letter from America
Coaching The Next Generation
By Ian Thomson
Incoming Portland Timbers head coach Caleb Porter joins Major League Soccer this month having built something of a monster at the University of Akron over the past seven years. Ohio-based Akron, situated about 40 miles south of Cleveland, won seven consecutive league titles during Porter’s reign and became an annual contender for the national college championship – contested in a one-game knockout format between 48 top schools selected from regional divisions across the United States. Fourteen of Porter’s former players have graduated to M.L.S. and more from his latest crop will follow before the new season kicks off next March.
Significantly, Akron has decided to replace 37-year-old Porter with Jared Embick, his 34-year-old assistant, amid expectations for continued success. Embick, it seems, is the latest coach on a conveyor belt of young talent in the U.S. that reflects football’s recent hardships in the country and its vast improvement over the past decade. Unlike in Scotland, the future of the game is unencumbered by what has gone before.
“I remember when I was in high school and it was a struggle to find games on T.V. outside of the national team games,” said Embick in a recent interview. “Now you can watch 20 European league games every weekend.”
What was available in those pre-1994 World Cup days was the occasional British game with teams typically fielding a big man/little man combination up front, Embick recalls. There were countless long balls, plenty of flick-ons and boundless charging around. America was not welded to such ruggedness when M.L.S. started in 1996, although a lack of technical quality combined with an infatuation for most things British contributed to a direct approach evolving. Those days are fading as up-and-coming coaches who have studied the playing styles of the best teams in the world make their mark at the professional level.
The lack of an established U.S. league until recently has given this new generation a clean slate to build an American style of play. Akron’s blueprint follows the possession-based principles of Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao, according to Embick. The school sends its coaches to Europe to study the training sessions of the world’s top teams. Their task is then to figure out how to communicate those methods to some of the best young players emerging from the M.L.S. Academy and high school ranks.
Akron’s results have been startling – 123 victories in 158 games under Porter including this year’s record of 17 wins in 20. The team’s only reverse came in a 3-1 loss at Notre Dame, coached by former Dons goalkeeper Bobby Clark, after an early sending off left them with 10 men for an hour. They have become difficult to beat because they rarely give the ball away cheaply. They are difficult to score against because they pin the opposition deep into their own half. They are difficult to contain because they attack in great numbers. (Akron’s full-backs, like Dani Alves at Barcelona, spend most of their time playing as wingers). And they are difficult to catch on the counter-attack because they have the speed to quickly retreat into a solid defensive shape.
It’s not just Akron who have committed to honing an attacking, adventurous style. The recent College Cup Final between Indiana and Georgetown on Dec. 9 (Akron were eliminated on penalties in the last 16) showcased two teams with excellent technical skills who were committed to swiftly moving the ball around until an opening appeared. Some of those players will also find themselves selected by M.L.S. clubs during the annual pre-season draft on Jan. 17.
Scotland received a first-hand lesson in the improvements being made in the U.S. during last May’s 5-1 thrashing in Jacksonville. That debacle was partly blamed on players coming to the end of a long, hard season and having nothing to play for, but the underlying signs at the youth level suggest that this gulf is going to be around for some time unless we free ourselves from the way we’ve always done things.
Ian Thomson is a journalist and exiled Dons fan living in Morgantown, West Virginia. Follow him on Twitter at @SoccerObserver.
