 European Championships was the final spark for a rethink on the structure of youth development, as the proportion of foreigners had risen massively in the Bundesliga during the 1990s, Honigstein tells us:

Below the radar. . .something strange and disconcerting was happening: Germany was running out of decent players. The influx from GDR-trained professionals that was supposed to make “Germany unbeatable for years to come” (according to Franz Beckenbauer after winning the World Cup in 1990) had dried up along with the funding for the specialized sports schools where they had been drilled from a very young age. In the Bundesliga, newly rich clubs awash with TV money had gone on a spending spree, doubling the number of foreigners from 17 percent (1992) to 34 percent (1997) in five years.

Desperate for strikers in particular, national manager Vogts ensured that South-African born Sean Dundee, a Karlsruher FC player without any German background, was fast-tracked for German citizenship. Dundee received his passport in January 1997 but never played for Germany after picking up an injury before his first scheduled game, a friendly against Israel, and losing his form soon after.

Vogts’ successor, Erich Ribbeck, equally desperate, approached another Bundesliga import, Brazilian forward Paulo Rink (Leverkusen). Rink, it turned out, had German grandparents and was quickly introduced to the national team. He picked up 13 caps from 1998 to 2000.

The cases of Rink and Dundee, both unprecedented in German football since the war, demonstrated that something was very wrong. The disappointing quarterfinal exit against Croatia at the 1998 World Cup then made it plain to see: not enough talent was coming through. In the Bundesliga, the percentage of foreigners had risen again, to 50 percent by the time the season kicked off in 2000.

At this point, Honigstein explains, a new structure in Germany’s youth development system was implemented, with 121 national talent centers built for 10-17 year-olds, emphasising technical skills, with full-time coaches at a cost of $15.6 million over five years. Meanwhile, all professional clubs in Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 were required to build youth academies by the German Football Association.

Jackson explains the consequences, quoting Christian Seifert, the Bundesliga’s CEO:

Seifert said that the national team’s stark improvement was a direct result of the overhaul of Germany’s academy system, with all 36 clubs in the two Bundesliga divisions now obliged to operate centrally regulated academies before being given a licence to play in the league. Of the 23-man national squad now in South Africa, 19 came from Bundesliga academies, with the other four from Bundesliga 2 academies.

The most significant change, said Seifert, was insisting that in these new academies at least 12 players in each intake have to be eligible to play for Germany.

“That was the key difference,” he said. “Fifa’s 6+5 rule means only that players must have grown up in the club. For example, Cesc Fabregas was developed at Arsenal, but is Spanish. In Germany, our academies must have 12 in each group able to play for Germany.”

Since that restructuring, the proportion of Germany-qualified players in the Bundesliga has changed significantly.

“In 2003-4 we had 44% from foreign countries,” Seifert said. “Right now it is only 38%. So 62% are able to play for the national team.” In England it is the other way around, with an approximate 60/40 split of foreigners and nationals.

Interestingly, one key cornerstone of German professional soccer and one key economic development provided the underpinnings for this system to be successfully implemented.

Firstly, as Honigstein puts it, economic necessity forced a focus on cheaper domestic talent:

The Kirch TV conglomerate that had bankrolled the Bundesliga boom since the early ’90s collapsed in 2002, leaving the clubs in severe financial difficulties. Faced with huge, unsustainable wage bills, they found that the easiest way to cope was to release all the well-paid but fairly mediocre foreigners on their books and replace them with young, much cheaper recruits from their own youth teams.

Secondly, unlike in England, a unified approach and the requirement that clubs are majority owned by local supporters made it easier to put in place a focus on domestic youth development, according to Jackson:

“In 2003-4 we had 44% from foreign countries,” Seifert said. “Right now it is only 38%. So 62% are able to play for the national team.” In England it is the other way around, with an approximate 60/40 split of foreigners and nationals.

Seifert emphasised that essential to the system’s smooth operation was the unity between clubs and the German FA, achieved in part through the stipulation that no single entity can own more than 49% of a Bundesliga club.

“This way you don’t have a foreign owner who doesn’t really care for the national teams,” said Seifert. “The clubs have a very strong relationship with the FA: we are all engaged in discussions [about youth development].”

That is in stark contrast to England, where infighting between the FA, the Premier League and the Football League resulted in the Professional Game Youth Development Group being disbanded last year after just a year of operation. Since then, no single body has been in control of youth development in England. Instead, the power has rested with Premier League clubs.

