Ermahgerd US Mens

All the big boys in soccer… their national team are all in an academy full time by the age of 12… well before HS age even.

2 things hurt US Soccer:

1. Pay for Play model - just not a thing in most other countries. A lot of the US Soccer team happens to be from fairly affluent families that can afford $15-25k a year for their kids to get high end training but it leaves behind a massive talent pool to pull from who simply can't afford it.

2. Competition. These other countries simply don't have as many sports competing for the best athletes as US and Canada do.

Us women's soccer enjoyed dominance for a long time due to other nations not offering any institutional support to women's soccer… but that's about to erode real quick.

The infrastructure for soccer here vs. the rest of the world is just not great. Sure, there's way bigger money in sports here vs other nations but it just goes to all the other sports and will continue to, Title IX or not.

What thread was it where we had like 4-5 pages of discussion on this exact topic?

deadbq03 said:

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ag0207 said:

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It may not fix it completely but it would help.

If you don't think that it would be beneficial then what should be done to make the US more competitive?

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Hard to pin it down to one thing. The big thing is interest in the game… and that continues to slowly grow.

There's lots of factors at play but ultimately they all revolve around that. We have too many sports that are more popular.

Pay to play? All sports have that… but rich families care enough about football and basketball that they'll pool their money to fund poor kids who are good and bring them on their teams as ringers. Hell, even without pay to play, we have a long history of fake jobs being given to poor parents so a stud can move school districts.

I've very recently bemoaned how Title 9 messed up men's soccer, but I've rethought that and changed my mind. In truth men's college soccer was already downhill beforehand. A&M scrapped their men's team well before Title 9. The problem is lack of interest… once college athletics became less of a "club activity" and required more money to stay competitive, soccer died because no one was interested.


I now think USSF needs to lean into what makes soccer unique rather than try to translate to Big 3 sports.

As one small example, instead of trying to have men's college soccer, I'd prop up stories of all the 16 year olds getting paid real salaries to play in MLS while their counterparts in football and basketball can't get paid til college NIL money and are still forced to go through the charade of academics.

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I think you really underrate how early elite soccer players start training in a way where it is more or less their primary focus and academics truly become a secondary pursuit in other areas of the world. It's way earlier than what you see in football and basketball here in the US. That's why the pay for play thing is such a big deal specifically for soccer.

Said another way, your last point is interesting… but it's a bit moot if a parent hasn't been paying serious cash for 7 or 8 years already to get you to be a skilled enough player to be paid professionally.

Pay to play just weeds to many of the top athletes out of soccer early in the US and it doesn't do the same worldwide.

ATM9000 said:

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deadbq03 said:

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ag0207 said:

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It may not fix it completely but it would help.

If you don't think that it would be beneficial then what should be done to make the US more competitive?

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Hard to pin it down to one thing. The big thing is interest in the game… and that continues to slowly grow.

There's lots of factors at play but ultimately they all revolve around that. We have too many sports that are more popular.

Pay to play? All sports have that… but rich families care enough about football and basketball that they'll pool their money to fund poor kids who are good and bring them on their teams as ringers. Hell, even without pay to play, we have a long history of fake jobs being given to poor parents so a stud can move school districts.

I've very recently bemoaned how Title 9 messed up men's soccer, but I've rethought that and changed my mind. In truth men's college soccer was already downhill beforehand. A&M scrapped their men's team well before Title 9. The problem is lack of interest… once college athletics became less of a "club activity" and required more money to stay competitive, soccer died because no one was interested.


I now think USSF needs to lean into what makes soccer unique rather than try to translate to Big 3 sports.

As one small example, instead of trying to have men's college soccer, I'd prop up stories of all the 16 year olds getting paid real salaries to play in MLS while their counterparts in football and basketball can't get paid til college NIL money and are still forced to go through the charade of academics.

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I think you really underrate how early elite soccer players start training in a way where it is more or less their primary focus and academics truly become a secondary pursuit in other areas of the world. It's way earlier than what you see in football and basketball here in the US. That's why the pay for play thing is such a big deal specifically for soccer.

Said another way, your last point is interesting… but it's a bit moot if a parent hasn't been paying serious cash for 7 or 8 years already to get you to be a skilled enough player to be paid professionally.

Pay to play just weeds to many of the top athletes out of soccer early in the US and it doesn't do the same worldwide.

