BTL Special Edition: Ideas to Improve American Soccer | Ep. 142

I am Dean Linky. This is Breaking the Line, the EC&L podcast with a special World Cup edition featuring the EC&L president and CEO Christian Laborers and the EC&L vice president and Chief of Staff Doug Fracken. That's right. All things World Cup and all things that come off the World Cup. And we get started right away by turning it over to Mr. Christian Laborers. Thank you very much, Dean, for that introduction to this special first-ever EC&L podcast. Special edition. Special edition off calendar. World Cup edition. So in theory, do it might ever have a special edition every four years, no? Now we should probably do more than every four years, but we felt that at the conclusion of the 2026 World Cup here in America, Mexico and Canada. That also tied very closely to the conclusion of the EC&L 2526 season. It was an appropriate time to talk a little bit, one to wrap up the World Cup in the last couple of games, but then in more depth, Doug, for us to weigh in and talk about some of the chatter, whether it's social media or mainstream media or just generally in the soccer industry about the World Cup and American soccer and where the future of American soccer goes and what youth soccer's role is and where it can improve, but also maybe where there's some other issues and areas for improvement. Yeah, agreed. You want to just put a bow on the World Cup. Talk about that a little bit first. I saw probably about half of the final believe it or not. There was a I had to coach during the World Cup final. There was a tournament game scheduled, which was a little bit disappointing, but Warm Up was spent with the iPad on, so there wasn't really much of a warm up, so everybody could watch the game. That seems kind of short-sighted to have a game during the World Cup final. Nobody was happy about it. Gosh, we saw the last 30 minutes, what day overwhelming performance in that game and what a contrast to the fireworks of Saturday. I thought that the final was stunning. I was stunning. I was shocked. I mean, you know, Spain has been dominant throughout the World Cup. No question. The level of dominance in the final, I was stunned by the fact that Argentina didn't register a single. Yeah, it's not even a shot on goal, Christian. They did not have a single chance until at a time. And by the way, they could have scored an at a time, which is a crazy part of it. I mean, it was like 20 to zero at one point. I thought, you know, and I watched the whole thing, I just thought it was stunning to the level that Argentina is of a footballing nation and that team, generally, that that was all that they could muster out of that whole situation. And that speaks obviously very highly to Spain's ability to not only control the ball and have the ball with the majority of the time, but to recover the ball when they didn't. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot made of Spain's ability to dominate the ball, which is on full display. But I think they're the quality of their defending as a collective and even on an individual level is not spoken about enough. Yeah. And you could see, you know, I guess the other thing I would say is just there is and you know, this is easy to armchair to stuff, but there is a level of emotional control that you have to have. Yeah, yeah, stay at it. In a very highly emotionally charged moments, right? Because this could be your only ever, you know, time experiencing something like that. And and to see that Argentina lost lost that and a lot of times, you know, they they're kind of no, I think if you ever watched South American like, if you watch the Copa America or any kind of South American competition, it can be a little emotional and crazy. That's the nature of them. I thought Argentina, you know, didn't bring that emotional control. They went down a player. I think it was even more inevitable that they were not going to win the game. Well, but you know, it was crazy to me. I mean, much has been made about how England, you know, I think England was pushed back into and to defense in the back five was a reaction to what was already happening. But much much has been made about England being pushed back in how that game went. It was crazy to me to see that after Spain scored down a man for the first time in the entire game. Argentina actually had the ball for an extended period of time and created chances. So even even the vaunted Spanish team ended up doing some desperate defending in extra time. And it's a credit to, I think, you know, one, Argentina for fighting to the end. But it also just shows the emotion in the game and the natural ebbs and flows of going up and what that does to the other team because I was watching that and that's like for the first time in the entire game down a man they're creating chances and then they didn't look like they could to your point that they would be within an acre of the goal for most most of the time. Yeah, yeah, no question. But it did does feel like the right, and I think everybody's kind of said that the right team won and the best team won and could host to Spain and and then the third place game obviously was a was a completely different kind of game. I mean, it would reminded me of an all-star game, you know, when a little bit of the defensive discipline and focus and effort maybe drops and you see the unbelievable quality of the attacking players and it sort of felt like one obviously France was not quite on the same page in the first half and then England got rattled in the second half and then it kind of felt like the last 20 minutes when it got the fourth three. It sort of settled into say, okay, now now we're both here. There's 20 minutes left. Maybe we should maybe we really want to win this now. It kind of reminds me and you won't, may you probably won't know this because I know you're not a fan of the NBA, but if you watch the NBA regular season, basically what happens, it seems to me and I'm an NBA fan, but the teams pretty much sleepwalk through the first three quarters, you know, because they're playing 82 games in a year or whatever and it's so, you know, so long and they're, you know, whatever, that they kind of sleepwalk and then all of a sudden, you know, they decide let's make a game of it for the last quarter or whatever, but it was pretty, did it make you say to yourself, why weren't England braver towards the end of the Argentina game? It's hard to figure out causation on some of that stuff. I mean, when you think about the heat that they played in the altitude that they played in, the emotional pressure of the moment, like I said, I thought in that game, they got pinned back before they went to a back-five. They were given up crosses. They were not getting out. I think what happened there, whether that was just physical toil that it was finally the well was dry, whether it was the emotional pressure or whether there was, I mean, at least to some degree, there was a decision at some point and I don't think the decision was the trigger, but at some point there was a decision, hey, we're going to sit back on this and ride it out and they helped me. But 19 minutes. I mean, 19 minutes plus plus that at times. Well, but that's where the game is different, right, with the hydration breaks because now the game's not 90 minutes. I mean, I would wonder what the average length of the games were in this