Germany’s system emphasises development in elite centres from a slightly older age, and focuses on small-sided skills at younger ages. Via Honigstein: “We start with the U-9s. They play four-a-side, on small pitches, to encourage individual skills,” said Thomas Albeck, head of youth development at Stuttgart. “We then add players every year, only the U-13s are playing with full teams.”

There are many lessons here to consider for countries around the world struggling with trying to work out the best way to develop young domestic talent.

One sentence in there might prompt Paul Gardner to froth at the mouth, though: “The tempo and the level of training is a lot higher than normal [youth] training sessions,” says Urbano Castro Jr., United’s youth development coordinator. “We’ve had guys that came out from top-notch regional teams and they’ll step into our training and they’ll kind of struggle just because it’s faster, more physical.”

[Emphasis mine in the hopes of baiting Gardner, should he happen to read this blog.]

England’s European Under-17 Championships victory owed much to manager John Peacock’s championing of a short-passing, tactically aware brand of football

If imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, Spanish egos should be boosted by yesterday’s narrow defeat to England in the final of the European Under-17 Championships. The Football Association has used Spain as a key role model in a bid to overhaul youth development across England. With long-ball tactics now kicked firmly into the philosophical long grass, there is a greatly increased emphasis on technical excellence and possession football.

Yesterday’s technically adroit 2-1 triumph against Spain in Liechtenstein not only meant that John Peacock’s teenagers became the first England men’s team to lift a European trophy for 17 years but vindicated a policy designed to raise standards and attract silverware.

Taylor goes on to discuss the Football Association’s new coaching manual, The Future Game, an apparently “radical” document:

Recognising the need to raise the technical bar, Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development and Peacock, who aside from his U-17 duties is the organisation’s head of coaching, have fought fierce internal battles to raise the revenue necessary to fund the implementation of their new philosophy. The central tenets of the FA’s radical new coaching programme for young English players are set out in the recently published 275-page document The Future Game but living, breathing, short-passing, tactically aware manifestation of this earnest treatise’s importance arrived in Liechtenstein.

I haven’t seen this document, though I would like to. But Martin Samuel at the Daily Mail is unimpressed by one apparently missing aspect to it, dismayed that it does not discuss reducing the size of the pitch for younger players to be more appropriate to their size and physical capabilities:

‘Is there anything in there on pitch sizes?’ I asked the gentleman at the FA. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘That’s a rather abstract concept.’

But it isn’t. It becomes finite, the size of the pitch, if Brooking makes it so. Were he to instruct that it should be made relative to the size of the players, instantly we would have a better quality, more technical game.

Ever notice the size of the pitches kids mark for themselves in the playground or the park? Not big, are they? Kids don’t want some gruesome slog against the odds; they want a quick, fun game with lots of action and lots of goals. The faster the better, in fact: what do you think rush goalie is all about?

What is an entirely abstract concept is the vague notion, advanced by Brooking and others, that we should play like Holland or Brazil, France or Spain, Germany, Argentina, or whoever wins the World Cup this summer.

I’ve heard a million of these theories and they founder at the same stage: teach the Ajax method as much as you like, but if on Sunday the wind is against you, the pitch is sodden and the halfway line is 50 yards away, your 11-year-old goalkeeper will barely be able to get the ball out of his own penalty area, so the opposing forwards will push up and camp on the edge of the box, the wide players will close down your full backs and you will be trapped.

Samuel sounds like a man with a bee rattling around rather too loudly in this bonnet, even though he does have a point. But notably, he doesn’t discuss what is actually in The Future Game, and whether it is actually full of radical and useful ideas or not. Nor does Louise Taylor, and I’m guessing neither of them have actually read it. I’d sure like to see a copy of it end up in the hands of a football journalist incisive enough to give it a real critique.

Big Story

On Saturday at Toyota Park, I watched parts of a game between the Chicago Fire Academy and the US Youth National U-17 Team, a game won by the Fire 4-0. To be fair, many of the Fire’s players were a year older than their opponents (though the Fire were also missing a couple of their best players, Technical Director Frank Klopas mentioned to me), but it was still an impressive showing.

Remember the name Victor Pineda (who also plays for the USYNT), Fire fans: the talented 17 year-old looked awfully good in the glimpses I saw, and MLS rule changes announced last week make it much more likely a player like him could be signed to the first team squad sooner rather than later.

