The standard critique of Canada and America’s pay-to-play model of youth soccer development—in which parents are responsible for paying for registration fees, travel and tournament costs, uniforms, etc.—is that it is fundamentally inequitable.

This is, of course, true. While preternaturally talented U12s will receive formal (or informal) financial assistance from an interested youth soccer club, kids who are less obvious standouts but who have real potential to succeed will get left behind for the crime of not having wealthier parents.

This is particularly devastating in places like Canada, where scouts tend to focus primarily on the top youth development leagues, such as OPDL in Ontario.

Moreover, this lack of equity also extends between provinces.

The Nova Scotia Soccer League registration costs, for example, are roughly one-tenth of those in Ontario, an astonishing accessibility gap that is only partially closed by the fact that Ontario arguably has better coaching and playing resources.

Alright, you might be thinking, that sucks for the poor kids who aren’t Lamine Yamal, but at least the kids in the league will get their shot.

Unfortunately, as we’ll see, pay-to-play also hinders youth development for the kids who can afford it, and not only because they are being denied the chance to play in a deeper talent pool (I strongly suspect this dynamic is also at play for the girls’ teams as well).

Great youth teams don’t always produce great senior players

This past weekend, I watched my son’s club—currently in the middle-lower end of the league table—play the best team in his OPDL age group. I was excited to see Ontario’s best youth soccer club.

What I witnessed on the pitch, however, will be familiar to many parents of pay-to-play development leagues.

The team was roughly half a foot taller than the boys in our team. The back line was a good foot taller or more. Their wingers were extremely fast, though not necessarily otherworldly in possession.

Tactically, their approach could not have been more obvious. The well-organized, freakishly tall backline would patiently pass the ball, wait for one of their speedy wingers to initiate a diagonal run, and then ping it downfield in the hopes they might latch onto it, something that happened maybe once out of every four attempts. All of the club’s players had been drilled repeatedly to take only a few touches.

Graham Taylor would have been proud.

Though our club’s high block and discipline in avoiding a high press were effective for most of the game, our luck ran out late in the final stages, and we let a few soft goals in.

The team we faced is one of roughly three or four clubs in the league that dominate OPDL every year. On the evidence so far, each of these teams, with some important exceptions, plays more or less a similar style (Vaughan so far has bucked the trend).

These clubs’ players also fill out most of the youth provincial teams. They enjoy some of the top coaching talents in the country. And they produce professional players and the odd national team regular.

But most of their pro soccer grads aren’t likely players you’ve heard of. Quite a few are in the Canadian Premier League. Many received D1 scholarships to play in the NCAA.

So what? You might be thinking. There’s nothing wrong with journeymen footballers, and the more Ontario produces, the more likely a few are to reach Alphonso Davies-type greatness. Ontario is never going to have the same number of scouting eyeballs as a European academy side or MLS Next team.

These are fair points, but the fact of the matter is that while Ontario enjoys some truly perennially dominant youth clubs, it lacks a single, standout producer of consistently international-calibre talent.

Parents don’t pay to develop their kids, they pay to win

There may be one exception to this in Ontario, however: Brampton Youth SC. The club, now no longer in OPDL, has trained players including Tajon Buchanan, Jonathon Osorio and Cyle Larin, Jayden Nelson and others, and makes up an outsized portion of Canada’s men’s national team players.

Interestingly, despite Brampton’s historic pedigree, the club never lit up the OPDL league standings. I don’t know exactly why, but knowing a few things about Ontario soccer now, I would venture to guess it might be because the club has historically favoured technical ability over size and speed.

While this preference is great for developing professional footballers, it’s not great for winning youth soccer matches. No matter how technically skilled your players are, unless you’re La Masia, it’s going to be difficult for your kids to compete against teams stacked with near 6-foot fourteen-year-old defenders and wingers who are track stars but might not be able to dribble for more than a few yards at a time.

This is how it should be, of course. Youth soccer is awash in reminders that the results don’t matter as much as the training, the experience, the learning, the growth, the technical ability.

The problem is that pay-to-play strongly disincentivizes this ethos. Because while parents know, at least intellectually, that winning isn’t everything, they also reasonably believe that their kid is less likely to earn attention from pro clubs or D1 American universities if they’re stuck on a losing team. Certainly, Ontario’s annual selection of provincial call-ups would back that up, dominated as it is by the OPDL’s winningest clubs.

And the clubs know that, despite OPDL’s ostensible insistence that kids play for their nearest local team, losing makes it more difficult to recruit players and their families, not just for OPDL, but for lucrative house and rep leagues.

