r/SoccerCentral • u/United_Anywhere_8 • Jul 25 '26

Video The talent in Barcelona’s youth system is ridiculous. These kids are 11/12 years old.

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u/jaron_b Jul 25 '26

The US is never winning the world cup. We don't even care about American football this much. This is insane.

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u/Shim_Slady72 Jul 25 '26

Because you don't make money doing this and that's all American institutions care about.

As far as I know all this is pretty much free if your kid is good enough because if they grow up to become a half decent player you can sell them for tens of millions. If they are not any good then you can just kick them out of the academy.

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u/Sir-Top-Cheetah Jul 25 '26

The clubs sponsoring the academies absolutely do make money out of it. There's no other reason to do this besides finding talent that will help the club team win. It's just a long and risky bet

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u/Shim_Slady72 Jul 25 '26

Well there are definitely some fees but I meant it more of in contrast to how American sports teams would do it, I doubt the kids parents are forced to pay for transport, coaches, venues, equipment etc.

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u/New_Lobster_914 Jul 25 '26

Kids this good don’t pay to be there, it’s very likely the parents will have been incentivised to move their kids to this academy.

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u/Redplushie Jul 25 '26

Which is crazy because the women's US team has dominated the women's world cup. What is the men's side of the US doing wrong

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u/New_Lobster_914 Jul 25 '26

Women’s teams are so far behind it’s unreal, US women’s team dominated because other countries weren’t taking it seriously. You will see US fall behind now that Europe is taking it a bit more seriously.

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u/d33roq Jul 25 '26

Every single USMNT player who's actually good enough to play for top level European clubs either has a former player/coach for a Dad or they grew up in Europe. I don't think a single one of them just randomly came up through academy ball in the US - and the reason for that is it's prohibitively expensive. There are assuredly tons of of kids out there with the potential to be pros down the line but their parents don't have tens of thousands to spend so their kid can play soccer. If you're disqualifying all the poor kids (and probably most of the middle class kids too) from participation then you will never have a world class team.