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Message: [QUOTE="IthacaMatt, post: 209111, member: 405"] It used to be in the 90s, when we hosted the World Cup in 94, and the sport first began to take hold, especially with our game against Brazil, well back then we could defend really well, but we had almost no chance in hell of scoring against anyone. That 94 World Cup team had a lot of amateur players, just to measure how far we've come in terms of our talent base. Now, time has shown that American players play kind of a British game; we're big and fast and athletic and we overpower opponents. We tend to have few players who have the skill level of players from certain warm weather parts of the world where football is the big thing. Klinsmann wants to get more skilled guys into the program. Right now, short term, it looks like he is mining Germany for talent that has dual citizenship. Great strategy, if you ask me. Kids who play their way into the Bundesliga are likely to be good enough to earn consideration for the national team. Another thing that Klinsmann is trying to figure out is how to tap into poor Hispanic neighborhoods in California and the Southwest, where potential "street soccer" Mexican style players may exist. I think that's a great strategy, if we can somehow get something like Boy's Clubs or Little League for soccer in poor neighborhoods. Not everyone grows to 6-7 and has an NBA future, after all. Lionel Messi looks about 5-4 and was a sickly kid with Ricketts from the slums or Argentina, sent away to soccer school in Spain at 14. It's like a Dickens novel. For all its merits and growth, MSL is still AAA soccer. It's a minor league, because the wage scale is messed up with these 3 "big" contracts per team, and the very small salaries for everyone else. It's a try-out league, not a major league. It's the MAC or the Conference USA of national premier leagues around the world. We've got to grow the product and fix it a bit, and it may catch on in the US in a bigger way than hockey, for instance, or Formula 1. And I don't mean to speak heresey, but is it me, or maybe has NASCAR jumped the shark ? Is it starting its decline do you think ? I'm getting that sense, kind of like with pro wrestling about a decade ago... [/QUOTE]

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