At the World Cup, the USMNT breakout star may be Alex Freeman. The 21-year-old son of former NFL star Antonio Freeman has anchored a defensive position the US team sorely needed. Growing up, everyone asked if he’d follow in his father’s footsteps. He played everything from football to tennis, but harbored a “secret love for soccer.” As Alex said, “I wanted to chase my own dream and make my own path.”
Seems like a slam dunk for talent ID, right? If you asked anyone two years ago whether Freeman had a shot even to make the US team, they would have asked, “Who?”
At 15, he tried out for the closest MLS youth Academy, Inter Miami, to chase that dream. And he didn’t make the cut. They passed on him. It was only thanks to a former coach who encouraged him to try out for Orlando City’s academy. But Orlando offered him a different path. They moved him from a focus on attacking to right back. Miami saw an attacker who wasn’t good enough. Orlando saw a defender who didn’t exist yet. They saw potential and decided to see what happened when you developed it.
Even with making it into the youth talent pipeline, he spent years in the reserves and playing on the B teams. Even once he became a pro, he only accumulated 11 minutes of MLS league play before 2025. So up until a year and a half ago, he was a fringe pro, and now he’s starring as a key piece on the national team.
I love this story as it gets at the heart of talent ID. We suck at it. Genuinely, we’re terrible. Even in the sport that dominates the world’s interest and has academies set up all over the world to attract talent
Consider the following.
In a study of German youth academies that tracked over 14,000 under-12 players in the national talent program, only 0.6% ever made it as professionals. That’s in a program designed to help develop elite players; the success rate is tiny. In a follow-up study, trying to identify youth talent, when they used an assessment that included a full barrage of tests, including speed, endurance, dribbling, tactics, and coaches’ expert opinions, it explained about 15% of those who reached a pro academy. The researchers concluded the metric “wasn’t sensitive enough to justify individual selection decisions.”
A broader study that looked at youth, almost 10,000 players in football powerhouses of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, found that only 15% of U17 selected players successfully made it to a senior team. While another study looking at Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, and Denmark, found that U17 experience was either a non-significant or negative predictor of making it on the senior level (being a part of the national team, Champions League, or Europa League). They found that youth performance explained only 3.2% of the variance in the number of elite senior appearances.
And we could go on and on:
- In Italy’s national system, only 9% of U16 and 15% of U19 made the national team. Fewer than 20% of those on the senior team had been part of the U16 selections
- In Sweden’s national selection system, out of all the senior team members over 13 years, 34% entered the national training system at U15–U16, 33% at U17–U18, and 33% at U21 or senior.
- Across multiple sports, a meta-analysis found that the best juniors and the best seniors are often different people. Even just comparing U18 versus senior teams, the two groups are up to 93% different. And the overlap is even smaller the younger you get. But you don’t need research to tell you this, all you have to do is look at the U-13 track records…
- Future Bundesliga players first entered a youth elite academy at an average age of 14. In the researchers’ words, “only a minority of the current Bundesliga players were already involved in these programmes during the earlier age categories.”
- Among the players who reached the senior German national team, only 48.2% had debuted in a national youth team by U19. Meaning more than half of senior German internationals weren’t in the elite national-team setup through the junior years at all.
In other words, being the best under-12-year-old is a near-worthless predictor of who turns pro. The younger the age group, the worse off the predictive ability. Yes, at some point, as we reach our teens, it becomes easier. But the earlier we “select” for talent, research shows that what we’re often doing is selecting for those born earlier in the year (relative age effect), those who hit puberty earlier, or those who have been highly trained from a young age, so they appear more talented but don’t have as high a ceiling.
The younger we try to evaluate talent, the more we are evaluating things that have nothing to do with talent. We’re looking at advantages that wash out by the time athletes reach maturity. One of the reasons is that what makes a great 10-year-old is often different from what makes a great 22-year-old player.
And while we’re focused on soccer, it’s not much brighter in other sports. Consider this analysis done by Henry Abbott on the NBA draft. He found that after 5 years, only 16% of those drafted between 6-14 are “good” NBA players and still on their original team, while it drops to 11% for those drafted 15th-30th. Out of the 180 players selected in the first round of the draft over the last 5 years, only 14 were all-stars. And this is talent ID when they are 19-22 year olds!
Even when we have talent, we make a critical mistake with development. We treat them like mini-adults, thinking overly organized practices and coaching are the key to development. Research says that it misses a key component.