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It's going to take a massive culture shift in this country for it to happen. I think i said it on the other thread (not like im the only person to make this point) but soccer is really the only sport where true, professional/high level development, happens at a really young age. Name a badass soccer player in a top flight league or national team that didn't start playing until they were 12? You can't(conversely you can name dozens HOF level basketball or football players that didn't start playing until HS or even college) ****, look at the English national team. There was a post somewhere that showed at what age each player entered a professional academy. Most were between 6-8yrs old. A couple outliers at 10 or 11, but the rest were all under the age of 9. Good luck getting our current culture to be ok with diverting hundreds of boys to "professional" sporting academies bypassing our public education system. Huge swathes of our country already bemoan the amount of money spent on athletics, and you think they'll be fine with that? Doubtful.

Also another thing to keep in mind, I think I saw there are 92 professional clubs in England for example, each with their own licensed developmental academy. For a country of around 60million that's about the size of Alabama. Add to that, all those academies are incentivized if one of their academy kids goes to a bigger club. We have 30 MLS academies spread out around a country of 340million who just poach the best local kids from these pay to play clubs(and get nothing in return) so they HAVE to take the rich families money.

I appreciate what you're saying but respectfully disagree with your first point. That perspective exists only in the kinds of families we grew up in, where parents believe their kids can learn and help them do it. Where parents trust that education will help their kids get good jobs. Many (most?) families don't share that… and with the advent of AI - those feelings are growing even into families that look a lot like ours.

If the NFL and NBA offered free academies starting somewhere at age 6-9, they'd have tremendous interest - especially from families stuck in the cycle of poverty and drugs where kids are objectively more of a burden than a blessing, even if the parents have good intentions and love them dearly.

I could go on, but I tend to get too wordy. Point is, I think it would work, but the finances don't make sense cause there's not enough interest in the game.

deadbq03 said:

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I appreciate what you're saying but respectfully disagree with your first point. That perspective exists only in the kinds of families we grew up in, where parents believe their kids can learn and help them do it. Where parents trust that education will help their kids get good jobs. Many (most?) families don't share that… and with the advent of AI - those feelings are growing even into families that look a lot like ours.

If the NFL and NBA offered free academies starting somewhere at age 6-9, they'd have tremendous interest - especially from families stuck in the cycle of poverty and drugs where kids are objectively more of a burden than a blessing, even if the parents have good intentions and love them dearly.

I could go on, but I tend to get too wordy. Point is, I think it would work, but the finances don't make sense cause there's not enough interest in the game.

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I think the popularity lacks because we've more or less got other sports that are our sports. And sharing the stage with the other sports combined with the population density of the US vs Europe make it difficult to pull off where the finances can work.

I agree it isn't a culture issue. It is what it is and a huge reason why so many are sort of weeded out of the talent pool naturally.

Ending Title IX would end women's AND men's soccer for colleges. All the money would go to revenue-generating sports and non-rev sports would be cut completely.

Men's soccer already has less funding than women's soccer and AD's would just cut both.

College is waaaaay too late

AgRyan04 said:

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College is waaaaay too late

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That's true for all sports. That's not really the point. The lack of men's soccer in college does a few things:

1) It makes the sport even less attractive to parents because scholarship opportunities are limited.
2) It limits exposure to the sport. How many more fans might there be if it existed at major colleges?
3) The fact that it doesn't exist on most campuses, but women's soccer is widespread contributes to the hyper-masculine notion that the sport is "soft" or only for women.

Imagine if gridiron football never evolved in the 1800s and American college students just kept playing association football and followed the British rules. College would be a step along the journey to being a pro - just like it is currently in other sports.

But back on topic, it's a moot point. The fact that we don't have widespread men's soccer in college is a symptom of the real problem; it isn't itself the actual problem and artificially trying to bring it back by killing Title 9 wouldn't work.

A robust college game would not only generate some additional talent, as it does even now, but IMO the primary benefit would be that it would create a more robust coaching profession. It creates an additional level of high paying jobs (a level which also proven to be a legitimate stepping stone to professional jobs domestic and overseas and national team jobs) for former players to climb towards and creates a larger pool of talent in that profession. How many guys that are coaching youth baseball or basketball at the ages you guys seem so concerned about are former college players in those sports? Probably a lot of them.

I hadn't thought of that. Massive impact there.

JJxvi said:

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A robust college game would not only generate some additional talent, as it does even now, but IMO the primary benefit would be that it would create a more robust coaching profession. It creates an additional level of high paying jobs (a level which also proven to be a legitimate stepping stone to professional jobs domestic and overseas and national team jobs) for former players to climb towards and creates a larger pool of talent in that profession. How many guys that are coaching youth baseball or basketball at the ages you guys seem so concerned about are former college players in those sports? Probably a lot of them.

