Leander Schaerlaeckens

speaker

344 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Leander Schaerlaeckens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Football Weekly · Is the USA ready for the World Cup? – Football Weekly podcast · 13 May 2026 podcast

Oh, that's so good.

The trouble was that some of the leading players wanted nothing to do with it.

They wanted to stay with their teams, with the Cosmos or with the Seattle Sounders.

And so what you really wound up getting was a tribute band of the national team, such as it was, that came dead last in the NASL and that folded after that one season.

Around this time, it was just an unserious operation.

The players were getting $5 a day per DMs.

They were turning down call-ups all the time because it wasn't worth the bother because often they weren't brought together until the day of the game or the day before a game.

And so to have gotten from there to finally qualifying by 1990 and to consistently reaching the knockout stages of the World Cup today is a bit of a sporting miracle.

And that's really what the book is about.

I think it is.

Soccer has for too long been a rite of passage of American childhood, the way the Boy Scouts might be and the way sleepovers might be.

And it's something that you would ditch and move on from once you became a teenager and you started getting serious about the real sports.

The other issue is that youth soccer is prohibitively expensive, and it's really, really hard for a lot of families to afford it, which has been a bit of a

common trend i think in in today's conversation and so that's frozen out an awful lot of talent over the years feels like the cheapest sport you could play amidst the american sport you don't need a bat you don't need any pads one would think yeah one would think but um like all of youth sports in america it's been privatized it's been commercialized

Uh, we have something called travel sports, which has basically devoured all of rec sports, which would be run by nonprofits or by local towns and which would be free or very cheap.

And it's been taken over by these leagues that are, um, very much for profit industries that'll charge.

If you want to play to any kind of serious level, unless you're in an MLS Academy, it's going to cost you thousands of dollars a year.

And so the U S national team, uh,

especially on the men's side, has often looked a lot like the American upper middle class because that's the only people who can afford for their kids to be seen and to play at the levels where the coaching is good and the competition is good.

And I think an element of it is sort of generational as well, right?

Showing 301–320 of 344 · page 16 of 18