Jonathan Gonzalez shook-up what was going to be an otherwise nondescript January camp by letting it be known he's going to play for El Tri at the senior national team level; meaning he will be "cap-tied" to Mexico going forward.
As this relates to Gonzalez, it's a big deal because he's an elite-level young player. The U.S. Men's National Team certainly would benefit from his skillset as a shut down d-mid as the current positional core group phases out prior to the 2022 cycle.
If you want to read more about the Gonzalez situation specifically, I suggest Steve Davis' piece in FourFourTwo and Matt Doyle's "Arm Chair Analyst" column on the subject.
What I'm most interested--and have tweeted about extensively--is the underlying issue(s) US Soccer has within its player development paradigm relative to Latino players. Specifically, Mexican-American players.
Two basic but critical structural issues to highlight:
- High-level coaching is extremely difficult to find and it's incredibly expensive to utilize. This is exact opposite of an effective strategy to develop the widest array of potential USMNT players as is possible; which one would assume should be the goal of US Soccer.
- Youth player development is (still) built around white upper-middle class families. The stereotypes of soccer mom's exist for a reason. With the switch to a quasi-academy model in 2007 players need access to one of 197 affiliate clubs. These clubs need to fund their coaches, trainers, equipment, etc. to do that, they need enough players who can pay their full fees to offset the scholarship players. It's pretty simple, really.
There's more to each point, clearly, but the net-effect is that because of these issues there are entire communities disconnected from US Soccer's youth development project. It gets even worse when you realize that the communities which are being left aside are the talent producing ones. To put it another way, the "system" isn't designed for Mexican-American youth to be identified and/or developed by-and-large.
As a result, when a dual-eligible player like Gonzalez is available and chooses to play for Mexico, it's a huge blow because there aren't hundreds prospects lineup to take his place; which is a shame because there should be.
More to come...
