Development and Winning Do Not Require That You Choose a Side

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There is a very subtle yet powerful mistruth about development that keeps our soccer culture from adopting development as its primary navigation: 

By choosing development, you must do so at the sacrifice of winning.

Our soccer culture sees development and winning like two opposing political parties where you are forced to choose a side. You are either a member of the “Developer” Party where you prioritize development at the expense of winning, or a member of the “Wins” Party where you prioritize winning matches irrespective of development.

Saying this out loud makes the whole thing seem ridiculous, but this mistruth’s subtleness is what gives it power.

Because of its subtle nature, it conditions us to take actions without realizing it’s driving our behavior. Owners, directors, coaches, parents, players, and fans are all making decisions or crafting opinions based on this false dichotomy. But before unveiling the biggest downstream effects of the misunderstanding, we must actually state the truth: 

Development creates the conditions for sustained success.

You increase your chances of winning today and tomorrow when you prioritize development every day. So the choice isn’t between development and winning. It's between a focused belief in a developmental process that fosters long-term success OR taking developmental shortcuts that sacrifice tomorrow for a form of success that is unlikely to be sustained.

That's the true dichotomy. 

But by believing it's a choice between development and winning, we implicitly give ourselves permission to take developmental shortcuts, which only hurts the sport and its participants.

Here are 5 examples of this misconception in action:

1. Coaches Get Less Time

Especially at the professional levels, coaches aren't given the time to see their vision come to fruition. 

This doesn’t mean that every coach’s vision is guaranteed to bear fruit, but we never commit enough time to seeing if it actually will. And that’s the leap and trust required of owners or sporting directors to be great long-term, especially when you hire a young coach who will need time to learn their trade. This is a much larger problem overseas than it is here, but it has already infiltrated our other more popular sports domestically (NFL, NBA, MLB). 

Owners and Directors want sustained success without the requisite time spent to create the conditions for it.

2. Talent Accumulation Has Gone to New Levels

The most clear representation of the false dichotomy is our over-infatuation with recruitment and Talent Identification.

The MLS builds its brand on foreign imports. The college game has become a league dominated by 22-26 year old Europeans. And our youth teams are focused on bringing in physically superior kids who ensure you win today with little thought about tomorrow. 

By prioritizing winning, we limit the opportunities for Americans to play beyond a certain level, despite having more infrastructure available than ever before.

3. Players Not Born in Quarter 1 (January-March) Are Screwed

Our top academy teams and youth national teams are built with kids that are physically more developed than their contemporaries. 

The late developer prospect will never get to pursue their potential domestically because they don’t guarantee you wins today. I spoke with a prominent US Soccer scout in our country, and he explained to me that there was an initiative about 5 years ago within the academy and youth national team levels to prioritize incorporating late developers into their teams and camps. But now, 5 years later, close to 90-95% of the players in our academies who get put in national team camps are born in Quarter 1 (Q1). 

Strangely enough, our best American players are late developers born outside of Q1, who either went overseas at a young age to further their development (Pulisic, McKennie, Reyna) or were never exposed to our system in the first place (Weah, Dest, Musah).

4. Development Becomes PR

It has become common practice to “show” how much you believe in development through a press release without ever considering the next steps for the player. 

There are so many young talented Americans who traded their futures for a press release. They didn’t know this at the time, but their organization’s leadership had no real long-term plan to actually develop them—they just wanted the PR. So many of our brightest talents get swallowed up within a soccer culture where its leaders chose winning over developing players and teams capable of sustaining success long-term. 

Sacrificing player development for short-term winning puts all the responsibility on the player while the leaders who crafted the contract face little-to-no accountability.

5. Parents Make Poor Decisions For Their Child

I’ve seen so many parents leave our club to pursue “winning” only to come back a year or two later. 

And here’s the thing. Those same players who were capable of being recruited by the top clubs, come back in decline both from a skills and motivation perspective. They went to an environment that demanded everything of them, but provided nothing positive developmentally in return. 

A year (and possibly a future in the game) lost because winning was valued more than development.

Conclusion

These are only 5 examples, but I’m guessing you can think of many more within your environments. 

Today, it’s much more socially unacceptable to be the crazy parent who loses their mind on a sideline during a youth match because they want to win. But the problem gets more nuanced the higher you go. If we don’t build awareness around this false dichotomy between winning and development, it will continue to unconsciously drive our soccer culture’s decision-making.

In that scenario, our soccer culture never truly wins. 

The sport, its players, and everyone involved fail to reach their full potential, which means we all lose.

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