U.S. Soccer needs your kid’s youth club to help its national teams. Will it happen?

U.S. Soccer Federation sporting director Matt Crocker didn’t invent his slogan of choice, but that’s no reason not to use it.

“If we do what we’ve always done, we will get what we’ve always got,” he said in a seminar at the United Soccer Coaches Convention last week. He said it at another event last month, too, and has no doubt said it many other times in his tenure so far.

The message might even be getting through, helped by Mauricio Pochettino and Emma Hayes’ big-ticket successes lately with the senior national teams. But the people Crocker really needs to reach don’t work at his employer. In fact, they’ve historically worked against it.

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America’s youth soccer industrial complex — a phrase whose accuracy is confirmed at every convention — doesn’t like being told what to do by the sport’s governing body, or by anyone else. Many coaches and administrators have long cared more about winning games, making money, and keeping their jobs than about big-picture player development.

For as much as Crocker is judged on the senior national teams’ success, he is also measured on that big picture. And while he’s happy to let the men, the women, and the youth game do some things differently, he knows how he wants to steer the freighter carrying them all.

His map is the “U.S. Way” program scheduled to roll out this year. It includes some medicine for the youth game to consume, and Crocker is trying to serve it with quite a bit of sugar.

“We understand this is not U.S. Soccer standing here going, ‘You must do this, you must do that,’” he said. “It’s us better understanding your environments. It’s us better collaborating and working with you and giving you the resources — for free — to be able to tap into some of the things that might help you as a coach, that might help you as a club.”

Free sugar certainly tastes good, right?

Crocker’s case is helped by some medicine that U.S. Soccer has taken over the years. Before MLS teams built out their youth academy pipelines (which the NWSL hasn’t even started yet), the governing body ran a residency program for elite teenage boys in Bradenton, Fla., from 1999 to 2017.

From 2007 to 2020, there was also the U.S. Soccer Development Academy league for elite youth clubs. It had strict and often controversial rules for participation.

Both entities are not missed these days, and that proves an important point. Player development is supposed to be the job of clubs, not national federations.

Even though Crocker has pushed the governing body to fund full-scale youth national teams at every needed age (under-14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 23, boys and girls), they’re all still meant to be finishing schools. Clubs develop players, then the national teams pick from them.

“Without you guys in this room, we all fail,” Crocker said to a room that housed coaches, administrators, and more across American youth soccer. “We can put all our resources into the national teams, but unless we’re improving the quality of the child or young player coming into the system, it doesn’t matter. We just get the opportunity to sprinkle the cherry on the top, and we get 60 days [a year] if we’re lucky.”

Club teams, he continued, “get all that time with the players. You have the opportunity to really kick on player development.”

Some of his remarks went into the weeds, but it’s necessary to understand how player development in soccer works around the world, and how different it is from basketball, football, and baseball.

“When we talk about our international players or the international players that exist in this country, even at that level, 85% of player development happens in club [soccer] — and it starts when they’re [age] four,” Crocker said. “It’s not like as if, as soon as they go to the so-called pro club, whether that be MLS or NWSL, then all of a sudden, when they become a professional player, that’s when they develop. Development happens from the first touch point, the very first touch point at the grassroots.”

The crowd in attendance for Crocker’s remarks wasn’t very big, and he noticed from the stage.

“Either the presentation went really well last year, and everybody got all the content that they needed, so [they] didn’t decide to come back, or the presentation wasn’t good enough,” he said of his well-attended speech at last year’s convention.

When Crocker talked about how “there’s a lot of infighting, a lot of players going from one club to another, a lot of teams not playing each other and going further afield” — all of which are true — there was no applause, laughter, or groaning.

“That team can’t play that team, and they go all the way past them and jump on a plane and spend hundreds of dollars to go and play [another] team, because that league fell out with that league,” he said at another point. “Just crazy. This is about children. This is about the best opportunities for children.”

About 10 minutes in, Crocker got ready to slip in the medicine. But first, he offered a little more sugar.

“I think I opened last year with the same thing, which is player development happens in your clubs and your environment,” he said. “And our job in U.S. Soccer is to recognize that, celebrate it, and support you in doing the best jobs you can in really really challenging difficult situations.”

Then he went for it.

“Basically, our job is to define as the federation, as hopefully the leaders in soccer, to be able to give you guys clear guidance over: we believe youth development needs to look like this in the future,” he said. “And these are the things that we believe you could do to support a better quality of child, of player, achieving a better experience within the game in the future. So, us as a governing body finally putting the stake in the ground and going, ‘This is what we believe in.’”

