Can MLS put brains over brawn?

Ask a foreign coach about the American players he has worked with, and he’ll doubtless have many good things to say. The clichés and generalizations largely hold up: they are big, strong, hard-working, dedicated and low-maintenance.

But if they’re being frank, those same coaches will also confide in you the major deficiency in the bulk of Americans: problem-solving. Soccer, boiled down to its basics, is a dance of space. And unlocking that space requires an innate ability to quickly solve the spatial problems forever thrown at you on the field -- not so much geometry as improvisation.

A capacity for solving problems is bedrock to creativity, another asset most American players are accused of lacking. A possible explanation might be that in the traditional American sports, players are either given assignments or a finite amount of options, whereas soccer is unscripted and played on a largely blank canvas. You could also dismiss that as hokum. Either way, the problem persists.

So in its admirable and abiding zeal to belong to the best leagues in the world, Major League Soccer came to realize that in order to field better players, it would need to produce better players -- more technical players, most of all. Over the last decade or even two, France has arguably been the soccer world’s most consistent producer of elite creative talent. Certainly, other countries can stake a claim to that distinction, but surely none are quite so elaborate and deliberate in the pedagogy of their future generations of professionals through regional talent incubators and the famed national Clairefontaine training center.

On Feb. 25, MLS announced a partnership with the French Football Federation designed to bring the 19 MLS teams’ youth academies to a higher level by enrolling one coach from each in the 16-month Elite Formation Coaching License course. Eight weeks of classroom and field instruction culminate in several weeks of observation at the academy of a premier European club with the course completing in May 2014.

"We set these benchmarks and goals for what it means to be a top league by 2022," says Tim Bezbatchenko, who oversaw the FFF partnership for the league and is now Toronto FC’s general manager. "One area we identified that was weaker than many others was our experience with developing a world class player. The idea was to focus on who’s coaching the coaches. We said, 'Let’s invest in our own people and their professional development.' We decided to go to the source. The French Football Federation really revolutionized player development in Europe."

The deal was a straightforward one. The FFF receives a fee and furthers its branding while MLS exposes an entire generation of its youth coaches to a top-notch education.

John Wolyniec, a long-time New York MetroStars/Red Bulls forward and now its reserve team coach and player development coordinator, was one of those selected by his club to partake. "Throughout history the French have developed a reputation for being thinkers," he says, when reached in San Sebastian, Spain, where he is observing Real Sociedad’s youth academy, after an earlier stint observing Paris Saint-Germain’s. "And when you’re trying to think about educating in soccer, you have to have a bit of an intellectual approach. That’s one of the things I’ve noticed so far in this course, is how in-depth and how comprehensively they think about what they’re doing.

"Basically the entire first week of the course was based around us taking an objective look at ourselves, who we are and who we want to be, and can we see ourselves as educators, rather than coaches?" Wolyniec says. "In other words: not playing to win on the weekend but developing the player to win in the future and to become a professional.”

In order to enable such a shift, the French argue that the way we evaluate talent has to change rather drastically. “They talk more about not picking your best player at U-12 but picking the player that is aware and is capable of understanding concepts and grasping tactics and knowing how to handle himself on the field without the coach telling them what to do,” says Wolyniec. "If we want to be successful at the highest level of the modern game, you need players that can think for themselves, go out there in any situation and determine what’s the best course of action."

Scouting players on vision and playing intellect above physical tools is very much a departure from the traditional American model as it’s still applied in many places. "In our rush to try to develop players I think we skip understanding the game first and kind of run to ‘Let’s see if we can take some good athletes and make them technical and see if we can make some good players,’” says Wolyniec.

But in addition to finding players with the right kind of mind, this model also requires you to give those players the tools to think for themselves on the field. “A lot of it is about self-discovery, about coaches setting up the training so players can solve the playing problems on their own,” says Bezbatchenko. "It’s about creating intelligent players. It’s about teaching the coaches how to set that up, how to do that."

The self-sufficient player, the theory goes, is a creature not of repetition but of understanding. "How do we get them to realize and grasp concepts without force-feeding them?" says Wolyniec. "It’s like math, they can’t just teach you that two plus two is four, they have to teach you why so you can take that concept and apply it to bigger numbers. We’re not drilling kids to death to make them extreme technical animals; just giving them the opportunity to get on the field and make decisions for themselves."

These are expansive ideas, underpinning lofty ambitions. And just how much of it will make it into MLS’s academies is hard to say. No team is under any obligation to apply any of what they learn, after all. But then perhaps that isn’t the point. “I think the most important thing is the eye-opening part of it,” says Wolyniec. “The realization that there’s something bigger and better out there and we need to strive to try to match that.”