B with a lake

[Sam Mahmood @TheSammahmood_]

The U.S. soccer federation is a poor return on invested capital.

I played soccer for 20+ years.

Grassroots.
Academy.
D1 college.
Pursued professionally after.

And I’ll say the quiet part out loud:

The US soccer infrastructure is broken.

In America, we treat playing D1 soccer like it is the peak achievement.

For most families, clubs, coaches, and players, the entire youth soccer machine is built around one goal:

Get recruited.
Get a scholarship.
Play college soccer.

But if the objective is to produce world-class players, D1 soccer is a terrible development path.

From 18-22, some of the most important technical development years of your career, you are preparing for a 3-4 month season built largely around athleticism, direct play, set pieces, fitness, and survival.

Now compare that to an 18-year-old in Spain, Argentina, Morocco, Italy, England, or France.

That player has likely been in a professional environment for years.

Training daily.
Playing meaningful matches year-round.
Competing against grown professionals.
Getting thousands more touches.
Learning how to solve the game under pressure.

The gap is massive.

And it shows.

American players are usually athletic.
They are usually fit.
They usually compete hard.

But at the highest levels, that is not enough.

The biggest difference is technical comfort.

We do not move the ball like Spain.
We do not combine like Argentina.
We do not play with the same fluidity, rhythm, and confidence you see from countries where the game is embedded into the culture from childhood.

That comes down to volume.

Volume of touches.
Volume of street soccer.
Volume of futsal.
Volume of unstructured play.
Volume of high-level training environments.
Volume of meaningful games.

In the US, youth soccer is expensive, overly organized, overly coached, tournament-driven, and too often built around winning games at 13 instead of developing players for 23.

Parents spend thousands.
Clubs charge thousands.
Travel teams fly all over the country.
Showcases become the product.
Recruiting becomes the scoreboard.

But the return on invested capital is poor.

We probably spend more money on youth soccer than almost any country in the world, yet the technical output does not match the investment.

That is a broken operating model.

And like any business, if the output is weak, you do not blame the customer.

You inspect the system.

The US has talent.
The US has athletes.
The US has money.
The US has facilities.

But the foundation is wrong.

We built a pay-to-play, college-recruiting machine and confused it for a world-class player development system.

Those are not the same thing.

Until we fix the grassroots layer, increase meaningful touches, make development less dependent on family income, and stop treating college soccer as the top of the mountain, the US will keep underperforming relative to its resources.

I’m not saying this to trash US Soccer.

I’m saying it because I lived it.

And if we actually want to become a powerhouse, we have to be honest about the infrastructure first.

[Jah 🇫🇷🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @KyleMcCordMuse]

Them making soccer a rich white kid sport is one of the worst things this country has ever done

[Sports Book Reviews @SprtBookReviews]

Why can't the USA have a dominant soccer team? Look how much it costs to play under 9 soccer for my local team. My parents didn't pay even ten percent of this in total for 8 years of me playing as a kid in Ireland.

[ALUTHEDON @Mbakaza4L]

AN ICE AGENT TORTURED A MAN TO DEATH, THEN COVERED IT UP.

AN. ICE. AGENT. TORTURED. A. MAN. TO. DEATH. THEN. COVERED. IT. UP!

[Hoop Central @TheHoopCentral]

YAXEL LENDEBORG TONIGHT:

19 POINTS
6 ASSISTS
5 REBOUNDS
100% FG
100% 3P
100% FT
21 MINUTES

WARRIORS DEBUT. 🔥🔥🔥

[Warren @swd2]

Notice when you want an abortion the fetus is a person but when we talk about immigration, actual children are called offspring.

Words matter. They are saying the Nazi shit out loud. Listen to them.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

HEGSETH: “The document says Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

BRENNAN: “(Obama’s Iran Deal) said that too.” 🎯

HEGSETH: “The difference is we did this from a position of strength.” 🤡

(TRANSLATION: this was an unnecessary, costly war that accomplished nothing)

[Nur Dogan @nurdogandiyorki]

That’s the reality!
#FIFA

[San Francisco 49ers @49ers]

The 49ers mourn the passing of former LB Aldon Smith.

📰 https://t.co/gVxEEdWtLp

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

If you earned $10,000 a day from the dawn of humans 300,000 years ago, you'd have earned less money than Elons wealth.

Tax this shit out of billionaires (and one trillionaire)

[Liam Nissan™ @theliamnissan]

Yup

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Reason #1,000,000,000,000 why we should tax the rich.

[The Pink King @DayalSami]

Call me a hater but I think living in a world where both trillionaires and global poverty coexist is a sign humanity has failed as a species

[Adam Analysis @adamemedia1]

🚨 🇮🇱 THIS IS MASSIVE

An ISRAELI CYBER FIRM just got exposed for running a GLOBAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE OPERATION across five countries, simultaneously.

Read that again.

The moment journalists called BlackCore for comment, the company DELETED ITS ENTIRE INTERNET PRESENCE

This is what a ROGUE STATE does when it can’t win the argument.

[More details in the replies 👇🏼 ]

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

If Bernie's 5% annual wealth tax on billionaires had been enacted in 2012, Elon Musk would be worth less than $365 billion instead of the $1.2 trillion that he's worth today.

Elon would still be the wealthiest man alive & every family in America would have universal childcare.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

People have to start gofundmes to pay for cancer treatment

[Zoldyck @Michealkaiser_]

This is what a holocaust looks like.

[Bryce Greene @TheGreeneBJ]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

[SF Giants on NBCS @NBCSGiants]

BRYCE ELDRIDGE WALK-OFF GRAND SLAM TO COMPLETE THE COMEBACK 😱😱😱

[Suppressed News. @SuppressedNws1]

WOW.

AlJazeera just dropped a ONE HOUR documentary about ISRAEL’s CRIMES against the PALESTINIANS.

This is very HARD TO WATCH.