After the embarrassment,
we must go forward
After several decades of continuous participation and having hosted the FIFA Men’s World Cup in 1994, the US is out of the next one. Our country was sadly eliminated, in the preliminary rounds, by small nations such as Panama and Honduras that don’t have the man power and resources we think we have. It is sorrowful and devastating, but it came as no surprise to some of us. It is obvious that we didn’t do our homework right for long time and now we will pay the consequences. This unfortunate situation will take us back 50 years, will make us lose gazillions amount of money and make the sport of soccer even more unpopular that it is now.
Many people are furious and demand the immediate resignation
of the coach and the president of the Federation. We understand the feeling of
the fans as we are unhappy too, but in my view, that is not the way to go,
instead we must use our intelligence to think and come up with sensible, long
term solutions. We must use the opportunity to learn, to change and to move
forward.
If you analyze the facts it becomes clear that soccer in
America has many fundamental problems with their structure and organization. Like
it or not we must understand that we are still far away from being a top soccer
country since we don’t have a definitive soccer culture. We play soccer mostly
to baby seat our children and/or to please hypercapnic, obese, soccer uneducated
fans (“win or lose, we are here for the booze”). Furthermore and more importantly,
we don’t develop soccer players because we don’t have real soccer coaches, instead
we allow amateurs “conoceurs” to lead our youth into competing at very early
ages to try to win at all cost just to please their parent’s super ego rather
than to teach kids how to play the healthy sport of soccer. We are not here “for
the kids” as the motto our youth leaders pretend, instead many of those leaders
are here for their own ego and monetary advantage. Unfortunately our recent immigrants
don’t bring with them the passion for the game either, and our children are not
passionate about soccer, because they don’t “breath” soccer like the children
of the rest of the world. They don’t want to emulate Carli Lloyd or Chris
Pulisic like the kids from the rest of the world want to emulate Leo Messi or
Cristiano Ronaldo.
I can go and go detailing the malfunctions of our soccer
society, but I am not interested in just criticizing. I am mostly interested in
finding solutions to the problems. I want to propose to take a look at
fundamental psychological and structural changes that our soccer institutions may
need to endorse to get better. They are as follows:
1. Adhere to the basic idea that soccer is a sport for life,
that we can develop better people by way of soccer. The concept here is that
soccer will help modeling our character.
2. Change the obsolete structure of youth soccer totally disconnected
from “adult” soccer. We must work all together toward a common goal.
3. Integrate the love for our Nation and our families with the
love and passion for soccer. After all, soccer is the best and safest team
sport of them all.
4. Adapt our soccer leagues to the international standards and don’t try to “re-invent the wheel"
5. Support our grassroots activities instead of exploiting them
5. Support our grassroots activities instead of exploiting them
