The distinction between Latin and European playing styles is of vital importance to American soccer. It is intimately related to the question of a playing style for the U.S. men’s national team.
Briefly: during its 100-year history in the USA the sport has been largely organized and controlled by European immigrants or by Americans under European influence. I can narrow that down, because most of the European influence has come from Britain and from Germany.
Which, for most of those 100 years, was just fine. But it’s anything but fine today. Over the past three decades a massive change has come about in the ethnic composition of the American population. Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the country. A large proportion of the Hispanics are soccer-oriented, and they, of course, play the Latin way.
That short paragraph ought to be followed by one describing how traditional American soccer has welcomed the arrival of tens of thousands of soccer fans and players -- a quite extraordinary windfall for a country still working hard to build up soccer’s popularity in this country.
Well, there is no such paragraph. Because the American “welcome” has been either non-existent or tepid. This has to be one of the all-time great sporting blunders, a really colossal collapse of common sense. So complete has been the silence from soccer’s leaders, that one can legitimately ask what ought to be a fatuous question: have these guys even noticed what is going on?
But the question is not fatuous. For decades now I have been trying to strike up conversations on the topic with scores of these so-called leaders. Frankly, a waste of time. The replies have ranged from frivolous to hostile, taking in genuine puzzlement, but virtually always they have been uninformed and/or evasive.
And it does not get any better. My colleague Mike Woitalla, in a series of interviews on this website, has been asking a bunch of top soccer guys about the development of a U.S. style, and has managed to bring up the matter of the Hispanic players.
Of particular interest was Woitalla’s session with two of U.S. Soccer’s topmost coaching guys -- Nico Romeijn (Chief Sport Development Officer) and Ryan Mooney (Chief Soccer Officer). On the subject of Hispanic players Mooney’s answers were an absolute disgrace. Asked about the number of Hispanics holding A, B, or C licenses, Mooney replied: “At the moment we don’t have demographic information in the DCC (Digital Coaching Center), so we’re not able to tell you.”
Not bad, scoring about a 9 on the slippery-evasion scale, I’d say. Mooney cannot address the matter because his computer can’t help him. Apparently, Mooney has no personal experience of anything Hispanic, so he cannot speak from his own experience. Not quite true -- he has seen enough for him to drop a sledge-hammer hint that the lack of Hispanics is their own fault. Of course -- exactly as has been the case for decades (he doesn’t know this?) -- he has trouble using the word “Hispanic” -- he talks instead of trying to recruit coaching instructors from a “more diverse applicant pool” -- where, it seems, “we have found, many times, very unfortunately, that the interest is not there ...”
I wonder -- has it ever entered Mooney’s mind that what the U.S. coaching schemes offer might genuinely not appeal to those who like Latin American soccer? Doubtful. That would involve Mooney and Romeijn in the many subtleties that distinguish the Latin American game from the European.
If there’s one thing that jumps off the page when both Romeijn (who is Dutch) and Mooney speak, it is self-satisfaction. Romeijn admits, “We acknowledge there are different ways of teaching,” which is big of him, while also proclaiming that, “We are confident that we are doing it the right way.” Self-satisfaction becomes smugness.
No doubt, Mooney and Romeijn would like an almost hilariously diverse army of coaching instructors. They’d all be teaching the same thing, though?
Well, no. Because Romeijn makes it clear that what they’re after is uniformity of teaching technique. Without getting into pedagogic technicalities, I think that translates into this: these Federation-licensed coaches must be above all top-rate teachers. Super experts at getting their message into their pupil’s brain, at making their sessions understandable, etc., etc.
Certainly commendable. Probably we’ve all suffered under teachers who made an hour’s class seem like a year. Anything to avoid that is obviously a good thing. Romeijn’s interest seems to end there. Neither he nor Mooney show much interest in what these coaches are teaching -- interest in the strictly soccer part, that is.
