Amidst an influx of impressive young talent coming to Major League Soccer from South America, the Bundesliga is raiding the U.S. for young players. So while American teenagers may not be having any luck breaking into lineups at home, they’re finding more opportunities in the league of the world champions. To steal a line from Taylor Twellman, what are we doing?
Aged just 16 years, five months and two days (for comparison’s sake, Lionel Messi was 17 years, three months and 22 days), teenage Catalan phenom Claudia Pina made her league debut for FC Barcelona Femeni Sunday in the club’s 2-0 victory over Zaragoza.
Pina has been a revelation for Barcelona throughout her La Masia rise, and her exploits for Spain at the U-17 level have been remarkable, to say the least.
You might’ve forgotten about Ousmane Dembele following his 20-game layoff due to a thigh muscle rupture, and that’s OK. Really, missing that many games accounts for roughly 20 percent of the kid's career so far.
The fallout to the Jonathan Gonzalez switch from the U.S. to Mexico has been immense. We’ve covered it here and here. Simply put: The U.S. appears to be failing in its pursuit of identifying and recruiting Mexican-Americans to compete for the national team. But the possibility of a Timothy Tillman switch is proof U.S.
The fallout from Jonathan Gonzalez’s switch from the United States national team to Mexico has been expectedly fierce, especially so when coupled with the current state of U.S. Soccer. Here was a California native who’d progressed through the U.S. youth system, including run-outs at the U-17, U-18 and U-20 levels, who joined Mexican club side C.F. Monterrey in 2014 “bleeding red, white and blue.”
17-year-old Missouri native Josh Sargent made his Werder Bremen debut on Tuesday while appearing for the club’s U-23 team in a friendly versus Dynamo Dresden. Sargent officially joined the club on Jan. 1 and won’t be able to sign a professional contract until turning 18 on February 20, but the eagle has landed.
As first reported by Univision and subsequently confirmed by ESPN FC and the Washington Post’s Steven Goff, 18-year-old Monterrey midfielder Jonathan Gonzalez, having represented the United States at the U-17, U-18 and U-20 levels, will request a one-time switch of allegiance from FI
It’s an old trope of film that always gets the job done effectively and, more importantly, concisely: the training montage. Films like the Rocky franchise, The Karate Kid, X-Men: First Class, The Fighter, Cool Runnings, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Hunger Games and you get the point have all utilized the uplifting sequence to quickly portray a long passage of time devoted to painstaking preparation.
Two weeks after being named the 2017 U.S. Soccer Male Player of the Year, 19-year-old Borussia Dortmund attacker Christian Pulisic added another first to his individual trophy cabinet: the accolade for December’s Bundesliga Goal of the Month.
It was the eighth Bundesliga goal of Pulisic’s career, but the first to be named Goal of the Month. The composed finish against Hoffenheim from December 16 gave Dortmund all three points in the 89th minute.
When FC Barcelona signed 12-year-old prospect Cristobal Munoz from a youth side affiliated with Malaga last March, the deal was heralded by Barcelona-based daily Sport as the capture of “the hottest young prospect in Spanish football.”