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All great points… but how? You've got way high revenue sports to compete with on campus, better leagues and opportunities even in lower divisions across the pond than a university could offer… and frankly… better alternatives when it comes to actual soccer to watch the already exists elsewhere.

College soccer just isn't a really compelling offer relative to the alternatives unless you somehow get every other league in the world to play ball with it similar to the NBA and NFL in the NCAA. And that's just not going to happen.

I think there are lots of creative ways but they all take money that simply isn't there (perhaps because no one at USSF has the boldness to try something new and drum up support for it).

Lies. You also already like soccer.

JJxvi said:

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I would watch and follow A&M soccer just because its A&M

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I'm sure you would but the masses won't. You don't have a season really for it to be the primary sport on campus. Further to that, federal protections to days like college football has to Saturdays won't exist. And college soccer would do very little for the professional pipeline like the NBA gets from college basketball currently. There's zero incentive for the global leagues to play nicely with US college soccer when it comes to sharing the market.

JJxvi said:

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A robust college game would not only generate some additional talent, as it does even now, but IMO the primary benefit would be that it would create a more robust coaching profession. It creates an additional level of high paying jobs (a level which also proven to be a legitimate stepping stone to professional jobs domestic and overseas and national team jobs) for former players to climb towards and creates a larger pool of talent in that profession. How many guys that are coaching youth baseball or basketball at the ages you guys seem so concerned about are former college players in those sports? Probably a lot of them.

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I don't know if I really wanna say this, but that's what the women's game is being used for now. Bobby Shuttlesworth was an MLS pro and he's coaching women's college soccer. Landon Donovan coaches the San Diego pro team for a while. Lee Nguyen was a USMNT level international player and he's only coached women's soccer. Now he's the head coach at Dallas Trinity FC. I just recently chatted with Kei Kamara, who was a Sierra Leone international and MLS longtime veteran. He's got coaching opportunities in the women's college and pro game.

The list can go on.

To be a Div I school, you have to support at least 16 NCAA sanctioned sports, 8 men and 8 women's sports or 7 men and 9 women's sports.

We'll see how many Division 1 schools care about matching women's sports if Title IX goes away. That was the OP.

I get it, I read it. Lots of discussion around what will happen, I just added my thoughts. You certainly did not have to read it.

Title IX is not an NCAA nor a conference or university thing- it is federal law which is enforced by the NCAA, conferences and university. It isn't going to just go away. Legislation will have to be proposed and passed for it to go away. The immediate law suits will clog up the courts for years if that happens.

TXAGBQ76 said:

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I get it, I read it. Lots of discussion around what will happen, I just added my thoughts. You certainly did not have to read it.

Title IX is not an NCAA nor a conference or university thing- it is federal law which is enforced by the NCAA, conferences and university. It isn't going to just go away. Legislation will have to be proposed and passed for it to go away. The immediate law suits will clog up the courts for years if that happens.

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The PCSA seeks to force more spend on Olympics and Women's sports because both are viewed as endangered by spend on football in the PCSA roughly doubling,

Title IX really only guarantees (roughly) as many roster spots for women as the football team has for men. The whole thing can collapse.

Don't disagree, but the schools can't decide tomorrow to no longer support title IX. There is going to be a lot of unraveling that will need to occur- and lots of law suits to be dealt with.

TXAGBQ76 said:

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Don't disagree, but the schools can't decide tomorrow to no longer support title IX. There is going to be a lot of unraveling that will need to occur- and lots of law suits to be dealt with.

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They only have to match football roster spots/scholarships in women's sports to minimize spending. House agreement does not increase Title IX spend since women's sports don't make money…

Agreed. My comments are geared to those that said we will just cancel title IX and give that money to football.

We are paying for a ton of sports (men's and women's) that not only don't make money but lose a bunch of money.

The "big schools" in the north and the west generally sponsor more sports, including in many cases men's soccer, than schools in the SEC/the South. The reason is longstanding cultural-political decisions in the South to not sponsor a broader range of sports. The reason is not, in truth, Title IX even though Title IX provides an easy excuse any time a question is raised about a men's sport.

I am not saying it could happen over night, but A&M or any of the big boys down in the south could, if they wanted to, expand their offerings to include men's soccer. But they don't, in reality, want to. Or it's certainly not anywhere near enough a priority.

Add these two sports: Men's soccer & Women's Gymnastics. Wouldn't that comply with Title IX?

Women's gymnastics already has a strong following in the south.

The Unfiltered Soccer podcast with Tim Howard and Landon Donovan (really good listen/watch) has started talking about youth soccer in the US since the World Cup and have said they're going to a series on it.

This is a short-ish video of them chatting with Carlos Bocanegra where they get into some of the issues a bit: