For those who watched yesterday's World Cup Final between Spain and Holland and wondered 'what does the US have to do to get to that stage?', a response comes from Bill George - Professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
Whereas the Spanish and the Dutch focus on player development, the Americans focus on player selection. But if you don't develop your players, when it comes to selection, your choices are limited. That's why American men's coach Bob Bradley wound up selecting three of four strikers for the World Cup who hadn't been part of the two-year U.S. ordeal of qualifying matches and friendly tournaments: he had very little to choose from. No wonder U.S. strikers failed to score a single goal in the four World Cup games. Wouldn't Bradley love to have two strikers who sat on the bench for Spain against Germany: Fernando Torres and Cesc Fabregas.
In retrospect, U.S. players did remarkably well to battle back in every game. With a little bit of luck, they could have wound up in the semi-finals.
But the real reason we didn't advance further is that Bradley simply lacked the talent to choose from. So don't blame him. Instead, look to the boss of U.S. Soccer, Sunil Gulati, who focuses more on choosing and critiquing coaches that he does in creating a youth development system.
American soccer today has fifty percent more youth players than any other sport. In a nation of 300 million people (versus five million in the Netherlands), you would think that America could produce top-level players like it does in every other sport. Obviously, we have the athletes with the speed, size, agility and strength to be world-class players. But we'll never produce championship teams until we create a youth development system with consistent coaching.
I hope Sunil Gulati is reading this - rather than point fingers at what Bob Bradley didn't do, maybe he can look out and find a way to improve our development plan in youth soccer and Major League Soccer.
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