- When Research Gets Too Real, Too Soon, by Rafi Lehmann, Princeton.edu, October 7, 2017.
3. David beating Goliath is very exciting – unless you’re a fan of Goliath.
The United States has 330 million people and a massive youth soccer system, yet its men’s national soccer team just got bushwhacked by a team from Trinidad and Tobago, a country with 1.3 million residents.
How could this happen?
It’s not just about cultural norms. (Even if 90 percent of the U.S. population didn’t care about soccer, 33 million still would.) It’s not just about high school football teams siphoning off potential soccer talent. (There’s talent enough to go around when you have all those people.) It’s not just about U.S. soccer’s leadership and disorganization. (There are ineffective bureaucracies everywhere.) It’s not just about the unimaginative style of soccer played by U.S. teams. (Nobody criticizes the German team for its methodical style of play.)
Instead the problem is the American system of identifying and cultivating soccer talent – or, more accurately, not identifying this talent.
For the past six years I have been researching and writing about the commercialized youth sports industry, including a youth soccer system that excludes low-income and nonsuburban families from participating at the same rate as higher-income families.
U.S. kids don’t play soccer with bare feet on hardscrabble barrio fields where creativity dominates the action and with few grownups in sight.
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