IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-27804-2_12.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Young Americans: Transfers and Lost Dollars

In: Star-Spangled Soccer

Author

Listed:
  • Gary Hopkins

Abstract

Now here opens a can of worms in American soccer. Just how good are the USA players, how good the system producing them and how proficient the coaches developing their skills? I do not purport to be an expert coach or skilled manager but all I know is that I have followed and watched soccer for over 45 years, know a good player when I see one and a promising kid when exposed to one. I have followed American soccer since 1989 and my gut tells me the USA has lots of promising players, in fact a decent level of good players but nowhere near enough great players! For the purpose of this book and its focus, great players are those that the top European clubs would pay good money to buy. For until America is producing players and enough of them that are good enough to play for Manchester United, Barcelona, AC Milan and Real Madrid it will never win a World Cup. Because teams that do have players populating the top leagues in Europe. For America to compete it will have to adopt a systematic, professional and far-reaching player development system that discovers talent on par with the world’s best. It may not be easy but is necessary and actually can be done. Steve Heighway, the Liverpool youth team coach, who developed Owen, Gerrard, Carragher and Fowler and spent many years coaching youth soccer in Florida, once told me that he thought the talent pool he left behind was better than the one he inherited when he returned to Liverpool.

Suggested Citation

  • Gary Hopkins, 2010. "Young Americans: Transfers and Lost Dollars," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Star-Spangled Soccer, chapter 0, pages 246-255, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-27804-2_12
    DOI: 10.1007/978-0-230-27804-2_12
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-27804-2_12. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.