5 Reasons Why Non-Developers Replace Development With Talent ID

When Development is not your primary navigation, leaders are forced to take shortcuts to overcome that void.

Talent Identification, the process of scouting, identifying and recruiting new prospects into your environment, is more prioritized in our soccer culture than talent development. Talent ID is not a bad thing in and of itself when it’s used to identify future prospects that are developmental fits within an environment. But it becomes a problem when our soccer culture uses Talent ID as the primary process for improving its teams.

This misuse of Talent ID impacts every level in our country (national teams, professional, college and youth), which has obvious ramifications for player development.

But why do our leaders do this?

Here are the 5 reasons why our soccer culture and the Non-Developer replace talent development with Talent ID.

When you don’t have a developmental vision driving your process, you need talented players to overcome the environment’s shortcomings.

The single most important reason we prioritize Talent ID over Talent Development is that when you can’t develop players, there is no other choice. What other mechanism do you have if you can’t develop the players in front of you? This can be seen at the youth level all the way through to our national teams.

Talent ID is the only lever the Non-Developer has to ensure the ruse continues.

A Non-Developer’s ability to maintain their position of power is not incumbent on their ability to develop players, but to use the infrastructure to their advantage.

Non-Developers know on some level that our soccer culture is suboptimal, but for them, it’s more important to maintain the status quo than to grow the sport. Because to grow the sport, that requires being self-critical, which means two things – better solutions are required and, more importantly, many will realize I’m not the one for the job. It’s just better to distract people with shiny signings like Messi or forcing the best youth players to join the local MLS Academy.

In both situations, leaders use Talent ID to prioritize their place in the game instead of what’s best for the game and its players.

Our soccer culture’s consumers (players, parents, fans) have bought into the status quo.

Development is not understood as a process within our soccer culture. It’s a resume we compile to prove future worth. Exposure to Talent ID is one of the main selling points of our youth soccer landscape – if you join our club, we will get you in front of more college coaches, national team evaluators, and European scouts.

Our country’s obsession with achievement further cements Talent ID’s power within the soccer culture.

Our soccer culture cares more about protecting its leaders than serving its people.

The sport is filled to the brim with inept coaches and leaders who have leveraged their “experience” and position within the system to ensure they can enjoy the fruits of leadership without ever having to provide anything in return. There are coaches at every level of this country that have little to zero understanding of how to best develop the players in front of them. There are USMNT Coaches, MLS Head Coaches, and College Coaches who get to work with our country’s best players, and have no idea how to improve those players and the overall group unless they just get “better players”.

On a long enough time horizon, even the most inept coach can “win,” which leads me to my final point.

Someone always “wins,” even when we agree to play a flawed game.

Winning is the Trojan Horse that conceals all the issues our sport has. But winning is no more than PR when everyone is prioritizing Talent ID over Talent Development because both our players and the sport remain stuck. The only time this really gets exposed is every four years at the World Cup where we have to play against other countries who prioritize talent development over talent ID (i.e. Netherlands 2022, Not Qualifying 2018, Belgium 2014, etc.).

That’s why there was so much tension from fans after this past World Cup – our federation and pundits paint the picture that making it to the round of 16 was a success, but the Netherlands match showed the gap between nations and implicitly why it’s impossible to close that gap with our current leadership leading the way.

Final Words

Prioritizing Talent ID over Talent Development not only ensures we will never become a soccer power, but it also ensures those responsible for this continue to impact the sport’s future.

In our country, we fail both the super-talented prospect AND the prospect that has a few qualities to develop. The former climbs the ladder until they reach a level where they can no longer overcome the vision and are deemed no longer “good enough”. And the latter is discounted much sooner because they aren’t the finished product that can overcome the environment they are in.

Our country can become a world power and our players can become world-class, but that will never be the case until we prioritize Talent Development over Talent ID.

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