So, size and speed win out over technique in tryouts. Coaches, feeling pressure to win at all costs to keep up demand for registration spots, will succumb to the temptation to play long ball rather than work the ball from back to front, even at the sacrifice of training smarter, more resilient footballers. Kids who might be extremely adept on the ball but who aren’t elite sprinters or enjoying an early growth spurt will lose their spot.

Of course, size and speed are important pro footballing qualities. The problem, however, is that as players age, these attributes matter less. Despite years of elite-level coaching, these players will struggle to compete against international peers who have the same height and speed but are simply far more confident on the ball and intelligent off it.

This is part of the relative age effect, in which youth teams select kids born earlier in the year because they are more developed (ie bigger and faster). The chart below gives you an idea of how it works in practice.

I’ve yet to see how Ontario soccer has meaningfully tried to address this issue, but I have definitely seen how it affects how teams play on the pitch.

Solving the perverse incentives of pay-to-play isn’t easy. It will require Ontario to find ways to counter the relative age effect, and government investment to reduce the need for clubs to sacrifice long-term player development for trophies. But there is a reason why so many of Canada’s best players left the country at a young age to play in Europe or America.

And it doesn’t have to be this way.

Before I dive in, I want to characterize how I’m going to approach talking about youth soccer development in what will be a series of posts over the next few weeks.

My aim is not to provide a comprehensive, iron-clad argument for one series of approaches over another. I’m not going to say that countries should emulate X, Y, Z development pathways.

Rather, I want to share some casual observations I’ve made in the past four years or so as a dad of a kid in the system. This is not to make definitive claims about what is right or wrong but, hopefully, to provoke some discussion and sharing of knowledge and ideas on the subject.

That’s it! This is not a wildly ambitious project.

Okay, so I have had direct experience with exactly two football development environments: the Nova Scotia Soccer League (NSSL) and the Ontario Professional Development League (OPDL).

This is because my son is a goalkeeper. But he’s not the star of this post (goalkeeper development appears to be something of an odd duck and will be the subject of a future post).

My impression of both leagues is not that one is comprehensively better trained, coached or refereed than the other. Nor does one favour particular physical characteristics more than the other. OPDL is more expensive and includes more practices. While there are more skilled players in OPDL, this is a matter of volume rather than degree. The best kids that I’ve seen in NSSL, though fewer and further between, are about on par with the best kids I’ve seen in OPDL (crucially, they are not always on the best OPDL teams, but more on that later).

Counterintuitively, however, I believe that standout players in smaller player pools such as the NSSL have a better chance of accelerating their development than in bigger pools like the OPDL.

Nova Scotia native Jacob Shaffelburg provides a good case study.

Shaffelburg played for Valley United FC, a good but not exactly dominant NSSL club based in Wolfville. Here, the speedy winger, who likely could have also pursued a track career (dominance in several sports is usually a good indicator of a professional promise), stood out for his remarkable pace and technique and played up past his age group. He was a natural shoo-in for the provincial team, where his talent was even more distinct.

But what arguably set Shaffelburg on the path to a pro career was his father’s connections to the coach of FC Nashville Heroes, a man who had coached Jacob’s older brother Zach (who is also a very good soccer player and now a rheumatologist in the NS south shore area—what a family!). An invitation to play for FC Nashville Heroes during a highly successful cup run when he was a mere 13 years old set Jacob down a path that took him to a highly regarded soccer school in Massachusetts, a pro career in MLS and a core place in the Canadian men’s national team.

Would Shaffelburg’s pro-pathway have been replicated had he grown up in Ontario?

If you believe in such a thing as objective standout talent—that ‘development’ matters less than innate gifts, you’d probably say yes.

But interestingly, Toronto FC didn’t see Shaffelburg as a real prospect. In fact, his experience with Toronto was so bad he contemplated leaving MLS altogether. It was his old family connection to Nashville that set the Nova Scotian on the way to greatness.

But in OPDL, being “developed” by Toronto FC is often seen as the pinnacle of a potential career (I have more thoughts on that subject later on as well).

I believe that kids like Shaffelburg are not destined to go pro. No one is. Going professional, particularly in a North American environment, is as much a story of happy accidents, valuable interpersonal connections, and individual drive as it is about innate talent. It can come down to one coach seeing something in you that another doesn’t.

I also think for this reason that in environments like Nova Scotia, if you’re a truly standout player, your chances of going professional are likely higher than if you had chosen to play in OPDL, just based on the volume of elite players in Ontario alone.