World Cup, but it seems like you never saw less than seven minutes of stoppage time and frequently in the knockout games, you saw 10 minutes or so of stoppage time. So making that decision in the 70th minute or whatever it was that they did, it's still 30 minutes to play, right? And that's, we haven't seen that before, where you just consistently count on almost double digits of stoppage time. Yeah. And again, you're not there. So again, it's so easy to armchair quarterback it and you know, you've added a game to the equation with the new format and to your point, the rest periods also got shorter as the as the tournament went on, right? So the days you had in between games were more or less once you got out of the group. So fatigue, you know, certainly plays a part of that, both mental fatigue and but but then I look and I say, well, Argentina had to come back and play extra time and all these different things in a lot of their games. So they, you know, had in theory expended the same amount of emotion and all that as England had. I don't think they played as many outdoor games or as many games in the heat with as much travel. And you know, how does that you get a physiologist to tell us all of all that sort of stuff. I will say the combativeness and the the work rate of the Argentinian team and the ability to put, you know, messy into the spots that he needed to be, it was fun to watch for a lot of the tournament. Wasn't that fun in the final, but their ability and their and their and their pride. I mean, you sort of felt like some of those guys might die on the field if that's what it took. No question, no question. You have to tip your cap to Argentina for making it to the final. Yeah, because they did a lot of it on, not I mean, they obviously have quality everywhere, but the way to your point, they fought and never gave in as I'd say an example to, you know, how you how you'd like to see your teams do it. Did one game in the World Cup one or two games stay? out to you where you were like, man, that was awesome. I think England, Mexico at the Azteca was pretty amazing. That was my favorite one. You didn't believe they could do it, especially in that environment. And to see that was really cool. Obviously, we've talked about the opener. We went to the opener. Looking back, now it's weird that the tournament's over after five weeks, almost six weeks long. But looking back, that game looks like it'll be even bigger of a memory for my family and my kids. I think when you see what the six weeks of soccer every day does, and to go back and say, gosh, you remember that seems like an eternity ago, but that game happened. So, maybe this is time to transition to some of these bigger discussions of the impact of the World Cup here in American Soccer. The discussions it has provoked, some of them well-informed, some of them not, so well-informed, but I suppose welcome, because people talking about soccer is a good thing to some degree. So I think overall, I give the World Cup here a phenomenal, phenomenal grade overall. I think it's inspired a lot of kids. I think you're going to see that, you're going to see that in growth. I think there are studies that have shown in previous years. A country hosting the World Cup typically sees a bump in layer participation through it. So I think we'll in 15, 20 years, you'll hear stories of kids who decided soccer was for them during this World Cup and decided that they were going to play. And we'll dig into this, I know, because this is part of this discussion, but here is what happened. It never happens here. And that is soccer was front and center. Soccer was front and center and captured the imagination of the country for a long period of time, to your point. When you think about these other countries, soccer is always front and center because it's a such a huge part of their culture, right? And so in a way, we have to rely on moments like these to inspire the next generation because it's so rarely front and center in our country that will get into the cultural kind of discussion that I know will have. But if you think about Spain, and again, I'm not one of those people that says, well, Spain wanted, so we should do everything that Spain does because Spain is uniquely Spain. And they're going to do what they do. And there's a lot of differences. But in Spain, soccer is front and center. It's the difference between something being cultural and something being event or a moment in time, event driven or a moment in time. And so I think your point is really good. This is how the sport is viewed everywhere else in the world. 365 days a year. Of course, the World Cup is a special moment, right? And no matter what country you are, it's a special moment. But soccer is still number one in the culture. The other whatever, 45 weeks of the year, every year, soccer is number one. And here America turned its attention for six weeks to a sport that it's never, never looked at with that degree of bright light. And I suppose, you know, we will see the inevitable fading of the spotlight. The question is how much and how much of it can be retained with people who have decided, you know what, I'm going to become a fan of this or hey, I'm a kid and I'm going to start to play this sport because that was really cool. And how much we see of that and how much of the fade of the light, I guess we'll see over the coming months here. It was really cool to see so many people inspired, so many people watching something that they hadn't watched before talking about something they haven't talked about before. And I think for the kids that are already playing, it was even more special. And we saw that at our events with people talking about it, people watching it on the TVs that were on site in San Diego. And, you know, I think just a special, special summer. And it's almost like you've probably had this conversation now, everybody says, okay, well now what do I do? Because the last six weeks, everybody kind of stayed around a TV for a long period of time because they wanted to watch games and highlights and all that stuff. And now it's sort of, we're in the desert. Yeah, it's great to get it front and center. And people will inevitably ask the question, how do we ever compete to win a men's world cup? We've obviously won four on the women's side. And we can talk about that and how that happened or happens. The first thing I want to say about that, and we said this, I think at the end of the last podcast is, we finished in the top 16 in the world. You would define soccer in this country as a French culture, not culture, not front center culture. Well, I don't know if I would say French, but I would say it's definitely not football. It's definitely not basketball. Right. It's probably not baseball. Although, you know, my making argue about that a little bit, but it's definitely not the first or second sport that America talks about. Right. And to think about that and where it is in the, you know, in the pecking order of our culture, our sports culture, you have to say, you know, you do have to tip your hat to what these guys have done. It ended probably in a way that maybe leaves us sour taste in your mouth. No, but to your point, countries like Germany and the Netherlands go out at the same point we do. That doesn't mean we, you wash over it. And it doesn't mean that there's no questions of what can we do better and how do we make