Episode 223: Soccer Education is the Key to Soccer Development

What are the missing ingredients that prevent the US from succeeding internationally?

From technique and tactics, to coaching and business …
You can learn a lot about that here, and the ambitious can be taken further with the coaching membership.

But underpinning all of it is this:

Soccer, the sport, in the United States is not the problem.
Our soccer governance is.

3four3 is all about giving you a deep look into our sport so that you can get better as a:

• Player
• Coach
• Parent
• Fan / Supporter
• … or whatever role you play in the soccer community

Understand:

This is NOT a news site.
This is NOT “journalism”.
This is NOT a site from some supporters of the sport who don’t know squat.

These are the views from people on the inside who many times will throw political correctness out the window. You want a “behind the scenes” education? Hopefully, you can stomach it.

What we say is very forward and many times controversial.

Few will love us, most will hate us. But my promise to you is brutal honesty. I want to help players, coaches, parents, and fans to lift their understanding with some richness and subtlety.

Soccer is a simple game, but within that simplicity lies complexity.

Soccer Development or Player Development? Start Getting it Straight

(Link to original article)

Time to recalibrate!

We’re not interested in player development here, we’re interested in soccer development.

While related, they are not the same.

1) Player Development

This is not the end all, be all, of this country’s issues.

As conventionally discussed, and comparatively speaking, it’s irrelevant.
It’s just a tiny speck of what’s going on.

If we transplanted the best youth academies in the world here, or did a great job adopting all their best practices, while progressive … it would hardly make a dent in the American soccer universe.

But it seems many would have you believe otherwise.

Well, they’re not telling you the whole story. Because you see, a proper environment must exist and be awaiting players when they graduate from the youth scene.

The next level(s), in and of themselves, contaminates, poisons, and even ruins all the work done in the youth.

And that’s what we’ve got: A toxic environment outside the immediate youth scene.

2) Soccer Development

This deals with all things influencing the sport. EVERYTHING

Soccer Development deals with cleaning up all that toxicity – the mess that America’s soccer shot callers have created, and continue to protect.

If we’re talking about our country, it can start from the general structure(s) that US Soccer has created and trickle all the way down to a non-soccer bean counter having a say at a youth club.

The entire ecosystem (including social, political, and cultural) matters. Understanding status quo at both macro and micro scale matters.

Status quo

No, people don’t understand the status quo. There’s just too much going on – and like most everything, it requires deliberate and focussed lifelong learning.

I mean sure, people have formed a concept of status quo …

But it’s like the concepts they’ve formed about all kinds of topics in their life; be they the education system, health care, the housing market, poverty, systems of government, etc.

At what level do they really understand those?

It’s crazy, people want solutions … people propose solutions … but people don’t remotely understand status quo. They don’t even understand the environment of the market.

Soccer Development is about two things:

1. Learning and educating on the status quo
2. Solutions based on understanding of status quo

Lesson #1

Soccer is a Global Sport, and we are not the market leader.

Yes, that’s obvious. What’s not obvious are the reasons.

This is really important guys: The reasons are NOT obvious!

And that right there is Lesson #1 – a lesson most people can’t even get past.

Hell, most don’t even have a real appreciation for the ramification(s) of soccer being a Global sport, as opposed to something non-global like American football.

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