If, for example, you’re a Shaffelburg-like phenom playing in the OPDL, you might be asked to play an age level above. You may get “asked” to try out for a more skilled OPDL team. You might make the Ontario provincial team.

But you’re not going to be earning any headline articles. Your dad might have connections to an American coach, but so do your teammates’ dads (actually, if you play at a top OPDL club, chances are the coaching staff has experience with Canada’s national team in some capacity).

You might wend your way through this remarkable maze, only to end up at Toronto FC and not be given any direction or advice on how to improve, because about ten kids are waiting to take your place.

There is, however, an exception to this, and that is Brampton, a suburb of Toronto that produces a disproportionate number of Canada’s best players for reasons that, in my opinion, have little to do with OPDL. But that’s for my next post.

I want to start by acknowledging something wonderful.

Over the past five years, despite my life getting—not exactly upended—but irrevocably changed (along with everyone else’s life) by the pandemic; despite my growing feeling that I’d said all that needed to be said about football (not just football analytics); despite my and my wife’s decision to move with our two children to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where my thoughts strayed even further from the Beautiful Game; despite feeling like this newsletter was well and truly dead…you kept subscribing.

Every few weeks, without fail, I would see new subscriber notifications.

None of this made sense. Couldn’t you read my entire archive without having to pass on your email address? And yes, I’m aware that most of the new subs were through blog recommendations (I don’t know how Substack works anymore) or something innocuous like that, people who didn’t bother to check the date on my latest post.

But it did truly keep the spark alive. So thank you for doing that, whoever you are (and hello if you’re reading this in anger because you forgot you signed up!)

So why am I back exactly?

It has to do with my son.

Right around the time I stopped writing this newsletter, he began his path to becoming a goalkeeper. His career began in earnest in Nova Scotia with a local club, and he’s continued to improve. This past August, we moved back from NS to Toronto, and, at 13 years old, he tried out and earned a spot on our local Ontario Professional Development League team.

And so, over the past few months or so, I’ve had a front row seat to ground zero for one major pathway to Canadian player development.

And I have things to say about it. Things that likely apply to North American youth sports in general. Things that I think make sense in the context of understanding how we develop elite footballers, how great potential footballers can fall through the cracks, and things that can apply to anyone who wants to think a little differently about talent development and identification. Things that, hopefully, might change things for the better.

How many things I have to say on this topic is TBD. But the main thing is, I’ve caught the itch again. So if you're new, please have a look around and see if this site is the kind of thing you’re interested in. And if you’re old, I’m sorry for leaving without saying goodbye, but look, this thing is free and will be free for the foreseeable future, so what the hell are you mad about exactly?

Anyway, I’m back! New posts on the way.

“Tail risk is a form of portfolio risk that arises when the possibility that an investment will move more than three standard deviations from the mean is greater than what is shown by a normal distribution. Tail risks include events that have a small probability of occurring, and occur at both ends of a normal distribution curve.” -Investopedia

A dude that I’ve gone hot and cold on over the years, but someone whose writing, particularly in Antifragile, has been fairly influential on my thinking about football and life in general, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

This is the person who coined the popular term ‘black swan’, an event so beyond our popular understanding of the world that it fundamentally shifts our concept of the world. Taleb, however, has been loudly arguing that the current COVID-19 pandemic is NOT a black swan.

And he’s right! The film Contagion, which involves a fictional virus far worse than this one but otherwise gets the science right in almost every respect, was made in 2011! And epidemiologists have been warning us about the likelihood of a global pandemic for decades. In that sense, COVID-19 represents a true tail risk, not a black swan event. I know this personally because the large, public institution I now work for—one that is often criticized for its bureaucracy and sluggishness—had a pandemic response plan in place for years, and was quick and decisive in responding to the crisis.

The reason is that many of the epidemiologists and public health experts that have been warning us for the past two decades work there!

Now, you might think, how can I expect tail risk preparations from an institution as relatively rinky-dink as football?

Well, I would agree that a sport like football doesn’t have the resources or the flexibility to plan for a situation like the one we face today, but I don’t agree that this an excuse for not having a plan in place at all, even a plan that lacked certain specific details. What do institutions like the F.A. exist for, if not for doing some of this long-term planning, taking on some of time and resources to prepare for tail risks on behalf of the teams that play in its leagues?

People, especially politicians, love nothing more than to bloviate about the ‘lessons of 9/11,’ but it seems to me that lesson wasn’t about terrorists or airport security or invading Middle Eastern nations that had nothing to do with it, but instead that world-changing events, whether that, or the 2008 crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entire 1960s, the H-bomb, or World War II, or the Great Depression, or the Spanish Flu, or the Great War and so and so forth, happen with some generational regularity!