He offered a little more sugar just to make sure it went down.

“Our job is not to tell you,” he said. “Our job is to show you these things can work and hopefully positively influence you to want to come and be part of the things that we’re talking about.”

A few minutes later, he went back to the medicine — this time, with something he knew is close to sacrilege in some parts of youth soccer.

“Our job as U.S. Soccer is to educate clubs, coaches, parents on when you are looking for your team next year, don’t automatically bring up the league table of winners and go, ‘I want my son to go there or daughter to go there because they must be the best club,’” he said. “That might not be the right environment for them. We need to start to make sure that we promote and value clubs that do great player development.”

And he happened to have an example lined up.

The day before Crocker spoke, he visited the Union’s facilities in Chester. It wasn’t his first time there, but it was his best chance yet to actually see the whole place, from the youth academy on up. He raved about it, just as Pochettino did when he came to town and counted the Union alumni on his squad.

“You see the culture that exists in that building,” Crocker said. “You see the kids smiling, and they’re in education — this is not even when they’re on the field to play. The education and the soccer go hand in glove, and it’s really just a great environment to see.”

Crocker tied all of this together with slides showing how many players in the world’s top 250 and 1,000, based on club success, come from various countries. He hired sports consulting firm Twenty First Group to crunch the numbers for him, and the result was clear.

In women’s soccer, it’s seven or more in the top 250. From 2016-25, the U.S. averaged 80 players at that level, by far the most; and only England had a higher major-tournament winning percentage. In the top 1,000 players, the U.S. had 180, almost 20% of the total.

» READ MORE: What’s the secret sauce at the Union’s youth academy? Here’s a taste of it.

Those teams, the data said, usually win at least 50% of their games in major tournaments, a benchmark “associated with consistently reaching the quarterfinals or later.”

But reduce to the top 50 players, and the U.S.’ portion has gone down lately.

“There’s this chasing pack now who are doing more youth development than they’ve ever done before,” Crocker said. “So the challenge in the women’s game is how do we maintain our top 180, but how do we get more players in that top 50?”

In men’s soccer, the success benchmark hits when a nation has four players in the top 250, or 15 in the top 1000. In the same 2016-25 time period, the U.S.’ average was zero in the top 250 and 5.8 in the top 1,000.

“Any team can win at any moment,” Crocker said. “But what we’re talking about is consistent, sustained success over many, many years … Clearly this picture doesn’t put us in that situation.”

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His goal is to get to 15 in the top 1,000, the men’s benchmark for a 50% win rate. And he returned to the top 250 to push home the final message.

It’s no surprise that the top five teams over the 10 years surveyed are Spain, France, Brazil, England, and Germany. But England was far off the pace at the start of the period: 15 players in the top 250 compared to Spain’s 49. Since then, they’ve steadily risen from 18 in 2018 to a table-topping 30. Spain is now second with 26.

The Twenty First Group researchers don’t think it’s a coincidence that England has reached two European Championship finals and a World Cup semifinal in that time.

And was it a coincidence that Crocker was the technical director of England’s Football Association from 2013-20, launching the “England DNA” program for the nation’s youth national teams along the way?

As he told The Inquirer last month, scaling that program up to a country the size of the United States — in both population and geography — is a gigantic task. But he knows where he wants to get to, and his U.S. Soccer colleagues used the rest of the convention to start to lay out the specifics.

“Currently, we have a landscape where it’s totally, I think, not un-governed, but you there’s not consistent standards across the whole country or best practices,” Crocker said. “We want to come to you, we want to be clear and concise about: if you want to be a club and you want to operate in this landscape, this is what best practice looks like. And we want to work with you to get to those best practice outcomes, and we are not going to to accept lower standards.”

The sugar tasted good. So will the right people take the rest of the medicine?

“This is not going to be an inspector coming in with a clipboard telling you all the things you’re doing wrong,” Crocker said. “This is U.S. Soccer going [for] health checks coming into your environments: where are you, what do you need, this is what good looks like, this is where you are. How do we work together to solve these things?”

By the end of the seminar, the crowd hadn’t revolted yet. It remained small, but greeted the end of Crocker’s prepared remarks with applause.

“You’ll walk away from here today, and you’ll either say that was great, or that was whatever,” he said.

Visiting a doctor can be that way sometimes.

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