You do raise the essence of the problem eloquently.... As I have been telling people every day,
US youngsters must develop a passion for the sport. This means that as soon as they wake up
they should want to go outside to juggle the ball, and do other ball control practises. They
should want to develop a touch for the ball...and practise against their friends to develop
dribbling, and other technical skills.
Football in this country is not developed the right way. What I see are kids going out for
a 2 hour practise under some expensive cac, who thinks he should try to teach kids tactics
at the age of 6. This is counterproductive, and even in the equally frustrated UK, they have
come to that realisation. As a result, they have banned the keeping of the score for kids
playing football, who are under a certain age. The reason why is that they just want the kids
to play, and not worry about scoring as much as they do about developing their individual
technical skills..
I do believe that a generation ago, Johan Cruyff railed against exactly the kind of player
development we see here in US, and produced a textbook detailing the skill necessary to
develop a kid. However, since teams like Germany seemed to be doing well with robots,
the admonision was abeyed.
One other thing that would help the US is the introduction of promotion and relegation.
The sort of cutthroat competition that such a system imposes improves dexterity and
acuity.
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