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Originally Posted by demonrail666
You're obviously right. England employ an Italian coach, after all. But England doesn't struggle to maintain a footballing identity amongst its people in the way that the US does. I imagine most Americans still think football is something other countries do very well and any ongoing relience on foreign talent will only reinforce that. America's sports culture (from what I understand) is about winning or nothing. I'm sure it would take the US Team to win the world cup before its media finally woke up but even if it did, without a national hero to pin that victory on, I wonder how interested people would be. Those are all hypotheticals but I do think America's strange relationship with broadly international team sports throw bup some quite unique differences between say England's attitude towards foreign coaches and the US's. And while I think talk of the US winning the WC is obviously somewhat premature, it should be noted that no team has ever won it with a foreign coach. So yeah, I still think Klinsmann is the right move right now but I'd worry if he set a precedent for the future.
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oh man, yes, i see where you're coming from, yes. when some olympic games were going on many years ago, there was an irish swimming champion, and i had an irish professor who mentioned he was annoyed that all the american commentators discussed was how the irish swimmer trained in the USA. and yes, americans bing extreme individualists always need a "hero" rather than a good team (the almighty quarterback).
last year we had our "hero" in brandon donovan, people were talking about him all over the place, but the thing is that such celebrity is never long lasting. he had his 15 minutes.
what is lacking here is a popular culture of the sport, and for it to be adopted in the streets as a regular pastime. right now many americans (you've seen some of that here) consider football "sissy", mostly because i think at this point it's associated with moms in minivans and coed teams instead of concussions, leg fractures, broken ribs, oliver kahn, etc. it's not seeing as the combat it is, but rather some sort of organized playground activity with parents swarming all over you.
then again, many american schools don't even have recess anymore, kids just go from class to class preparing for tests. when i was in school we'd had 10 minute breaks between classes, and those would be spent furiously kicking a bal--and each other. i don't know where i'm going with this but gringo children have little physical activity these days. do they play in the street or is it just video games and fuckin "play dates"? you know what the cfuck a "play date" is? fucking ridiculous...
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Originally Posted by the ikara cult
I remember reading an article when i was 13 or something saying that if the USA took football as seriously as it does American football and basketball theyd win the World Cup every time. Im not sure i concur with that, but the US has a perfect system in place with the way they use universities for their other sports.
Frankly the way football is run now people are losing faith in the honesty of the organisations by the minute
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the university system works well for sports like basketball and american football because college teams are semi-pro, they draw huge audiences and a lot of money and if you get a sports scholarship you're already famous pro teams try to reruit you before you graduate, etc. but who watches college "soccer" ?(i hate that name-- socks?) nobody i know. it's not good enough to be an exciting spectacle. so i think the way to go would be to a) make professional teams more attractive by providing a quality spectacle, and b) developing young players at the team level instead of farming them off to college and then going into a stupid lottery to get them.
regardless, this is going to happen over generations, and it's growing at a grassroots level, in whatever warped way americans do it, and that's where real change is going to come from. usa wold cup champion 2110? -- maybe.