Oregon Soccer Quality

[Guest]

I know there’s a lot of criticism of the quality of Oregon soccer in this forum. Is it possible that soccer in Oregon (and specifically in Portland) has way too many soccer clubs for talent to accumulate to any one specific team consistently? My experience is that Portland has too many clubs competing for the top talent for a city of its size. Other cities of similar size that I have lived in usually have 2-4 elite clubs, and then a bunch of community clubs. I feel like in Portland, you have 6-8 clubs that are trying to field elite teams so all the best players get spread around, and diluting the overall product.

[Guest]

Luton Town FC was in one of the smallest boroughs to have had a Premier League team, and its population is something like 230K. So, it seems like Portland SHOULD be able to support at least 10 decent youth clubs (well, in a dream world, ten Prem teams) since it has a metro population of 2.5M. But, if you designed your ideal situation for club teams what would it be? Mine would be something like one club for each of Portland's 5 quadrants, and then maybe one magnet super club for the central city and one for the east and west suburbs. And Possibly one each for the North and South Suburbs.


Then, for the rest of Oregon, every 230K should be able to have a decent club. That means, Salem metro, Eugene metro, Bend metro, and almost Medford metro (220K). We're not really far off from that. If you add the combined Albany and Corvallis metros, we get to almost 220K also. So, the clubs almost line up with what I would design, but I would say the quality is not what I would like. It seems to come down to Coaching and Culture to me. I think that means the quality overall is low(er than it should be). Proper footballing cultures would have their own training grounds, we're missing a lot of those. A proper footballing culture would have highly educated, highly experienced, well-paid coaches as well. We are missing that too. Sometimes we get highly educated coaches, sometimes we get highly experienced pro players, but there might be one highly paid, highly experienced, highly educated coach at each club, and they're usually the old guy who doesn't do much coaching and instead "runs" the club.

[Guest]

I think your comparison to Luton Town and ideal youth soccer scenario is based off an ideal of soccer being the sole major sport in the US. The reality is soccer competes against a variety of other sports for elite athletes. I
think the problem of good coaching/culture comes down to lack of experience at the coaching/club level. Youth soccer is not profitable enough to attract top coaching talent.

[Guest]

I think your comparison to Luton Town and ideal youth soccer scenario is based off an ideal of soccer being the sole major sport in the US. The reality is soccer competes against a variety of other sports for elite athletes. I
think the problem of good coaching/culture comes down to lack of experience at the coaching/club level. Youth soccer is not profitable enough to attract top coaching talent.

Yes, you got it exactly right. I was comparing "serious" football culture to our own. We are not serious about soccer, and the quality reflects that. But, I did make an enormous concession in that a Premier-League-level town might be comparable to a Decent-Youth-Club level city over here.

Still, we agree on what you said. Not enough money in it for club-owned facilities everywhere with full-time coaching and support staff everywhere as well. So, we have what we have, and it's just about what we deserve.

[Guest]

There has to be more community outreach, so many great athletes never discover soccer due to financial constraints or “good club” being 40 mins away.
No one cares about elite players being on the same team, get more players playing at higher levels and you will have better quality to compete with huge populations like NY Texas FL and CA.
My suggestion, find a way to have 32 good clubs for 7v7, 16 for 9v9, 8 for 11v11.
realistically each of 8 11v11 teams should be having good relationships with 3-4 neighborhood clubs in the area.

[Guest]

Or let Oregon be Oregon. The kids are at the level they are and will be fine as adults having played a fun sport while growing up.

[Guest]

Or let Oregon be Oregon. The kids are at the level they are and will be fine as adults having played a fun sport while growing up.

At least as adults they can stay local and play vs other like-minded souls. Unlike their youth days when costly laughable privates & meaningless x-country travel were labeled as the 'Fun'.