College to Pros for MLS: a Fatally Flawed System?

Tucked away in an USSoccerplayers post on the new MLS rules is this paragraph. I’d like your thoughts:

“And it’s another sign that the league is gradually giving up on college soccer as a source of future stars. The college game seems intent on staying put in its twilight parallel world, where its players are raved about at the local level and then emerge at the age of 22 expecting to make it in the professional game. But by then the vast majority are either too limited or too flawed to be of any worth in a league of rapidly increasing ambitions.” [emphasis added]

Or, in other words, the pointy-ball football model doesn’t work for futbol. And hanging onto it (as we’re doing with the upcoming Combine and SuperDraft) is one of the reasons the US and MLS lag behind the rest of the world.

Last week I quoted former Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Parreira on the Brazilian model of player development, which takes the opposite approach. Here’s that quote again:

“We have a mass production of players,” Parreira said. “I call it the factory. When a player is nine, he is already being evolved by a club. At 19, he has already had 10 years’ organised football. That’s why Brazil have so many good players, playing in the first division of Brazil aged 19.”

If we’re talking about skills, Parreira is absolutely correct. Soccer requires tactical and technical abilities and motor memory that need to be automatic by the time players reach their mid-teens, and the old US system isn’t set up to create that. Raising kids who eat, sleep, live and breathe soccer is the best way to make it happen, and unfortunately it’s harder to make that happen for players who have lives outside of the game. Like, for example, college students.

Still, though? Is there anybody else who has a hard time with the idea of throwing eighteen-year-old soccer machines into the league without a college degree when the minimum league salary is $12,900 per year? At least with the current model they’ll be able to use their degrees to make a living when their soccer careers end in five or ten years. Even if young players work their way up the ladder and start making as much as $200,000 a year, which is considered high in MLS, that’s not enough to save for the fresh start most will need when their playing careers end. It’s easy to say, “Well, when we improve the quality of the play, the salaries will naturallly increase.” But given the miniscule raises in the MLS salary cap recently, I’m not sure that’s where we’re heading. At least not any time soon.

But I’m probably being too much mom and not enough fan when I think these thoughts, and I know that Ian Plenderleith is right here. If you watched the US U-17s in the Nike friendlies earlier this month and saw the players who are growing up in a residential program, you saw that their skills are a much higher level than we’re used to at this age. (Or even at an older age. Like…oh…say, some MLS teams.) If the US is going to compete with the rest of the world, we’re eventually going to have to drop the US football post-college model.

Right?

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Category: MLS, North America, World Football