MLS roster sizes were increased from 24 to 26, with two more slots added solely for homegrown players from their youth academies. Clubs now receive three-quarters of the transfer fee for a homegrown player who goes abroad, an increase from two-thirds, and something that will, for example, be welcomed by a club like Vancouver who are about to join MLS with one of the continent’s leading youth academies.

The changes to the homegrown players rule considerably grows the incentives for clubs to invest in their development academies, building on MLS’ Home Grown Player Initiative founded in 2007, which now means every single club has an Academy team in US Soccer’s Development Academy, itself also founded in 2007 with a significant financial investment by US Soccer. The Development academy requires the participating clubs, 77 in total in 2009-10, to hold three training sessions per week, and limits the number of games the teams can play, to encourage a focus on the improvement of skills rather than maximising game play.

The Fire now have a free Academy that means kids from poorer backgrounds can get top-level training without having to pay the enormous fees typical of elite clubs in the United States in the past. They have a youth system that runs all the way from U-6 to the first team. And they have a very talented crop of players from a diverse variety of backgrounds.

The Fire are not doing this solely out of the goodness of their hearts. It is an investment in developing local talent that will not only improve the first team, but will eventually — they hope — make the club money through the transfer fees received in the future. MLS is going the right way in rewarding clubs for their substantial investments in youth development both on the field and off it. That’s the only way it can work.

Some don’t believe there is a need for this structure at all, as one of Paul Gardner’s rambling recent essays demonstrated (he’s not calling for ‘anarchy’…but it’s not at all clear what he is calling for).  But for me, watching local kids of all backgrounds from all parts of the Chicagoland area wearing the Fire badge beating the US Youth National Team on the main field at Toyota Park suggests to me a bright future for youth development in this country and its necessary connection to the elite professional league here.

Quick Hits

• Steve Davis has a theory about “the steaming pile of pooh at DC United“, deserving to be read for the title alone.
• AC St Louis get off to an inauspicious start as they start their first league game with ten men, while a player fetches his passport from the hotel.
• For sale: Liverpool.

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor Tom Dunmore @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

With the good news that the MLS season will indeed start this week, I’d like to offer my esoteric version of a season preview: where exactly does the current crop of elite American players come from?  Who are the boys (Luis Gil at 16 is—as far as I know—the youngest player in the league) and men (Pat Onstad at 42 is—as far as I can tell—the oldest) we’ll watch this season?

My questions are mostly born out of an amateur interest in cultural geography and a general curiosity about youth development; knowing where players comes from provides an important indicator of how the game works in different places.  Ironically, the globalization and commercialization of the modern professional game often obscures the importance of place—while pro teams symbolically represent cities and regions, very few of their players actually come from those locales.  It seems to me, for example, that knowing Real Salt Lake won last year’s MLS Cup tells me much less about soccer in Utah than the fact that the state, with a population of 2.5 million, has produced only one current MLS player (Justin Braun of Chivas USA grew up in Salt Lake City).

I was also provoked by an interview published here on Pitch Invasion a few months ago between Peter Wilt and ‘St. Louis based soccer executive Jeff Cooper.’  Wilt asked “Is the ‘St. Louis as a soccer hotbed’ notion a myth associated with the history of the sport’s support there or is St. Louis truly still ahead of the rest of the Midwest, and nation, in soccer interest and development?” and Cooper replied: “Per capita, St. Louis still produces more elite level players than any market.”  That, as we say in the social science business, is an empirical question.

Of course, if you try to parse Cooper’s statement it gets tricky: what exactly qualifies as an “elite level player” and how do you define a “market” (and, I might add, has hyper-capitalism advanced to the point that we now live in “markets” rather than “cities”)?  But I gave it a stab—and by my calculations Cooper is not quite right.  Though, in fairness, he’s also not far off.

So in the spirit of Soccernomics (which tried to statistically analyze soccer success internationally through cross-national comparisons), The Best Eleven (which has had some excellent maps of where MLS players come from), Kenn Tomasch (who has done some interesting comparisons of things such as the percentage of American born players in MLS vs the old NASL), and others I’m probably not aware of, I present and interpret a poor-man’s geographic analysis of the current MLS (and US Men’s National Team—USMNT) players based on where they spent their formative years.

What counts as “formative years?”  Honestly, that is something we could debate.  I went with where players spent their high school years.  Yes, I know most elite players don’t really bother with high school anymore.  But it seems to me as though those years (while focused on club soccer) are still key developmentally since they are when most players have to finally decide if they are going to commit to the game or move on to real life.

