Soccer · Issue No. 19
The International Touches Gap, By the Numbers
Week of September 14, 2026
QUICK TAKE - Kids in strong soccer countries rack up thousands of extra, unstructured touches — for free, on their own time. - More paid lessons don't close this gap; it's a different kind of practice entirely. - The real fix is unscheduled, self-directed play — hard to buy, easy to overlook.
An academy director who's worked at multiple professional soccer clubs points to a gap between American and international player development that has little to do with coaching quality and everything to do with what happens outside of organized practice.
In many countries with strong soccer development cultures, kids get extra touches on the ball informally — playing in the street, in a yard, at a park after watching a match on television, rather than through additional paid training. That kind of play isn't scheduled, coached, or tracked. It's just kids choosing to keep playing because the game is genuinely part of how they spend free time, the way American kids might spend an afternoon on a bike or in front of a screen.
The scale of the gap, in his estimation, is substantial: by the time a player reaches early adolescence, an academy kid from one of these countries may have accumulated thousands more touches on a ball than an American counterpart with a similar amount of formal training — simply because so much of that additional practice happened for free, informally, driven by the kid's own interest rather than a scheduled session.
This creates a real dilemma for American families, because the instinct to close that gap is usually to add more paid, structured training — another private lesson, another camp. But structured training isn't really a substitute for the kind of unstructured, self-directed play that produces those extra touches in the first place; it's a different kind of practice entirely, with different constraints and less repetition per hour. The more direct, harder-to-manufacture fix is simply more unstructured play — a kid choosing, on their own, to keep a ball at their feet during downtime rather than needing another organized session to do it. That's difficult to schedule and even harder to buy, which may be exactly why the gap persists.
From an interview with a professional soccer academy director.
This piece ran in PPA Pro Issue No. 19, alongside a camp spotlight and trainer pick for every sport. Subscribe free.