Just like we would expect one team to do a Leicester (or, on the flip side, a Borussia Dortmund) now and again, we should maybe listen to experts on the likelihood of certain ‘unthinkable’ events taking place over the next eighty years, including the prospect that football may be unplayable in June and August in two decades time, to take one example off the dome.

So no, I’m not letting football or any other organized sport off the hook for failing to prepare and making financial and organizational decisions on the fly.

But that’s the past. Let’s talk about the present.

A few days ago, my wife sent me a BBC story on the underground caves inhabited during WW2. These weren’t government-planned projects, the result of a grand committee, but a communal enterprise in response to inadequate bomb shelter provisions from the government.

The idea here is that ingenuity tends to shine best in a crisis, and it will emerge in the next few days that some clubs are handling the current crisis better than others. So I would urge clubs, and decision-makers, to start talking to other clubs, conferencing, chatting on Zoom, to see who is doing what and how well it is working. Compare notes, talk about collective actions, don’t wait for the government to save you, because chances are they’re not coming today, or any time soon.

That’s for now…while the future is still uncertain, I would only hope that we don’t forget the lesson here, that we will now understand that the Buddhists were fundamentally correct—the world is impermanent by nature. Our glossy, commercial enterprises, our stock prices, our global economy—it’s all a house of cards. It’s a cold world out there. Don’t get frosty. Get prepared.

It’s been mildly absurd to witness the on-going debate about the mechanics and implications of ‘completing’ the 2019-2020 season. Though I’m sure this is of some interest to many people, it does feel slightly like we’re playing soccer with a chunk of ice on the sinking Titanic, debating whether a goal should have counted or not.

I don’t want to sow panic or play Cassandra, but if things carry on as they are (more on this later), the reality is we will likely not see another live professional football match until 2021 at the earliest. In the interim, the TV rights ‘bubble’ we have talked about for the past two decades will have imploded, taking along with it the fortunes of broadcasters across Europe and North America. Many smaller clubs will wind down and completely cease operations. Players, many of whom will have gone unpaid for a long period, will increasingly take early retirement, beginning with the precarious lower leagues and, over time, enveloping the Premier League and other big European leagues as well.

The impact on the many tertiary industries that rely on football—journalists, consultancies analysts, vendors, etc.—may be incalculable. So if and when football does return, it may resemble, for a time, that ‘Yankees’ game in Interstellar.

Things are not normal, and I think we need to look at these truths head-on and accept them as adults. As someone who suffers from anxiety, I know intimately that this is something that is easy to write, extremely difficult to do.

So the question is: what can we do?

First, I think it’s important to give yourself time to accept what is happening and to mourn. A lot of people are taking in comfort in revisiting old debates, providing data for historic seasons, ranking all-time greater headers etc., and this is good and healthy. But once the reality of what we’re going to face dawns on all of us, we will need to accept that we’re not going to go back to normal.

I would therefore urge journalists, analysts, anyone involved in football reading this to consider making plans to pivot. Perhaps that means exploring how your skills will be useful over the course of this crisis, which could mean switching careers. Or it could mean exploring how to use your connections within football to help collectively come together to devise workable strategies to help steward the game through what is probably its greatest crisis since the Second World War. We will need to think clearly about what we are going to do over the next year and a half.

Now, that said, things could change. We’re learning things about the novel coronavirus every day. Though I’m not an epidemiologist or a public health expert, I think there is a lot of promise in the notion of deploying mass testing as a kind of proto-societal vaccination, which would effectively allow us to identify people with the disease, isolate them until they recover, and keep strict restrictions on movement in place until we generate a vaccine. In this case, football may be able to eventually make some sort of early return. So there is some room for taking a wait-and-see approach.

But hope shouldn’t be the basis of planning, kind of the running theme of this newsletter! We need to accept the possibility of a worst-case scenario, and plan for it—both as organizations and as individuals. Though I have a very limited platform, I will do my best in helping in this role.

Finally, I will end on some good news—football will never die. The game will always, always be with us. It has survived the two world wars, the Spanish flu, and Margaret Thatcher. Though we may all need to temporarily walk away from the game, it will be there when we are able to return. We all need to stay strong. We ARE going to get through COVID-19. The reality is we are going to lose loved ones, neighbours, friends. No one will be unaffected. But football is immune, and that alone should give us hope.