the sport improve that that's, those are not two binary choices. The point I think you're making is we were in the core of the round of 16 and we didn't have a great game in the round of 16, but we very much earned our spot there and that puts us in top 16, 20 countries in the world in the sport. And that's not anything to just ignore and to pretend it's especially the way we played in the games leading into that. You know, there's a lot of progress that's happened. And again, we want to talk about now, I think what do we need to do as a country or what can be done by various organizations in the country to continue that progress? Should we start with some ideas? Yeah. And these are our ideas. And I think these come through the lens of, from two people that obviously look at, look at it through the grassroots and have come up through the grassroots from a coaching perspective and then obviously running this league perspective. My first thing, because I wrote a list of things, would be we have to have access to create more of this culture that we're talking about. Now what I mean by that is, because a lot of people say, well, people don't have access to youth soccer. Listen, in these other countries, the first experiences these kids are having are not, has nothing to do with a youth soccer set up. They are playing in the streets and, you know, we said this before too, what like 92 players who played in the World Cup come from the suburbs of Paris and they play for different countries and your theory on re-talk about what that was like and it was not, it was not organized at all. It's just about their playing and look and I'll, and I'll circle this back. When I was a kid and I grew up in a neighborhood and we had to be in when the street light came on and all those kinds of things were left to our own devices, we went to the basketball court in, in the neighborhood and we all played basketball and it was unorganized. And so you're not surprised that the basketball, the culture of basketball in this country has led us to be the best country in the world at that sport. It's the access and the availability to do it in an unsupervised and unorganized kind of way. It's everywhere. I agree that having more places to play, especially in highly dense urban areas, I think is one factor. I'll take a step back and say actually a lot of the first experience to sport, I think, for people no matter what country you are in the world comes from watching it on TV. It comes from it being in your home because people are watching the professional league because mom or dad or brother or whoever it is likes it, watches it, played it, whatever it may be. And that, to me, when you talk about something cultural, you're talking about actually stepping on a field and being able to play in an easy way where there's facilities and opportunity. And I'm saying get it in the brain and get it in the eyes of people because they say, "What's everybody doing tonight? Why is everybody talking about this thing on TV, this game on TV? What is this game on TV?" And I want to. I mean, I will say this and I'm not disagreeing with you, but I will tell you, my first experience is in basketball because, and I'm trying to make a comparison here, we're not watching it. And it was playing it and going out on the court with a bunch of other kids and figuring it out. Fair for me. For worse, right? And then I watched it more and I became a huge fan of it, whatever. So I think they do go hand in hand. And so I agree with you. They do go hand in hand, but when we were in England last fall and we're riding around, what do you see everywhere? song or pitches everywhere, right? little cage, Den soccer fields. Yeah, you have that in especially in the dense areas. I don't disagree with that. I think that I think that's an important thing and that's that's something where you talk about urban planning. You talk about the ability to carve out spaces for athletics and take soccer or even out out of the picture just the space for kids to go do things and play sports of any kind. I think that's that's an important thing. I'm gonna I'm gonna bring some in my let me just say in this part in my neighborhood it's sort of my neighborhood it's a little a minute away or something. Our local professional team and in support of different communities they're building these little caged in soccer soccer pitch. Yes. Better turf. I think it's massive. I think it's I know I agree with you. I mean if you want to turn you want to turn a community into a sport driven community you need to have facilities where kids can go play and they generally to your point they need to be able to do that in an unorganized impromptu. I got nothing else to do for 30 minutes or an hour. I'm gonna go over here and instead of watching TV and subplane video games I'm gonna go and play this game with my friend and by the way the game they play there sometimes it'll be soccer sometimes it'll be a variation of soccer that they make up and it's fun and and my son a bunch of my son's high school teammates called him the other day and they all went to this little caged in pitch and they just played. Yeah and I think that's that's fair. Yeah. I'm gonna say I'm gonna talk now about the professional game and we'll get to a lot of different ideas here but some stats here because you know right now people talk about hey there's a lot of statements of pay to play is bad pay to play is the problem blah blah blah blah the bottom line is somebody is paying at least I think the dialogue has become a little more nuanced in that that you need facilities you need a coach who's getting paid you need referees getting paid all that sort of stuff the question is how do you provide better environments and lower cost environments and especially as kids rise up okay typically across the world that is done that is funded by the professional clubs so the professional clubs across the world and it's different in every country for sure but generally they are not they're not charging the players they are paying for the development of the players because there's an economic incentive at the end there's also incentives that I think are ignored here of if you do a really good job in developing players not only is there in theory some economic incentives to selling them but you also have club incentives of moving up in levels of competition which is all often ignored in this discussion that's a big incentive but if we take pro clubs is largely the people who are subsidizing the development of the top top talents wherever you start wherever you say you should start to select them there are some people that say and I would probably be in this group that say later is better in terms of selection some people start earlier but here's some numbers England all right I just picked I picked three three teams here from the from the semis England has 92 professional clubs across its top four levels so that's the premiership the championship league one and league two 92 say that again 92 92 professional clubs those are these are fully professional clubs and I've done a metric here of professional clubs per million people okay so England we've talked we've joked England's about the size of Alabama or the size of New York 92 pro clubs with a population of 76 76 hold on England's would fit in the United States so hold on let me get to this 57 million people 96 pro 92 pro clubs that