Scouts from U.S.F.C. have been actively looking at the best and brightest youth soccer talent for some time now, in anticipation of a pair of excellent opportunities involving European clubs and identification this summer.

But what exactly are these scouts looking for?

U.S.F.C.® Technical Director Don Ebert and Director of Scouting Jon Spencer weighed in on their approach to observing and evaluating soccer talent.

Ebert said in order to properly evaluate a player, he prefers to have a few players targeted ahead of match-time, but allows that the way the match unfolds could change this.

“It’s impossible to really see all 22 guys. What I try to do is have an idea of certain players so I can focus on those players for a game or at least a full half. I like to watch their movement off the ball, on the ball, how they react, how they handle the good and bad and how they handle pressure situations. This way I can watch those guys for 90 percent of the time.

“Sometimes though, guys just jump out and my eyes start focusing on him,” he continued. “But if that happens I’ll normally go and see him again and have my eyes focused on him so I can see him some more under those situations.”

Ebert added that everyone has their preferences for players, and he allows this makes scouting, especially of young players, a complicated venture. There are some common areas and absolutes which tend to guide most skilled observers.

“The game’s evolution has forced you to scout differently, for sure,” Ebert said. “When I first started, the technical, smart player was enough, but now the game is so fast – it’s played at lightning speed now – so the speed of play is the number one thing I look for.

“I don’t just mean pure speed, it involves many different things,” he noted. “There’s athletic speed, but also speed of thought, of reading, of touch. On top of all of that you are trying to project how a youth player is going to mature. You see some talented, technically-gifted guys who just don’t have the overall speed of play to play at that high of a level.”

Ebert said players with an ultimate goal of playing at a high level in Europe need to focus on some specifics.

“You absolutely cannot have a good overall speed of play without a good, confident first touch. You have to be technically sound in every aspect of the basic skills of the sport,” he said. “So many kids today skip that part. They tend to be the big athletes, the biggest and fastest. That allows them to get away with it at some levels, but it catches up to you. I hear NBA people all the time saying its all highlights for the kids and not enough attention to the fundamentals. But just like for soccer, you need to have that solid base to play faster and faster and faster to go up to the next levels.”

Ebert cited small-area, small-sided games and drills as instrumental in developing quick decision-making for young players. He has changed his own teams’ training regimen to include more of this.

“We sacrifice a lot of work on set pieces and 11v11 things to accomplish that, but I believe 100 percent that it is the key to having a successful career.”

Director of Scouting Jon Spencer has been taking a crash, reintroductory course to American youth soccer since returning home from a stint as a professional player in Germany. Spencer sees great potential for American players wishing to take their pursuits overseas, but also identifies some potential problem areas that young players need to address.

“We have some very athletic youth players here in the U.S. These guys have a lot of potential and largely are on par with the rest of the world,” he said. “The upper echelon is definitely on par, and there is a lot of parity in the (larger) group right underneath that top level. They have potential too and the question is whether as a soccer nation we can develop them as a whole and create a larger pool of SuperElite® players.

“When you compare what we do to the Euro clubs, that’s probably the one thing you’ll see, their players have experience playing in meaningful games, games that count, on a regular basis from age 10 or 11, up to 18 when they are looking to play professionally,” he added. “Because of that their pool of upper echelon players is larger than ours, but we have the potential to see our players getting to that as we see the development of American soccer as a whole.”

On the negative side, Spencer, who will be coaching the Orange County Blue Star team in the PDL this summer, said he sees problem areas in both the technical and tactical side of the youth game here.

“My biggest criticism is two-fold. One area is the technical – just the need to polish up our game. Some players you can tell have come from certain clubs because their touch is more polished than kids on other clubs. Their first touch prepares them for their next step, whether that’s going to be a shot, or a dribble or a pass. You see other players receive the ball and then they think ‘what do I do next?’ Well that is too late to think that at a high level and it’s an area of weakness overall.

So it relates to the tactical side. A lot of players don’t recognize very well when to take the dribble and when to play a pass, and so they lose the ball a lot,” he added. “I watched a kid the other day decide to dribble right at a player when if he had just played a pass to a wide open guy to his left his team would have been behind the defense. In Germany if you don’t play that ball, you’re on the bench. A lot of players don’t seem to understand tactically how and why another player is in a more dangerous spot, to create a 90 percent chance to score vs. a 30 percent chance.

The same goes for pressure. Our teams like to play pressure but often the players don’t seem to recognize how to make a difference with that pressure, how to pick the right spot to do it and to use multiple players so it is more likely to create a turnover.”