A few weeks ago, I read an article on Fox Soccer titled “US Soccer’s Secret Scouting Network”. It talked about a “secret” scouting program that was not so secret anymore. Why did it all of a sudden come out? I don’t know.
Within the
last five years, USSF has expanded its full time youth scouts from 3 to 9 and
its per diem scouts from 20 to 80. The article made it sound like it was such a
great accomplishment. It used the words “trebled” and “quadrupled” in the hopes
of making it sound better. Yes, I guess we are moving in the right direction in
that we are ADDING scouts, but the numbers and map blew everyone’s minds away,
and not in a good way. 9 full time
scouts for a country that holds over 300 million people. I can’t even put my
mind around only having 3! The article uses the number 25 million as the number
of soccer players in the US. How that number was figured out, I’m not
sure. If it’s just players in organized
leagues and clubs, then that is not an accurate picture at all.
The article
did not get into the strategy of the placing of scouts and there were a lot of
comments regarding the map and the supposed disbursement. If that is the actual
placements of scouts, it doesn’t seem to be an accurate representation of the
population and the potential talent that could be discovered. The number of
scouts per state should be treated a little bit like the House of
Representatives, the number in each state being decided according to the
population. It doesn’t make sense to spread them out geographically if there
are more people in one state than another. The logical idea is that where there
are more people, you have more eyes. Of course that means additional scouts,
and thus the issue of money comes up. That would be a huge INVESTMENT. I
emphasize the word investment because that is essentially what it is or at
least the way that it should be considered. It’s not something that you lose
and never get back. Being able to have more scouts increases the possibility of
finding that talent, of being able to field a team that could win games, a
championship team. What does a championship team bring in? MONEY. Money to be
able to continue having the best team in the world.
The thing that bothers me is that a lot of the times, scouts look at a player once and make their decision off that one day. To me, it seems a little unrealistic to be able
to decide if a player is talented in one day. I mean, how many times have we
not seen professional players have an off day? And these are professional
players, people who get paid to play and who have already proved themselves in
some way. They are not some guy who is
trying to prove that he has what it takes to be given a chance to represent his
country. A guy who knows that everything he does that day is going to make it or break
it for him. The odds of him getting another chance are small.
I kind of
wish the article would have gone a little deeper into what they plan to do
next, because I hope they don’t plan to stop here.
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