is 1.6 pro clubs per million people okay I want you to remember that number 1.6 pro clubs per million people and why does why are we saying the pro club because if people want top talent in environment where it's not paid where they're not paying for it that's generally what it takes Argentina okay Argentina approximately 90 pro clubs okay 46 million people that number of pro clubs per million people 1.9 Spain that number pro clubs per million people 0.8 okay so we're looking at 0.8 to 1.6 now obviously England's the smallest of those countries which is probably what it's the density helps in that a little bit now let's look at the US if you're going to assume that MLS is really the only organization that is funding this development 32 clubs the US has 341 million people 32 clubs if you're going to go clubs per million people that is 0.08 so if you look and say the pro clubs subsidizing youth development and providing access that is not paid-of-play in a great environment 1.6 1.9 0.8 for England, Argentina and Spain and in the US that number is 0.08 that is an order of magnitude and then some higher and so when we talk about what can we do to help create better and better hold on better access and better environments and better players down the road to me number one is we need more pro clubs yeah because I was going to my point I was going to make was imagine if that was 60 and you double that right and you're double that and we're still at point two right but you're giving twice the amount of right acts you know to to to that to that level of development and so yes I think it is an incredibly I think it's kind of an unintelligent argument to say that you in the US pay for what it's not I mean people who say that I you got it's more new us and we're going to talk about what you're talking to do better so that's number one to me is we need more pro clubs and how that happens in the way the game is economically structured in this country I'm not sure I'm not investing in correct because to be fair you say okay I think there's 12 USL clubs Jacob USL Championship clubs you know there's a bigger number of league one you throw some of those in maybe but I'm not aware correct me you know again if I'm wrong most of them for sure are not paying for the youth they're not subsidizing so a lot of times they're probably using it to help subsidize correct the two right so that begs the question of if you want to start talking about of opportunity and and investment into the youth development space you need more pro clubs investing in that and in to do that you need to look at the economic structure of the game obviously MLS does not have promotion relegation single entity 30 32 teams maybe it gets to 36 whatever the number is USL trying to set up its own pyramid with generally less resources and less funding than MLS does but everybody looking and you know again at the bottom line you know the the dirty secret of all pro sports it's very very few of them actually make any money year over year the value is in long term valuation of the of the franchise those are really deep economic waters to get into and I don't want to be get open the door on the pro rail argument but that is also a big incentive to developing players and other places it's not just selling them it's the opportunity for your club to move up levels both competitively and economically so that's number one I'm gonna move down so I'll give you number two I think you'll agree with this by the way on my list was professional opportunities so we're we're going to compare less ahead of time so let's stay I'm staying the pro world for one second longer and just say in general and I'm sure there's statistics out here people can find that would be better than what we can pull off of chat gpt or whatever but the number of young American players getting meaningful professional minutes in American pro leagues and MLS has dropped over time so I think there is you have to look at how many young Americans are actually getting meaningful minutes in pro leagues because it's one thing to get on a roster it's another thing to get minutes and so a lot of countries in the world we've talked about this and other podcasts have minimum numbers of requirements or maximum numbers of of internationals in order to incentivize giving minutes and time or not even incentivize mandate that there's a certain amount of time that is given to young talent domestic talent so I think that's a sort of part B to the pro yeah and I'm not not to say that American players have not benefited from MLS because I'm sure they have but I will tell you that it is very obvious as well that other countries in conca calf have very I'm also benefited very great because I think the level of teams in conca calf has definitely risen because of MLS yes 100 percent I think that's a fair fair point and this is all of this discussion is being within the lens if we're going to look at the country and soccer and the sport generally what are some areas that are meaningful I'm going to move down to number three I think you'll you'll agree with this one college soccer we're speaking specifically on the men's side for the purpose of this discussion. I mean, we'll reference the women's side here and there, but the number of American players in male college soccer has dramatically reduced. International's are about 50% of the division one roster pool. Why is that important? Again, one, it's opportunity to play and play longer and somebody's going to say college soccer is not good for development. Well, it's maybe it isn't a pathway to the national team all the time or something like that, right? Right. Right. Right. Now, and the point is there can be changes in college soccer to make it better for development like they're trying to do with a dual season. That makes it better immediately. College soccer is a really strong motivating factor for players and families to play you soccer and that's not a bad thing. It can be made a bad thing if you sort of over overdo it. But the idea and desire to play as you move into college and to have that experience keeps a lot of people motivated and excited about the sport and then the ability to play it longer continues to increase the football IQ for lack of a better word of the population. It gives more people longer experience as players in the game. And so there's a huge I think participation and engagement effect of college soccer on the youth game and there are not enough opportunities for the American male player. And so there needs to be number one a cap on the number of international players that are allowed on a roster in college soccer and I I would put that cap at four to six. Yeah, I put it less than that. I put it at three, but there you go. I would say so I wrote on my list and I don't know if you're the word Smith who says a lot of words on this podcast that I don't understand that you tell me later, but it's almost that college soccer youth players are disenfranchised almost American youth players are disenfranchised because they look at the college game and they say, I don't know that I have access to that. Or it seems like I don't have access to that. And when you look on college rosters and you see exprofessional players who are 27 years old, 26 years old, 24 years old, and you compare that, you know, I just think it's not it's not fair. It's not fair. Especially if it's if we're going to look