Romeijn repeatedly emphasizes the importance of getting the “development environment” right, “but the style, what they teach, that’s up to them.” Mooney also denies any intention to insist that players always play in “a certain way”. It is, he says, “Far more a process of guided discovery ...”
And what do coaches discover when they’re guided by instructors who know little of Latin soccer?
Enough. It is clear that the entire Federation coaching scheme is in the hands of people who, while not necessarily hostile to Latin soccer, really can’t be bothered with it.
The huge, and growing, reservoir of Hispanic coaches and players is being slighted. They can join in if they agree to Europeanize their thinking. That is probably seen, by the Federation, as the ideal, an Americanization program.
Are things now suddenly to get better under new President Carlos Cordeiro? Oh no, there’s little hope of that. Cordeiro’s “open letter” to the youth soccer community last June, set up a five-man task force to look into five “critical issues.” The task force does not include a Hispanic, and the word Hispanic did not appear in the open letter. This time, from the very top, the U.S. Soccer president himself lets us know that he’s unaware of any Hispanic issue that needs to be addressed.
U.S. Soccer is badly at fault, but the situation is little better elsewhere in American soccer.
Look at the coaches, look at their massive annual convention, with its overwhelming presence of European guest coaches. Has there ever been, among the thousands of talks, lectures, clinics and discussions given there over the past three decades, even one devoted to “the Hispanic question”? Not that I’ve been aware of, and I’ve attended most of those events.
The colleges? How many Hispanic coaches or players do they have? College soccer, high on speed and hustle, is about as far removed from the Latin game as is imaginable.
MLS, with a greater international presence, does a bit better. But it has taken them nearly 20 years to arrive at today’s point, where key players are also key entertainers and are also largely Latin Americans -- think Higuain, Valeri, Lodeiro, Acosta, Piatti, Vela, Almiron, Maxi Moralez et al.
Precisely the sort of players that this country, with all its resources, its academies, its elaborate coaching courses and licenses, consistently fails to produce.
Yet, at a younger age, those players already exist here. In the youth ranks there are plenty of young Hispanics who are trying to learn to play that way. Who have Maradona and Messi and Neymar as their heroes and models.
Briefly: during its 100-year history in the USA the sport has been largely organized and controlled by European immigrants or by Americans under European influence. I can narrow that down, because most of the European influence has come from Britain and from Germany.
Which, for most of those 100 years, was just fine. But it’s anything but fine today. Over the past three decades a massive change has come about in the ethnic composition of the American population. Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the country. A large proportion of the Hispanics are soccer-oriented, and they, of course, play the Latin way.
That short paragraph ought to be followed by one describing how traditional American soccer has welcomed the arrival of tens of thousands of soccer fans and players -- a quite extraordinary windfall for a country still working hard to build up soccer’s popularity in this country.
Well, there is no such paragraph. Because the American “welcome” has been either non-existent or tepid. This has to be one of the all-time great sporting blunders, a really colossal collapse of common sense. So complete has been the silence from soccer’s leaders, that one can legitimately ask what ought to be a fatuous question: have these guys even noticed what is going on?
But the question is not fatuous. For decades now I have been trying to strike up conversations on the topic with scores of these so-called leaders. Frankly, a waste of time. The replies have ranged from frivolous to hostile, taking in genuine puzzlement, but virtually always they have been uninformed and/or evasive.
And it does not get any better. My colleague Mike Woitalla, in a series of interviews on this website, has been asking a bunch of top soccer guys about the development of a U.S. style, and has managed to bring up the matter of the Hispanic players.
Of particular interest was Woitalla’s session with two of U.S. Soccer’s topmost coaching guys -- Nico Romeijn (Chief Sport Development Officer) and Ryan Mooney (Chief Soccer Officer). On the subject of Hispanic players Mooney’s answers were an absolute disgrace. Asked about the number of Hispanics holding A, B, or C licenses, Mooney replied: “At the moment we don’t have demographic information in the DCC (Digital Coaching Center), so we’re not able to tell you.”
