The quest to find soccer talent in America has not always been an easy one. While the methods used to mine the player pool in the United States for quality players are improving, the country remains too large to cover with any particular system.
This means players often fall through the cracks, and the desperation to find opportunities to impress scouts and move closer to the pro ranks is as real in the USA as any other country on earth.
Nike’s global soccer talent search, 'The Chance,' is looking to give players who have never had the venues as other players to show their stuff. The competition is covering more than 50 countries in search of 100 players to compete in the Grand Final in Barcelona. Nike will then select 16 winners to make up a team that will train and play with some of the world’s best teams in a tour taking place in January and February of 2013.
Past winners of the competition have earned professional contracts after being spotted by scouts while taking part in The Chance.
Scouts have already begun watching players at various locations in the United States, searching for standouts to be selected for the national final.
The process is like American Idol for soccer—of course, instead of singing, the competitors are soccer players trying to prove they have the talent to play on the next level.
The opportunity is a far different road than the more traditional paths American players have usually had to try to become a pro. For decades, the Olympic Development Program (ODP) served as a key conduit for talented players to get noticed and eventually play their way into the US youth national team system.
If ODP wasn’t a viable option, players also went the traditional college route, with college soccer allowing players to not only be seen by pro scouts, but also to hone their game and mature as individuals while attending college.
For the past dozen years, many of the country’s best young talents have been selected to take part in the US Under-17 National Team Residency Program, which has long been the closest thing in the States to the kind of full-time development program found in places like Europe and South America. The intensive program counts Landon Donovan, Michael Bradley, Jozy Altidore and Oguchi Onyewu among its alumni.
There have been exceptions to these standard paths in the past, with talented young players being spotted by European scouts at young ages and signing with clubs overseas rather than going the traditional college route to the pros, and for the past 17 years, Major League Soccer.
MLS has become more involved in the player development process, establishing academies across the country, but with just 19 MLS teams in the United States trying to cover a country as big as ours, there are still plenty of voids where players can go unnoticed.
US Soccer has stepped up the country’s player development system by ramping up the Development Academy system, which has consolidated many of the best youth soccer programs in the nation and implemented standards and practices to help better prepare players for the higher levels of the game.
That has meant improved coaching, as well as more opportunities for players who might have been left out in the past by development models built on “pay-for-play” system, which required players to pay their own way to be a part of elite programs.
With most MLS teams setting up their own free academy systems, and youth academies creating free opportunities for the country’s best talent, the USA has seen a considerable improvement in recent years to the player development system.
It is still a work in progress though. There are still hundreds, if not thousands, of talented players who aren’t fortunate enough to take the traditional paths to the pros, or who may not otherwise have a way to be noticed by scouts. That makes a program like Nike’s ‘The Chance’ all the more valuable in a country as large as the US, a country that is seeing the sport of soccer grow rapidly.
‘The Chance’ is opening the door for players who might have otherwise gone unnoticed, and it just might help uncover the next American soccer star to follow in the footsteps of Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey.