at college soccer as the next step in the development environment for the American game. And I think your point is really important. It doesn't mean that college soccer would be spitting out the future world cup winners of the United States of America men's national team. What it would do is it would keep youth players much more invested in the game as they keep in the game. Correct. It keeps more players involved in the game and engage as as youth as they get older because they see opportunity. That is in front of them. So there's a reason it keeps more people who are in college playing involved in the game. And to your point, there will be players that come up and bubble up late. And those numbers may not be significant, but they don't need to be significant. A couple more players that bubble up to high levels can change change teams. And so I think the second part to that, I would say similar to to you know what we were talking about the program is there. And we have to have the roster cap somewhere and then college soccer does need to be restructured in a way that it's not a three month or three and a half month season with a nine month off season. It needs to be made more developmentally relevant and more competitively strong with a longer season with a better training to game ratio throughout the seasons. And I think that's the most things I think making the difference on both sides. Absolutely. Yeah, both sides. Yeah, totally. And I think you know the reason you need in this for the same reason you need to cap internationals in college. It's the same argument. Because left alone people are going to go try and get the best players and the most experienced players that they can't and given a choice to your example in college of get a 25 year old who's just released from an academy in Europe or to get a young 19 year old American player. And they're going to go to the 25 year old if they want to if they want to win, especially if they want to win in the short term and there's not an incentive for them to invest in the 19 year old. So you have to change the incentives or the mandates in order to fix that. Yeah. And I don't think they'll change the incentives. I can't I can't imagine. But they connect any kind of developmental incentives to college soccer. And so the incentive is going to be to win. So you have to cat you have to mandate things to probably to control it. Okay, I'm going to jump now. So I assume you had college soccer in there and your and your list. I did. I say I said disenfranchising youth players college soccer just stop. Now I'm going to jump all the way down into the youngest ages. Okay, so I'm going to go into our. This is your soap box. Well, you know, listen, it's tough. It's not wrong. I mean, I'm just saying here. This is your this year. You're you're now in the in the throws of experiencing. Yeah, and I tell you the game. The game keeps you humble. No matter who you are and coaching coaching eight and nine year olds keeps you humble. And I'm learning that I'm learning that every day. Working to be better. But if we go to zone one. So we're talking now eight to 12 you eight to you 12 typically young coaches typically coaches without a lot of experience. A lot of times coaches that are there for a very short time and then they move into older age groups because of their desire to be with older players. These are the ages where teaching is in many ways the most impactful or where you can see the biggest gains. So we've talked for a long time about how do you improve that and there's also a bunch of economic problems with those age groups because experience coaches need to be paid for their experience. And you can't charge eight year olds to do so without also reducing the number of eight year olds. So at an age where you want more kids coming in and ideally you want the lowest possible costs. I mean, you should say that throughout the system. There has to be value. Correct. I have a solution. The solution is easy to have a solution when you're spending other people's money. That's one of the problems the government, but my solution would be national funding for experienced zone one directors assigned to and I got a proposal here 80 to 150 clubs across the country where the salaries of those coaches is paid by the national funding source. The burden is not put on the clubs and so that you can put very experienced very good coaches into little laboratories all over the country working with the youngest players mentoring the coaches of the youngest players and implementing a improved methodology at eight to 12 for these coaches. So I just ran a little bit of math. If you let's just say I put I put a salary a total salary burden. So you talk about salary on employment compensation. You know all the stuff that goes into it, which most people know that benefits that usually goes there benefits and all that stuff lumps into what 25 30% of the. So I just put it to make math easy $100,000 fully loaded. If you did that with a hundred clubs that's a $10 million annual cost and with the numbers being talked about. That's not a huge cause. It's not crazy. And if you said okay we're going to do this and we're going to put a hundred people across the country and a hundred clubs. You're talking about directly and made some very general assumptions. So you take about a talk about a club that has at least two teams per gender per age from you a to you 12. You're talking about a direct impact. And that by the way we have we have clubs that are the most clubs are way bigger than that. Right. But you're talking about even if those even if those people just work with a couple teams and then oversaw the coaches. You're talking about direct impact of almost 25,000 kids with indirect impact of tens hundreds of thousands that see that is the example and the coach that has a more direct mentor and a more experienced mentor and a cost burden that is not put on to the club, which then ultimately goes down to the parent thoughts on that. And I love this because this is this is we talk about this a lot here just about solutions. Everybody can talk about what the problem is but coming up with solutions and here's the other thing and this is parallel to this based on on your list is which is on my list. And the reality for club operators is the biggest challenge for people running clubs of which you were one I am one whatever is coaches. It is the absolute hardest part of it getting good coaches and then you take your coaches and then you have to deploy them. And then you deploy them in the way that almost that the market demands because the incentives are backwards and I'm sure we're going to get into the incentive piece of this more. But because the incentives are backwards the best coaches likely in your club are coaching the older kids. So it's really hard to take a really really good experience coach him. put them with younger players. - And by the way, if we took this proposal and you put these hundred experienced coaches into a hundred different clubs, they will learn as well. - Yes. - Because they will see what is happening in the youth club. They will deal with the in talk with the American parent. They will see the environment. They will see how the environment is different from Southern California to Maine. - They will influence young coaches at those clubs. - Correct. - So there's a trickle down effect to that that I think, and I think we would all look back and go, man, we don't have enough time to spend with our coaches at clubs. And we certainly don't have enough time to spend with our younger coaches that are coaching in zone one. And I agree with you. I mean, it's a hugely underserved, in my examples. - I'll give you an example. When I was in Portugal and speaking with people, one of the ways they get really good young coaches into the academies is they have university degrees in coaching, football. And the big clubs go and hire the best students out of the university degrees and put them in the academies. And so that's not that different than what I'm talking about. So that's in the pro world, right? 