That also means that I included MLS players who are not necessarily US nationals, but who spent their adolescence in a US city.  So, for an example from down the street, I counted both Danny Mwanga and Alex Nimo as Oregonians—even though Mwanga emigrated from Congo at age 14 and Nimo’s family emigrated from Liberia by way of Ghana at age 9.  I was honestly surprised by how many ‘international’ players in MLS actually spent significant portions of their youth in the US (other prominent examples include Toronto FC’s ‘Swiss’ goalkeeper Stefan Frei, who went to high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, Philadelphia’s ‘Brazilian’ midfielder Stefani Miglioranzi, who spent his adolescence in New York, and New England’s ‘Grenadian’ midfielder Shalrie Joseph, who spent his teen years in Brooklyn).  In fact, one of the main inferences I took away from looking at everything was that some degree of immigrant presence is probably a significant part of success in American soccer—both for immigrants and for non-immigrants challenged to compete.

Otherwise, my main method involved way too much (and, sadly, also way too little) time on Wikipedia and MLSnet.  I also learned that I was not the first to indulge this strange curiosity, as there is a whole Wikipedia page devoted to the home states of MLS, USL, Yanks Abroad, etc.—but however lovingly it must have been put together, that particular page now seems several years out of date.  So I mostly used the more current general list of MLS players and USMNT players currently in the World Cup picture, and cross-checked for the best information I could find about where they spent adolescence.  I ended up with a spreadsheet of 249 MLS / USMNT ‘American’ players.  I’m sure I got some of the specifics wrong (if I ever had the time and resources to do a more rigorous analysis, I’d jump at the opportunity), but the beauty of statistics is that with large enough numbers the patterns can still be meaningful.  And after putting it all together I’m confident the general picture is about right.

By State

Looking at a state by state comparison, the most obvious conclusion is that California dominates American soccer.  I count 58 players produced by the Golden State, and no other state is even close (Texas is second with 17, Florida is third with 15, and Illinois fourth with 13).  Further, most of those Californians are actually from the greater LA or greater San Diego area (41 by my count)—Cal South as they say in US Youth Soccer.

Of course, California is also the most populous US state (with Texas second, Florida fourth, and Illinois fifth)—so it may actually be more informative to look at players produced by population.  From that angle California’s 58 players from 36.5 million people is still not bad, but other ratios compare favorably:

• Colorado: 9 players, 4.7 million people.
• Oregon: 7 players, 3.7 million people.
• Hawaii: 2 players (Brian Ching and Zach Scott), 1.3 million people.
• Maryland: 8 players, 5.6 million people.
• Missouri: 8 players, 5.8 million people.
• Arizona: 8 players, 6.2 million people.

Then there are the states that don’t seem to be doing so well.  In terms of large states, the most glaring absentee is New York: with around 20 million people the state has produced only 11 players. Of course, there are more players from the New Jersey suburbs that could count as the New York metropolitan area—but even calculated by metropolitan area (which I look at below) New York does not do as well as it should based on population. Why not?  My guesses would be a combination of bad soccer weather, lots of other stuff for a young athlete to do, and maybe a lack of field space in the more populated areas?  But those are just guesses.

It is also interesting to look at the relatively large states (with over a million people) that don’t seem to produce any players—in these cases I’d guess the issue is more about the absence of ‘soccer culture’ than anything else:

• Alabama (pop. 4.6 million)
• South Carolina (pop. 4.3 million)
• Kentucky (pop. 4.2 million)
• Iowa (pop. 3 million)
• Arkansas (pop. 2.8 million)
• Nevada (pop. 2.5 million *though I probably could have counted Hercules Gomez—since he played youth soccer in Las Vegas)
• New Mexico (pop. 2 million)
• Idaho (pop. 1.5 million)
• Nebraska (pop. 1.8 million)
• West Virginia (pop. 1.8 million)

By Metropolitan Area

To get back to Jeff Cooper’s claim that per capita St. Louis “still produces more elite level players than any market,” I looked at players produced by metropolitan areas—and I tended to be liberal in defining a metropolitan area.  So, for example, I grouped Baltimore, Washington DC, and Northern Virginia together even though that may have meant including players developed in very different youth scenes (and, by the way, that greater DC agglomeration has produced 12 current MLS/USMNT players—which is not bad for 8.3 million in population, but not great either).

