no soccer stars till we have dense urbanisation
To improve, “players need to play with and against the best players. The talent has to get concentrated,” says Jared Micklos, who’s worked in development both with U.S. Soccer and internationally.
This happens naturally in, say, the Paris suburbs — which, as a result, churn out dozens and dozens of top-flight pros annually. As teens and pre-teens, they push one another, both in pickup games and leagues. The best get scouted and taken to Clairefontaine, the French Football Federation’s famed academy, which layers on tactical awareness and discipline.
The USMNT has featured very talented players over the years, but none occupying the rarefied air of the true global elite. Why not?
Thirty players at the 2022 men's World Cup in Qatar were born in the vicinity of France's capital. Compare that to two other hotbeds of youth football: Sao Paulo provided 12 World Cup players and Greater London eight. [...]
A local government policy of building high-quality football facilities in every Paris banlieue, partly to keep kids off the streets and out of trouble, has been fundamental to making the sport cheap and accessible to all.
"You come down from your building and you have a football field, so the first thing you do is go play football," says Abdelaziz Kaddour, sports director of FC Montfermeil 93, a thriving club in Seine Saint-Denis, a suburban Paris region with one of the highest crime and unemployment rates in France.
"And on top of that, most of the pitches are small. That means, they touch the ball a lot. They learn to dribble. And over time, it gives them a lot of quality, dribbling, speed, seeing things before others, tackling, intensity. [...]
Those not fortunate enough to be spotted by the scouts of Clairefontaine improve their skills in one of the biggest and most competitive amateur leagues in world football.
The Ligue de Paris Ile-de-France has more than 1,000 clubs and 270,000 players. It's such an important organisation that it has an office in the picture-perfect Place Valois, a well-struck free-kick away from the Louvre museum, right in the heart of Paris.
How people, policy and the shortcomings of the city's premier club have helped Paris export players in a quantity and quality unmatched anyw
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