'Cause the pro world can pay for that, but the pro world's gonna impact even if, I mean, listen, we just talked about it. There's so few in this country, but even if we expand that, it's still gonna only impact a certain number, right? We're talking about putting these people into the amateur world. And I think as Jacob has pointed out here in the chat, you know, we're talking about direct impact of 24, 25,000 players and indirect impact of hundreds of thousands every year. - Yeah. - And every year, there's a new cohort coming in. And I would say that there would be a chance that if you did that for four or five years, you might be able to stop doing it after that, because you would have made a very big investment in a moment in an way that then the investment will have impacted the environment that the initial investment may not be needed anymore. - Now I'm here for it. - Got another one. - Okay. - You know, we talk about, again, when people say, well, how do we get more players into the highest levels? And that statement itself ignores the whole process, right? This is a process of 10, 15 years of a player going from a youth player to a higher level 20 years. But if we talk about, if we're going to take that as sort of our given starting point, how do we get more players of higher quality into the national teams? Then you back up and say, okay, the senior national team, well, that bleeds down into the U20s, the U17s, the U15s, the U14s. We've talked about this ad nauseam, and it's not a secret. The selection process for the youth national teams is overwhelmingly from the MLS academies. And that is not a league issue. That is from those 32 academies. And I think that probably makes some sense at the older ages, especially looking at U20s and U17s, because that national team, more and more, is going to be filled with pros. We should all be helping fun players to that. And I think that is the case. But if we look down at U15 and U14, so we're talking about 13 and 14 year old kids in a country of 341 million, overwhelmingly still at those age groups, almost all of the players selected are still coming from 32 academies. And now I'm not here just to make that point as I have a suggestion. I'm going to say, very lazy scouting. So underline the point. And the last six under 15 youth national team camps from October 25 to June 26, four non-MLS clubs out of player selected, four, in the entire country. And why, why, in the last three, U14 talent ID programs, nine non-MLS clubs out of player selected. Why am I saying that at those age groups? In a country, so that's 13, you're going to be playing players. - But no, no, it's more players. It's a small number of players. I'm just, we had Jacob do this research, just identify a club that is non-MLS Academy Club. - Yeah. - And again, at 17 and 20, you're going to pick pros. I get that. We all understand that. That makes sense. At 14, there's only 32 of these pro organizations in the country. So there's no way that all of the top players with potential, or 90 something percent of them are already in that environment. There's just no way mathematically that that is true. So I have a. - Yeah, a puzzle. - They have a concept called red teaming in the military, I think it's in software as well, which is to test the defenses, test the validity. I might be abusing that term a little bit, but I would suggest developing a secondary youth national team scouting selection program that targets amateur clubs, only amateur clubs at U14 and U15. And saying, if this scouting program is going to largely focus on the pro clubs, which is what it is doing, and we think there's more players out there, then let's have a secondary program that focuses on finding the absolute best of the amateur clubs and putting them in a similar environment. Because if there is more talent out there that is not being picked, that is being deselected at these ages, which we think there is. - Because they're not at the MLS club. - Because they're not at an MLS club. And by the way, that might be because the local MLS club is seven hours away. It may be because the family doesn't want to move. There may be a lot of different reasons. - Sure, sure. - There's thousands of amateur youth clubs. And so I think a secondary national team program that focuses on those will actually, it'll actually prove the point of either, no, at the young ages were wrong, and the players are being scooped up earlier than we think. Which still begs a question about, is that still too early to select? And because deselection has an impact on players, but it gives more players that opportunity. And in the long term, I would think that there are players that will be better when they get pulled into the full national team if they've had that experience. - And would you say in their programming, just kind of runs parallel to the set of scouts? - parallel to the same stone. - You know, and maybe it's a different set of scouts, maybe it's a different set of coaches, maybe it's whatever. You can play games with that a little bit. The alternative to that, which I think there's being talked about in the US way, is these regionalized national team programs at 14 and 15, leading into a one national team at 17. That's that is, that will open the door for more players. Again, presuming that the scouting goes with it. But I think when we talk about, we just talked about zone one, and what can be done in zone one with the very, very big recreational base, you know, 'cause no matter how good you think you are, you're at you 90, 10, 11, it's recreational. Now we're talking about the initial selection of making sure that selection is not the scouting and the selection is not too focused on a small number of clubs and a small number of players. How can we expand that? - I'm sold. - Sold, all right. So we're spending, we're spending, I'm guessing, you know, I think I looked somewhere around, there's the US soccer national team, youth national team program, some of the 15 to 25 million dollars here line could be wrong on that. But if we did our first recommendation and we invested in zone one coaches, we're about 10 million dollars in, you know, if we do a whole amateur youth national team set up at 14, 15, let's put another 15 million dollars in there. Yeah. So we're at 25 million, and we're building the base with a better foundation of methodology and coaching. We're expanding the selection to include more people from more backgrounds who may not have already been found in the pro space. And again, we're not arguing whether the best players go into the pro space. Eventually they should go into that environment, which is subsidized. And we're saying we need more pro clubs. And we're saying that we