American fans of the beautiful game awoke this morning to the desolate wasteland that our US Men’s National Team has become. The smoking husk of a proud footballing nation has been left in ruins after a devastating defeat on a waterlogged pitch in Couva. Today, American fans arise to a future more bleak than at any point in modern American soccer history. This meltdown disaster was self-inflicted, brought about by the hubris of management and failure of the players to see the warning signs flashing along the way.
This systemic failure results in the men’s team missing the World Cup for the first time in over 30 years. This particular failure has many fathers on which we can cast blame, but none should have their feet held to the fire more than Sunil Gulati. This latest failure is by far the greatest shame of his tenure as the President of the US Soccer Federation, which includes several failed bids to host the World Cup and the ongoing scandal that sees the highly successful members of the USWNT paid far less than their male counterparts.
In true sportocrat fashion, Gulati can’t even be bothered to devote his full attention to US soccer development, but splits time as a senior lecturer at Columbia University. Gulati presumably spends the other parts of his day collecting bribes with one hand as he fights corruption with the other as a Vice President of FIFA’s Executive Committee. This hands off approach has led to the byzantine American soccer bureaucracy taking day-to-day control of the talent development and league management. For all the advocacy Gulati has done to stamp out corruption around the world and all the corporate sponsorship money he has collected, there is nothing to show for it on the pitch.
Gulati is also personally responsible for caving into the nativist idiots that called for the hire of an American manager in the wake of Jurgen Klinsmann’s firing. Almost from the beginning of the Klinsmann Era, a certain subset of American soccer fans began groaning about having a foreign manager. America does not have a decorated history of managerial talent or even a coherent national football philosophy on the men’s side. As this groaning turned into a din, Sunil capitulated by hiring Bruce Arena, an aging MLS manager with a commitment to talent developed by the MLS and the NCAA.
This philosophical change and reliance on MLS developed talent, resulted in the US fielding underpowered squads for several qualifying matches. Arena was desperate to find the most in form players, turning to the MLS, where consistent performances are an illusion. The truth is that from tactical, talent pool, and coaching perspectives, the MLS lacks behind other major leagues in all three categories. This is not a league we should be actively looking to developing talent in until major reforms are made.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody that spends an extended period of time watching MLS matches. The Designated Player and Salary Cap systems are a joke when transferred from American football to real football and both must be abolished immediately. The collective ownership of players and league allocation of transfers is farcical. These systems result in a highly stratified talent pool and the iniquities in pay result in the league being viewed as the “retirement home” of the football world. Clint Dempsey is compensated at a level 73x of what several of his Seattle Sounders teammates are paid. MLS team ownership values are up 80% from just 2013. The league is in a healthy financial position to implement sweeping changes to a failing system that exists only for the profit of team owners and league management.
While the MLS thrives on their golden throne atop the US soccer pyramid, the other leagues are left to languish with no hope of ever reaching the top flight. Now is the time to implement promotion/relegation across the entire league structure of American soccer. Enough of the excuses that fans won’t attend second tier fixtures when FC Cincinnati attracts an average of over 21,000 fans per game in USL. The MLS has never won the CONCACAF Champions League and without promotion/relegation fueling clubs to succeed, it will continue to falter in international club competitions.
While Gualti, Arena, and the MLS deserve the lion’s share of the blame, the unspoken culprit in all of this is the NCAA. The NCAA is a soccer talent vampire that sucks the life from America’s unparalleled player pool. From the hundreds of thousands of adult men that play soccer in America, do we really think that this was the best 17 we could muster for a must win game on a Tuesday in October? Of course it wasn’t and this is the fault of the NCAA, which harvests the cream of the crop of talent and squanders nearly all of it by cramming a season’s worth of soccer into a 4 month schedule.
The NCAA deprives players of a salary, while comparably aged footballers from around the world are already professionals. The NCAA imposes restrictions on out of season training and competitions, which limits the talent development of 17-22 year olds to a 6 month window, rather than around the year as it is done around the world. The NCAA also imposes other burdens on young soccer players, such as academic requirements and the cost of paying for college expenses that aren’t covered by scholarship.
Last in our list of blame has to be the American “academy” system, which is embarrassing on multiple fronts. From the extortion of parents forced to pay exorbitant fees for pitch time, substandard coaching, and travel teams to the clubs that view these academies as revenue generators. This entire system must be destroyed. The academy system allows parents to buy their child’s way into a club’s academy. Other academies around the world rely on scouts to identify and recruit talent, but in America your parent’s money is good enough. A perfect example of this would be the DC United Academy intake of young Baron Trump.
Every step of this pay-to-play system disenfranchises young potential professionals that do not come from well-to-do socioeconomic backgrounds. Every step of this must be destroyed, burnt to the ground, never to be returned to. It is a system that is unfair to young players, unfair to fans of the beautiful game, and one that squanders the vast majority of talent in our nation. We will be feeling the repercussions of this failure for decades to come. If we do not make sweeping changes with urgency, we will be doomed to repeat this fate that was unimaginable until last night.
Alex Schaffer 