Practice vs. Play
In the US, for decades, a basketball culture of pickup games drove development. More recently, there’s been a switch to younger and younger AAU/Travel team ball, and it’s now seen as a culprit for changes in our players’ skill development. In soccer, the same
What we’re left with is a development conundrum: how much organized practice matters early on versus play.
USMNT coach Mauricio Pochettino made a similar point recently, pointing to early play with the ball. “This isn’t taught at universities or in soccer schools. What happens is that many methods are copied. They set up soccer schools in the United States and tell kids: ‘Pass the ball from here to there, go back and shoot when you get there.’ That’s not soccer. When we learn, when we relate to the game, it’s with absolute freedom. I take the ball and my brother, my cousin, or my friend two years older takes it away from me. How do I get it back later? That’s the game; it’s not something robotic.”
Similar arguments have been made in Brazil’s recent lackluster performance compared to its historical success. Brazil developed its talent through street soccer and Futsal, which led to a kind of creativity that could seldom be matched. A study on Brazilian female professionals found that more futsal practice was related to better offensive decision-making. As the street soccer culture has disappeared, their development may have taken a hit, similar to US basketball.
Research backs this up. In a study on German professionals, the key wasn’t organized drills; it was play that made the difference. Approximately 68% of the soccer ‘training’ that occurred in childhood was non-organized casual play.
Researchers found that national team players:
- Played more informal football as kids.
- Played other sports during adolescence.
- Started serious, focused training later.
One of the reasons this is important is what Pochettino pointed out. Play develops not just our technical skills, but our ability to see the game in a specific way. Instead of an overly technical game of decision-making, we develop a natural variety. In sports psychology, we call this utilizing affordances. We connect perception and action in a free-flowing way. For the Americans, think of it as Patrick Mahomes playing QB versus a mechanical, rigid college QB. Mahomes can improvise and create on the field. A mechanical QB reads through his progressions like a decision tree and can’t pivot or create if those options aren’t there. It’s the same in soccer.
This often occurs because it feels like you’re actually coaching when you are running drills or giving explicit instructions. It also looks good to parents on the sidelines who are paying you. It doesn’t look as productive when you roll a ball out into the field and step back, getting out of their way.
Most agree that the path for development in soccer is early natural engagement, with lots of informal play. It’s developing a love of the game, without adults ruining it. And having the freedom, with just enough skill development, to develop creativity and a better perception-action system.
It’s a balancing act. Yes, to a degree, it helps to learn the game early on, but often it’s best in an unorganized fashion. Too much technical training, too much specialization, creates a rigid and fragile player who peaks early, gets burned out, or suffers injuries.
It’s the right balance of engagement, play, and gradual movement towards specialization during the early teen years.
So What?
Which brings us back to Freeman. One of the mental performance coaches who worked with Orlando City’s youth academy told us, “what stood out to me was his confidence, his desire to be elite, and his commitment to the work…He was one of the few who remained fully committed to his goals.”
Predicting potential is hard, even if you have all the resources and testing in the world. And when we see “talent,” we often get overzealous and think that if we can just treat them like a mini-adult with endless practice, we can sculpt them into a champion.
It doesn’t work that way. Of course, coaching and practice matter. But far too often, we neglect the underlying ingredients that stoke a love of the pursuit, and the creativity and resilience to keep going after it: play.
While every sport or pursuit is different, there are some commonalities:
- We suck at talent ID and overestimate our ability to predict future success.
- We often do things that develop performance RIGHT NOW, and neglect things that develop skills and abilities that help us in the future.
- We overestimate technical and organized coaching, and underappreciate the value of play and unstructured learning. (This is rampant in education as well!)
- Underneath it all has to be a love of the pursuit. If you don’t cultivate that, nothing else really matters.
There are many paths to the top. Too often, we try to over-engineer a process, to proclaim that we can become a factory of productive players or talent. It’s arrogance. Over and over again, the research and real-world experience points to the same thing. Give people a shot to develop their talent. Some will do so quickly, others take time. At the heart of it all is a love of the game and lots of unstructured play, with just enough coaching early on to develop their skills.
Just look at Alex Freeman. He’s starting at a World Cup because someone reopened a door one MLS squad had shut. And they gave him a new path to develop on, one that didn’t blossom until much later in his career.
-Steve