need more American players in college soccer. If just those four things we're done, and let's add your first idea concept of adding more spaces to play in highly dense areas, do those five things. I think we need to say-- Can I add one more? Can I add one more? Yes. And I know everybody talks about these solidarity payments and all that kind of stuff that doesn't happen here. Does not happen. Yes. The incentive-- the incentives-- and I think this is something we have to talk about-- the incentives here are to win. Yes. You are rewarded when you win. That then the best players come to play for your club and you win more. Yes. You are incentivized almost solely to win. Now, we both have talked about this, and we recognize winning is very important. And learning how to win is very important. And we don't want to take that competitive spirit out of the game for this sake, because you can go the complete opposite way, which we've also seen in the past, having a recursion, where it's like-- it's almost anti-wimming. You also have to incentivize the clubs, amateur clubs, to want to both put resources into younger ages where the development happens. and helping develop those players to move them on. You know, we said this step before, but when Wayne Rooney got sold by Everton, which is a pro club, to Man United, the transfer fee or the money that came through there helped fund the Everton Academy for something like eight years or something. That is the incentives have to be altered here. Because right now the incentive is to win. And we have to find ways to incentivize amateur clubs to focus on the development of players. You have put some pretty concrete proposals together. I think there's law involved in this and things that I don't want to oversimplify something that's not simple, but we have to figure out how to change the incentives. Because right now the incentives are win. - I agree with that statement. The answer to it, and I'm not legally equipped to debate the nuances of collective bargaining and restraint of labor or understanding trade that get thrown around when you talk about why it's not enforced, why training compensation is not enforced in the United States. But it does mean it goes back to our first comment. If there's not enough pro clubs, so that there's not enough free development, then the development system is gotta be paid for by the user. And ultimately, if those clubs, that's the only source of revenue because there's never a reward for developing, then there's no alternative. So either somebody starts it and pays for it because they see their own alternative. And one, you can do that in a pro, because, and again, I want to state again that the incentive is to, there's an economic incentive to sell players, but there's also an economic incentive that your own team gets better. And the biggest economic incentive is moving up levels where the revenue is higher when we're talking about a pro organization. So it's more complicated even than that. But if there was more incentive or reward for players that come, we'd have to figure out how do you, you'd have to do some work to make sure that you're not rewarding the aggregator of talent because that's right to your point. That's what happens in a lot of youth soccer is that the club that wins first gets the next players who are successful and they want to win. And then you aggregate talent and aggregating talent. You can do a really good job of teaching kids, by the way, and aggregate talent. And that's generally what tends to happen in life. But you can also-- But how do you do a good job? But you can do a not a good job of teaching and still aggregate talent and be very successful. And so whatever the incentives would be, we're going to have to separate the development and the aggregation of talent somehow. How do you tell the difference? And maybe that is as simple as it's laid out in the solidarity is that there's a payment based on where the kid was every year. To do that, you need a single source of truth. And what I mean by that is you need one player card. So you know where the kid was. Because right now, as we know all too well, with all sorts of different playing cards and sanctioning bodies, kids are playing all over the place. So if you try and say, well, where did that kid really play at that age group? There's not always easy to answer that question. Yeah, sure. Which also makes it hard to identify who's actually played the biggest role in helping that kid. Yeah, that's probably the toughest challenge as I see it is how do you unwind that? That it's already wound up pretty tight. So but I like your other solutions. I think those are obviously they take resources, but you could implement those. I'm not going to say it's easy. Yeah, nothing's easy. But the motivation of this discussion for us was obviously watching the World Cup, watching the performance of our national team, which was so positive for the majority of time, then listening to the discussions and seeing where those discussions have gone and saying, well, why don't we throw at least some ideas out that are a little more nuanced and maybe a little more actionable than just saying, hey, let's just blame that group for blaming that group. Yeah, blame pay for play. Yeah. I mean, because it's because by the-- I mean, as we said, we talked about some reforms or changes that can be done at a pro level. Some changes that can be done at a collegiate level. Some changes that can be done at an early national team level. Some changes that can be done at a zone one, basic level. Some incentives that affect all age groups, including probably most that U12 to U18 is probably where those incentives are the most powerful. Yeah, yeah. Do you think-- my last question on this is, do you think our young players play enough games? No. As a general answer, I think there was a time when people played too many games. And three games in a day, four games in a day, these tournaments that you and I grew up playing. I think as an example of that. I think we are-- we as a country over corrected and went to this. And there was a discussion at one point of like mandating that kids couldn't play more than a certain number of games. At U10U11, I sat in a room where that was actually talked about, which we went so far that. But at the end of the day, we made this comment before, I think, is kids don't sign up to play soccer to practice. They sign up to play games. Number one. So it's an incredibly motivational thing. It's where the excitement is. And two, you can't replicate what happens in a game in training. But all of coaching, right? All of coaching is about transferability. How do you make sure that what you do in training transfers to the game as effectively as possible? And really good coaches in session design and the way they coach can make things transfer and make a lot of things transfer. But you cannot replicate the game environment in a training. And I think kids need to play as much as possible to your point. A lot of that doesn't have to be in real formal competition. So going and playing in the pickup leagues that exists around cities for kids, going and playing in the adult leagues that exist, the random tournaments. I mean, things like the TST. Now that's for older players, obviously, there's no development, real impact, to that event. But 3V3 type events going and playing in those in a competitive environment. Those