And The Academy Award Goes To.....

For nearly 20 years the coach’s association Soccer Amerika Direct (SAD) has been promoting the game to very little effect here in the USA. In January of each year the group’s senior members, known as Fellows Of Old Long Standing (FOOLS), come together to bestow their annual award to the most encouraging trend in the North American game.

This year’s recipient has it’s basis in the professional clubs of Europe who launched this initiative as the panacea to all the game’s ills: here was the silver bullet which would drive back the hordes of joyous young players flooding into their game from Africa, and stop dead in their tracks those unscrupulous agents who did nothing to develop the players beyond parting them from 20% of their outrageous signing on fees.

Not wanting to miss out on a poorly thought out idea the principles were rapidly adopted here in the USA, where they were introduced in a uniquely American half-assed, incompetent way. The initiative was quickly taken up by those clubs who had been excluded from the original program by virtue of their long track record of not having a clue what they were on about, and the profile of the game was raised as more and more parents could be fleeced out of an ever larger part of their shrinking income to fund this ‘next big thing’. Soccer Amerika Direct has marveled at the way our coaches have packaged this idea and sold it to an unsuspecting public to the point where the parents of kids as young as 4 years old have been seduced by this single word miracle.

It is therefore with great pleasure that our SADFOOLS bestow their 2010 lifetime achievement award to the abuse, misuse and blatant commercial exploitation of the word ACADEMY.