Category: Football (soccer)

Allstate Sueño Alianza National Showcase 2019

From Sept. 26th – Sept. 30th, 50 players out of a pool of 5,000 players took the opportunity to show their skills for a chance to sign a professional football contract. The Allstate Sueño Alianza National Showcase brought these young players to SilverLakes Sports Complex in Norco, CA where more than 30 scouts from Liga MX, Major League Soccer, United Soccer League, and La Liga surveyed and assessed their skills and talents.

Of these 50 players, separated by age groups in U-14, U-17, and U-20 squads, 18 will be selected by La Liga scouts to travel to Spain and compete against academy teams from Spanish clubs.

David Zavala of Grand Rapids, MI broke a record at Alianza De Futbol when he received 21 invitations from scouts at Liga MX, MLS and USL teams as well as both the Mexican and U.S. national teams.

More information can be found at Alianza De Futbol’s webpage: https://alianzadefutbol.com/en/home/

Below are a few photos from the final match of the final day of competitions. Here is the link to the full album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/afroxander/albums/72157711196212448

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Why Did Soccer Fail In The U.S. When Other Sports Thrived?

Below is a link to a research paper I wrote last year that I’ve uploaded to my Academia page. It concerns research into the growth of gridiron football (NFL-style), baseball, and basketball in the US and why association football (a.k.a. soccer) failed to grasp the country’s imagination as the other three.

https://www.academia.edu/40016593/Why_Did_Soccer_Fail_In_The_U.S._When_Other_Sports_Thrived

An excerpt:

Most importantly, “the game in America badly lacked willful leadership…Plenty of athletic departments and administrators may have thought soccer was vaguely a good thing, yet none seemed to possess the eagerness and ambition to lift it to greater prominence” (Wangerin “Distant” 32).

The main issue facing the leagues across the nation was the lack of a governmental body to enforce a set of rules agreed upon by all. Leagues played according to their own sets of rules, which put them at odds with each other and the fanbases they catered to. A league in St. Louis, for example, “played halves of 30 minutes instead of 45” (Wangerin, “Soccer” 29).

The AFA, founded, ironically enough, by a group of British expatriates made the first to attempt to unify the country’s leagues in the late 19th century. Unfortunately, any and all attempts at unification became power struggles between British and American leaders of the sport who “engaged in petty rivalries and internecine organizational struggles that only helped to preserve their narrow fiefdoms and the status quo at the expense of creating an institutional structure that might have been able to disseminate the sport to the vast majority of the American public” (Markovits “Offside” 53).