Jen Morgan

Mom, proud teacher of multiple AP classes, coach. US Navy Vet (FMF HM),🍢FSU grad X2, Braves, Liverpool, Five at the Back Podcast @Fiveatb

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@BuschLitePapi44 Best advice I’ve seen so far…

[Zack @ZackC428]

@VanLathan If you’re actually being serious, don’t pick a team. Just watch the next season. The wand will choose the wizard.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year.

That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer.

FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset.

US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records.

So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros.

Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability.

Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business.

They will not.

[Fifty Shades of Whey @davenewworld_2]

Congress held a hearing on private equity's role in turning youth sports into a fee-extraction machine. Average family spending on a child's primary sport increased 46% between 2019 and 2024, widening the participation gap between lower-income and affluent families.

Bipartisan lawmakers looked at firms buying up local leagues, tournaments, and sports facilities turning a community institution into a consolidated, profit-driven commodity.

They examined rising fees, mandatory add-on costs, "stay-to-play" hotel requirements, vertical integration across leagues, tournaments, and camps, and the way large operators can squeeze out smaller community programs.

Youth sports should be about easy access for all children instead of finding new ways to extract money from parents.

I haven't seen anyone talk about this, so I just wanted to bring this to everyone's attention, especially all the parents who follow me.

These Wall Street firms are colonizing everything in sight, but private equity doesn't run our country. Soccer moms do! And the fight for youth sports is an important one. Pricing millions of children out of sports is not in our nation's best interests.

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

Y’all. I hurt🤣

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

This is the type of shit I pay my phone bill for

[dandelion georgism 🔰🏗 @DolphinMossad]

“And every four years when the World Cup comes around, we will say that we’d dominate if we had a stronger youth program.”

“And will we develop a stronger youth program?”

“We will not.”

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@aoshow33 @bilcrnu @ZackC428 @VanLathan I love the knowledge seeking approach you’re taking. Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but if you like basketball it may be useful. FotMob is a really useful app that lets you track games (both national & professional teams) across multiple countries and tournaments.

[Josh Sexton @jsexton24]

Thierry Henry explains how football and basketball are more similar than you may think ⚽️🏀

(Fox Sports)

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@ZackC428 @VanLathan Absolutely solid advice

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@AbbasiCalvin @VanLathan 38 game season is less intense, but addicting. Both Villa & LFC are good teams w/ exciting futures ahead. I would recommend you also look into the history of the cities & some of their current players (e.g. search LFC’s Virgil van Dijk, etc.).

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@lady_alicat @Jthomp72 @VanLathan As Americans, we have some of the best access to games in the world through NBC/Peacock

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@petercrouch Absolutely

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@lawdy15 @theskiff13 Excruciatingly embarrassing

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@rudkin_abigail It’s so embarrassing

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@MenInBlazers Amen. Happy birthday, 🇺🇸

[Daniel Sturridge @DanielSturridge]

Cape Verde, one of the smallest nations at the tournament, just took world champions Argentina to the brink of penalties. If this World Cup on American soil doesn’t make America fall in love with football, I don’t know what will.

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@wataru0209 We love you!

[Lovable Liberal and his Old English sheepdog @DougWahl1]

THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!

Trump wants to cut down Washington DC's oldest grove of cherry trees along and eliminate the public biking path and picnic areas so he can build a golf course on public land, using public dollars, and taking spaces away from the public.

[Trevor Noah @Trevornoah]

I completely understand where you’re coming from, but for a lot of gamers physical discs are the only way they could afford to play games because they could get them secondhand. You can also give games to your younger siblings Which is a great way to introduce them to the games you were playing.

Most importantly though, as we saw from PlayStation this past week, if the media we buy is only digital, it can be taken away from us at a moment’s notice with no recourse. Imagine that, one day your entire library of games could be deleted overnight because technically you don’t own it.

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@stavrosl11 @rudkin_abigail Same!

[Jen Morgan @AlbaUnda]

@rudkin_abigail This is the ONE team I wouldn’t be heartbroken over him managing

[Mueller, She Wrote @MuellerSheWrote]

Everyone should be extremely concerned that birthright citizenship was 5-4 and not unanimous.