With that caveat, by my calculations St. Louis is fourth in players produced per capita among US metropolitan areas.  Here they are in order:

1. The greater Denver area (including Colorado Springs) has produced 9 players with about 3 million in population – a rate of about 1 per every 330,000 people.
2. The greater Raleigh / Durham area of North Carolina (which I stretched to include Greenville to put Michael Harrington in the mix) has produced 5 players with only about 1.8 million people – a rate of about 1 per every 370,000 people.
3. The neighboring Greensboro / Winston-Salem area is not far behind—4 players from 1.5 million people means about 1 per 380,000 people.
4. St. Louis has produced 7 players from about 2.9 million people—about 1 per every 410,000.
5. (Actually, Honorable Mention) The Columbus Ohio area has produced 4 players from about 2 million people—about the same rate as the San Diego area (7 players from 3 million people), the Sacramento area (5 players from 2.4 million people), and even greater Los Angeles (34 players from about 17.8 million people) despite a much less amenable climate.

On the other side of the slate, several metropolitan areas struck me as underperforming—these are not exactly in order, but they all seem as though they should produce more players:

• The greater New York area has produced 14 (or so) players, but has about 22 million people (a rate of about 1 per every 1.6 million people).
• The Minneapolis / St. Paul area currently only seems to have one active player two active players who are both non-Minnesota natives (Abdus Ibrahim—who is an Ethiopian immigrant playing for Toronto FC –correction–and Teal Bunbury who is listed as Canadian), despite about 3.5 million in the area.
• By stretching, I could find 2 players from the Detroit area (Michael Holody is from the suburb of Clarkston, but he is a developmental player for Colorado; while Jacob Peterson of Toronto FC is actually from Portage, Michigan—which is only slightly closer to Detroit than Chicago), despite the Detroit metro area having about 5.3 million people.
• I only count 4 players from the Boston area, which has about 7.5 million people (a rate of about 1 per 1.9 million).
• Miami / Fort Lauderdale is not terrible, with 5 players from about 5.5 million people, but considering the weather and the locale I might have expected a bit more (the Tampa area, with about half the population, has also produced 5 players).

As a Canadian side-note, Toronto compares favorably to other North American cities with 9 players out of about 5 million people, but I could only find 1 from Vancouver’s 2.1 million (Pat Onstad playing for Houston).

So what is the moral of the story?  If I were to speculate on a Soccernomics-esque formula for the variables that contribute to American player production my very preliminary analysis would include:

1. Population size.  This is boring and obvious, but it also seems to be the strongest predictor: With more people there are better odds that some will turn out to be good soccer players.
2. Climate.  It’s probably not controversial to speculate that places such as Arizona (8 players) and Georgia (5 players) do better than places such as Michigan (2 players) and Minnesota (1  2 players) for the simple reason that a developing player can get outside all year round.
3. Soccer culture.  This is a fuzzy concept, but I suspect in the US more than other parts of the world there are wide regional differences in attitudes toward the game.  I’d hypothesize that this is why North Carolina (11 players) does better than South Carolina (0 players), and Oregon (7 players) does better than Alabama (0 players).
4. Immigrants.  This is admittedly more speculative, but in looking up current MLS/USMNT player backgrounds I was struck by how many are either first or second generation immigrants.  Charlie Davies is the only player from New Hampshire, which is not exactly a soccer hotbed, so it seems significant that his father is a Gambian immigrant.  Even in southern California, I suspect players such as Sacha Kljestan (whose father emigrated from Bosnia) and Carlos Bocanegra (whose father was born in Mexico, but raised in California) benefitted from exposure to diverse soccer communities.

For me what is most conspicuously absent from the list of variables that seem to matter in American player production is the presence of an MLS team itself.  With the possible exception of Columbus, most MLS cities look pretty average in producing youth players compared with non-MLS cities.  In fact, in some cases it seems that having good college programs in an area may better correlate with player production than having an MLS team: I suspect that relatively small parts of North Carolina produce more players than relatively large MLS cities such as Boston largely because Wake Forest, UNC, NC State, and Duke are viable options for quality soccer.

That may well change over time as MLS youth academies become better developed—but it also may not since American soccer is a persistently odd duck.  So ultimately, in the spirit of a season preview, the lesson here seems to be that in the current American soccer scene Jeff Cooper was right: MLS teams are indeed more representative of “markets” than “cities.”

(Note: there ended up being too many specific locales and names to list each individually—but I now have most of them in my spreadsheet.  So if anyone is curious about other specific places, players, and proportions, feel free to leave a comment with any queries and I will try to respond)