Not bad, scoring about a 9 on the slippery-evasion scale, I’d say. Mooney cannot address the matter because his computer can’t help him. Apparently, Mooney has no personal experience of anything Hispanic, so he cannot speak from his own experience. Not quite true -- he has seen enough for him to drop a sledge-hammer hint that the lack of Hispanics is their own fault. Of course -- exactly as has been the case for decades (he doesn’t know this?) -- he has trouble using the word “Hispanic” -- he talks instead of trying to recruit coaching instructors from a “more diverse applicant pool” -- where, it seems, “we have found, many times, very unfortunately, that the interest is not there ...”
I wonder -- has it ever entered Mooney’s mind that what the U.S. coaching schemes offer might genuinely not appeal to those who like Latin American soccer? Doubtful. That would involve Mooney and Romeijn in the many subtleties that distinguish the Latin American game from the European.
If there’s one thing that jumps off the page when both Romeijn (who is Dutch) and Mooney speak, it is self-satisfaction. Romeijn admits, “We acknowledge there are different ways of teaching,” which is big of him, while also proclaiming that, “We are confident that we are doing it the right way.” Self-satisfaction becomes smugness.
No doubt, Mooney and Romeijn would like an almost hilariously diverse army of coaching instructors. They’d all be teaching the same thing, though?
Well, no. Because Romeijn makes it clear that what they’re after is uniformity of teaching technique. Without getting into pedagogic technicalities, I think that translates into this: these Federation-licensed coaches must be above all top-rate teachers. Super experts at getting their message into their pupil’s brain, at making their sessions understandable, etc., etc.
Certainly commendable. Probably we’ve all suffered under teachers who made an hour’s class seem like a year. Anything to avoid that is obviously a good thing. Romeijn’s interest seems to end there. Neither he nor Mooney show much interest in what these coaches are teaching -- interest in the strictly soccer part, that is.
Romeijn repeatedly emphasizes the importance of getting the “development environment” right, “but the style, what they teach, that’s up to them.” Mooney also denies any intention to insist that players always play in “a certain way”. It is, he says, “Far more a process of guided discovery ...”
And what do coaches discover when they’re guided by instructors who know little of Latin soccer?
Enough. It is clear that the entire Federation coaching scheme is in the hands of people who, while not necessarily hostile to Latin soccer, really can’t be bothered with it.
The huge, and growing, reservoir of Hispanic coaches and players is being slighted. They can join in if they agree to Europeanize their thinking. That is probably seen, by the Federation, as the ideal, an Americanization program.
Are things now suddenly to get better under new President Carlos Cordeiro? Oh no, there’s little hope of that. Cordeiro’s “open letter” to the youth soccer community last June, set up a five-man task force to look into five “critical issues.” The task force does not include a Hispanic, and the word Hispanic did not appear in the open letter. This time, from the very top, the U.S. Soccer president himself lets us know that he’s unaware of any Hispanic issue that needs to be addressed.
U.S. Soccer is badly at fault, but the situation is little better elsewhere in American soccer.
Look at the coaches, look at their massive annual convention, with its overwhelming presence of European guest coaches. Has there ever been, among the thousands of talks, lectures, clinics and discussions given there over the past three decades, even one devoted to “the Hispanic question”? Not that I’ve been aware of, and I’ve attended most of those events.
The colleges? How many Hispanic coaches or players do they have? College soccer, high on speed and hustle, is about as far removed from the Latin game as is imaginable.
MLS, with a greater international presence, does a bit better. But it has taken them nearly 20 years to arrive at today’s point, where key players are also key entertainers and are also largely Latin Americans -- think Higuain, Valeri, Lodeiro, Acosta, Piatti, Vela, Almiron, Maxi Moralez et al.
Precisely the sort of players that this country, with all its resources, its academies, its elaborate coaching courses and licenses, consistently fails to produce.
Yet, at a younger age, those players already exist here. In the youth ranks there are plenty of young Hispanics who are trying to learn to play that way. Who have Maradona and Messi and Neymar as their heroes and models.