are good for kids. And so I think, and all of these things, the answer is balance. Because kids tend to manage their own fatigue. If you watch kids go play, they go run. And then when they're tired, they stop running. And then they come in, get a lally pop, and then they go run again. Creating environments for them to play both more formal games. And that doesn't-- and ideally, that's not with a bunch of travel. But also more informal games where they can go out. And there's a lot of, I think, learning for if you allow kids to play in a-- there's some leagues around here that kids playing on Friday night, where the kids can coach themselves. And it's a league. It's a referee, but it's very, very informal. And it's where you can see a lot of experimentation, a lot of craziness. But that's some of this stuff that creates the special players down the road. You know, as I look at what we do, I think probably as you get to the older age groups, we probably get it right. Game count wise when you start talking about 16, 17, 18, or so. Yeah, that's a good point. A good news. I think it's talking about younger. Yeah, I think it's the younger kids that it's-- I'm not sure that they do play enough, right? All right, well, this is a great topic to talk about. Because I think we always have to look inside and say, how can we make this better? How can we help our country and our national team finish in the final eight, not final 16, or whatever it is? Although there are a lot of factors to go into that that aren't all tied to what we're talking about. But then you just hear a lot of talk of-- and I think it's really-- this is a lot of talk without a lot of solutions. And that's maddening. Yeah. We live in this world, and we're trying to create solutions, you know? Well, and to your point at the very beginning about culture, whatever, however, we would measure the culture of American soccer, it moved up over the last six weeks. And how much it moved up will depend on how, as I referenced earlier, how bright the light stays and how much it dims. But it moved up at least a significant notch, maybe more. And kudos to the people that were involved in bringing that world cup here, because as we know, from all the drama of guitar and Russia, that is not an easy process. process, maybe it's better not to know that process sometime. Yeah, right. But just getting the world cup here, it took 30 something years, 32 years to come back. There's already talk about 2038, based on how the bidding has changed. So it may be that it's here much, much sooner than that. But kudos to all the people that did that. I know that's an incredible amount of work to do. So kudos to the people who put on the event, you know, US soccer and all the people outside of that that worked at all these venues and all the media and all the stuff to do it. They've moved the notch forward. And I think ultimately, if you look back, the word we started with this word and I think we finished with this word, it's culture. And you know, the ideas that we've talked about here are about how do we improve the culture? You know, if we define culture of what we do and how we do it, how do we improve the culture of the game specifically in a variety of different areas in our country. But having big events like the world cup is a piece of that as well. And so, you know, hopefully the club world cup is here again soon, hopefully the world cup, hopefully the women's world cup in 2031 being here. And hopefully those things will also move that notch forward. Anytime something of that magnitude is front and center, it will have a lasting impact. I think you, we talked about this on the last podcast. You cannot say that the 99 women's world cup that was here that the US one had did not have a lasting impact. It obviously and clearly did. You can't say, if you look at another sport that the hockey success on the men's and women's side, this past winter at the Winter Olympics will not have an impact. It absolutely will. So anytime something that is is not normally front and center here becomes front and center, it will absolutely have an impact. Well, and to to Jacob's point LA 28 in the Olympics, we hear six different cities that will be hosting games. I always feel like the Olympics feels like, you know, sort of the other soccer program. Yeah. You know, it seems like more on the women's side because I guess the senior women's national teams that participate in it, the men's side does kind of seem like an afterthought. Yeah, it's a U 23 competition on the men's side largely with I think some overage players. But, you know, maybe, maybe the buzz of the world cup will make that Olympic soccer competition, bring it a little bit more mainstream than in the past potentially. But that's another, another opportunity. So all these things move in the needle. I think I'll finish with there's a lot of people trying to do good work. There's a lot of conversations happening across various lines now of organizations of people trying to find solutions and none of it's easy. But I think the intentions are good and hopefully we can all keep moving together and knocking down some of these problems. And when we identify problems to your point, coming with solutions that are practical. Yeah, great. That was a great world cup, man. I'm glad I got to experience it. I went to a US game as well with my kids at a great time. And so those are things that definitely stick for you know, what's funny right now. I drive, I drive to practice right now and what my, my kids ask for two songs on the way to practice. Number one is Country Roads. They listen to Country Roads. So you have those kids who are at the age. They're so impressionable. It was so impressionable. So think about that for, you know, think about what that says about culture by the way. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And one is Country Roads and then the second one is God bless America. And we roll in, we roll into soccer and they're yelling in the back and singing the song, the words they remember. But you talk about cultural impact is pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Do we even do rock and brink investors on a special edition? We've never done this. We can. We can go. Who is your standout player, the world cup? Alisa. Alisa. I'm going to go to you. He stood up, didn't he? Yeah. Two bellings stood up in there. He stood up in the third place game too. Excuse me. You want to come on and finish this off for everybody? At six, the goal was pretty dirty, man. Yeah. I'll go to you, belling. We'll just call it a mini, Brack and Brain Buster to wrap the world cup. I feel like I've had so many like softball questions because the world cup has just given me so much material. Now I'm really going to have to get back into the lab, start working on my, uh, my Brack and Brain brushes for the future. All right. And then we have two photos to, uh, to you, to the team behind the team here who has made this special edition of the podcast come to life because, uh, we felt that the timing was right and we didn't want to wait long after the world cup to bring these topics up. And as always, we'll take feedback. Absolutely. Until next time, Doug. Ciao, Bella. Thank you for listening to Breaking the Line, the EC&L podcast. And remember, if you have a question that you want answered on Breaking the Line, the EC&L podcast, email us at info@theec&l.com.