Lol true. Good thing elite soccer players don't go to college

This wont be popular, but honestly, sometimes I wonder if investing into college soccer would actually be the quickest path. Not saying the best path for the best of the best, but it could encourage teenage rentention if there were scholarships to be won. Also, a popular college game would pump a lot more money into developing the late bloomers.

DallasAggie97 said:

---

What types of alternative leagues are there? We just lost a USA youth player to Mexico. I read that he played in a Latin league for youth soccer. Are those lower cost? Are the teams better?

It seems strange that we don't have more Latino players on our USMNT.

---

a lot of them are on our youth teams, then somehow they arent "making it" at the senior level as starters

JJxvi said:

---

This wont be popular, but honestly, sometimes I wonder if investing into college soccer would actually be the quickest path. Not saying the best path for the best of the best, but it could encourage teenage rentention if there were scholarships to be won. Also, a popular college game would pump a lot more money into developing the late bloomers.

---

Title ix will always limit the number of colleges offering scholarship's for men's soccer.

Still incredibly dumb that all of the big 12(mainly schools in texas) didn't have D1 teams. Top youth club leagues in the country in Dallas, and I believe Houston, Austin, and San Antonio had good club leagues too

I think that would help for the late bloomers. The only problem is that it puts us behind the curve from countries getting talent in their system at 15-16 years old.

There is kind of an adversarial viewpoint between "soccer people" and NCAA soccer it seems to me. It makes sense to some extent, because college is not great for truly professional level 17-18 year old talent, and people dont want to see prospects stunt their growth in any way. However, US Soccer needs to look in the mirror and realize that high schools and colleges are where Americans learn to play and develop into professional athletes. Period. Thats just how it is here. The colleges are a minor league sports system here, and it so happens they are a minor league sports system with HUGE inherent advantages over like the lower levels of the pyramid where amateur, semi-pro and low level pros play in other countries. The biggest advantage is that people generally actually give a **** about college sports here, and the Universities are pumping a **** ton of money into developing athletes.

The Texas A&M budget for women's soccer is $4.4M dollars and the sport itself generates $2.5M in revenue. I would not be shocked if that $4.4M budget was actually more than what it costs to run a professional top level NWSL team, and probably it would likely compare favorably to men's teams that are down the pyramid in the developmental systems in other countries. Universities are able to leverage their student and alumni interests into revenue streams because of love of the school and dont need to necessarily rely totally on the quality of play. This is a huge advantage over most developmental leagues. To put it in other terms, a 2nd tier football team developing talent for the NFL, the Texas A&M Aggies, is a sports juggernaut, pumping MILLIONS into player development, coaching, scouting, etc. If this did not exist, I can guarantee you that the Waco Bears, a farm team for the Houston Texans that they have to fund to do the same job that the NCAA does would not have nearly the resources or interest that the current NCAA is able to bring to bear to develop and find football players.

I know there are many many problems, but they are problems that US Soccer should be working to solve. They should be putting pressure on the NCAA to bring the rules into alignment with FIFA rules. They should be trying to leverage MLS, National Team, and SUM tv and event contracts to turn the college cup into a TV event and pump their money into it even if the federation and NCAA have to give it away to broadcast for free. They should be using their resources to find way to fund scholarships, or find other creative ways to fund scholarships, both mens and womens to ease some of the title ix burdens and encourage growth of the mens sport. They should be convincing major conferences and major programs (the ones with lots of money and lots of fan support for many sports) to add men's teams. Etc etc etc. I think there are many ways US Soccer could encourage growth of college soccer, but since the prevailing view is that college soccer is just bad, they would seem to just prefer that it go away rather than leverage its benefits to developing a truly American developmental system.

https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2018/02/07/21/38/20180207-news-us-soccer-launches-2018-spring-mens-college-program

This was pretty successful and the NCAA is in the process of making rule changes so that the differences should be eliminated over time. The big change will be to add a Spring season as recovery and development during the current schedule is pretty difficult if not impossible. There is no benefit to playing games with no meaningful breaks for recovery and training. There is work being done on adding the Spring season and the number of universities that have been opposed is lower now than just a few years ago.

US Soccer sees a definite benefit to having an additional developmental league and the NCAA would capture a large number of players that have potential as pros and beyond.

Glad to hear that.

And I dont mean to put it all on US Soccer either. The NCAA and its member institutions need to embrace soccer as well. It's just unfortunate that the way scholarships are funded means that schools wont add men's teams until the sport is big enough to make generate real revenue, and also that the sport wont generate real revenue until enough big schools and conferences actually adopt it.

The numbers of men's D1 programs has been on the rise the past several years, so that's a good sign.