Club Soccer Crossroads: Clubs Must Make Money

Article From Top Drawer Soccer
Exact Link: http://www.topdrawersoccer.com/component/option,com_topdrawer/Itemid,251/nid,7503/ 

Written by Robert Ziegler, ESNN January 01, 2009

(2nd in a series of articles about elite youth soccer in America being at a crossroads)

Longtime readers of the site have seen me make mention of a subgroup within the soccer community who have apparently grown comfortable with making money off of mediocrity. 

I don't mean to paint with too broad of a brush here and I really have no way to quantify just how prevalent a practice this is, but IT IS out there on the elite youth soccer landscape, and it is important for us as a soccer nation, not to mention to one soccer family at a time, that we learn how to recognize this syndrome and eradicate it. 

Making money is vital to the quality development of players.

As we address that, it's also important not to get caught up in some socialist/populist economic agenda that treats the necessary club and coaching services as an entitlement or some kind of national program. The thing that will most help real player development in this country is if clubs figure out the way to make money doing it. I'll say it again in bold type: It is imperative for clubs to develop a sustainable economic model of player development.

By this I do not mean a machine that generates revenue for the purpose of making an individual wealthy. If the business goes well enough that company employees make a good or even a very good living, that is a good thing, but the business needs to be set up to support solid performance in delivering a good product. That is what will be sustainable in an increasingly sophisticated marketplace.

This means that the business has the proper manpower to truly provide the right kind of coaching to its customer base. It doesn't mean a club with one coach stretched too thin among players and teams, or unqualified coaches covering a certain number of teams while the main man is dividing his time between the "really serious" teams at the club.

Think of some other company or product that is well-regarded. The product itself is quality, meaning the manufacturers do the right things, and that is meets real needs of consumers. There's good service and real pride of ownership. Too often the club scene ends up being more like a late night TV commercial where a lot of yelling and hype tells you how great the product is, but in the long run there's not much being offered. The kinds of products offered in the mainstream of the marketplace however, the ones that people really like, let their product/service do most of the yelling for them.

Now the difference with soccer player development is that, unlike our naturally knowing what a good jar of peanut butter tastes like, or what makes a vacuum cleaner work, we don't always recognize good soccer player development. Let's face it, even as we "grow" as a soccer nation, there's still not too many of us who naturally recognize good coaching or development in this sport. As we've said many times, it's possible for a coach to sell a parent group on the idea that he/she is doing well because the team is winning games at U10 and U11, but when the team gets to be about U15 they suddenly realize "We never learned how to play."

So we need not only to hold the coaching community accountable for its standards of production, we need to learn how to recognize good standards of production. That's where this discussion takes us next.

Tomorrow: Realistic goals for consumers in the American youth soccer market.