A Pulitzer Prize-winning sports journalist unravels why the United States has failed to produce elite men's soccer players for so long - and shows why a golden era just might be coming.
The contrast is striking. As the United States women's national soccer team has long dominated the sport, winners of four World Cups and four Olympic gold medals, the men's team has floundered. They failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup and the last three Olympics and have long struggled when facing the world's best teams. How could such a global powerhouse on the women's side - and in other men's team sports - be so far behind the rest of the world?
In Switching Fields, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Dohrmann turns his investigative focus on the system that develops male soccer players in the United States, examining why the US has struggled for decades to produce elite talent. But rather than just focus on the past, he turns forward, connecting with coaches and players who are changing the way talented players are unearthed and developed: an American living in Japan who devised a new way for kids under five to be introduced to the game, a coach in Los Angeles who traveled to Spain and Argentina and returned with coaching methods he used to school a team of future pros, an Arizona real estate developer whose grand experiment changed the way pro teams in the US develop talent.
Following these innovators' inspiring journeys, Dohrmann gives ever-hopeful US soccer fans a reason to believe that a movement is underway that is smashing the developmental status quo, and it has put the United States on the precipice of greatness.
