With J Hutcherson -- Hello Vancouver, or something like that. Later today, Major League Soccer will have compounded the player development problem by adding a second Canadian club, pushing MLS further away from the main reason it was founded. For those of you needing a reminder, that was a FIFA mandate about US player development. Country-specific because that's FIFA for you. One country with one topflight domestic league.
MLS has opted for the business and promotions model instead of the competitive. For those of you nodding along, at least consider for a second what's happening in Europe.
FIFA's attempt to make the 6+5 rule is a way to literally force clubs to focus on domestic player development. That includes the awareness that limiting foreign players will lower the awe value of the world all-star squads turning out for the elite clubs. It doesn't seem to be keeping them up nights.
In FIFA's version of the world, a domestic league that doesn't build up its country's national team misses the point. In US soccer, things have gotten slightly askew since the era when the leadership would agree to anything in exchange for a World Cup.
Major League Soccer's marketing wing actively promotes the biggest rival to US fan support in the United States. As soon as the market developed, the League started selling young American talent overseas for as much as they could get. That included keeping US players in the League because they couldn't find a club willing to pay their price point.
Profit motivation is what it is, and making that the point of criticism is naive at best. We all get that. At the same time, development has never been officially pushed off the table.
There's a very good reason for that, and its initials are F.I.F.A.
Consider the alternative. MLS announces the obvious for all to hear. They're a private business responsible only to a small group of investor/operators and, though happy to help in theory, in practice not really interested in its role in their own player development, much less the US National Team. After all, that's what mothballing the entire reserve division while pushing expansion in another country indicates.
FIFA could step in through a number of channels, but that's not really the point. The officially sanctioned US first division is now in the business of propping up Canadian soccer through league expansion and Mexican soccer through promotion, and none of this was part of an open discussion.
According to League policy, nothing concerning MLS is open. For whatever reason, the US Soccer Federation opted for the same privacy when stalling on its role as the national governing body for soccer in the United States.
The result is the League they sanction at cross-purposes, with no motivation to even explain. I'm not arguing that further Canadian expansion or marketing the Mexican National Team in the United States are things that need to be stopped outright.
What I'm saying is that the national governing body needed and needs to do its job. Make this a discussion rather than a League's declaration and lead US soccer with more than just the short-term best interest of the League and their mutual marketers in mind.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
