Summer Of Love And Opportunity
When I was a kid, I was Tony Yeboah. Every time I got the ball, every time I shot, I was trying to replicate that goal — bar and in from outside the box, Leeds United, mid-nineties. I didn't do it on purpose. It just happened because I'd watched the man play and somewhere in my brain I decided I could be him.
Do your players do that? Is there a player on your team who arrives to training walking like Messi, or who chips the goalkeeper in the rondo because they saw somebody do it on Instagram? That moment — where a kid sees something in the professional game and tries to bring it onto their field — is one of the most powerful forces in player development. And it happens most naturally in the summer, when the big tournaments are on and the game is impossible to ignore.
The question is whether we're using it.
Part One: Participation
Summer camps are where most of your players spend their soccer hours in July and August. Every club runs one. Some run several. Two to six hours a day, five days a week — it's the most concentrated contact time you'll have with players all year, and a lot of it is wasted on drills and cone patterns that nobody will remember by September.
The easiest win in any summer camp is a Camp World Cup. Split the kids into countries, give each team a flag, and before the games start — ask them who they know from that country. Who are the players? What do they know about the national team? If your team is Scotland and nobody knows a single Scottish player, that's your job. Tell them about a player. Show them a clip. Give them someone to be.
This is how you grow soccer culture in the US. Not through coaching clinics or federation initiatives — through a kid wearing an Argentina shirt at camp because Messi just scored in a tournament the night before. That's the door. Once they've identified with a player, everything else follows.
Camp jerseys matter too. If your players show up to a soccer camp in basketball shorts and a baseball jersey, you've already lost something. The culture of the game should be present from the moment they arrive. Soccer kit, soccer conversation, soccer everywhere they look for a week. It sounds like a small thing. It isn't.
And then take it off the camp field. After a Copa America game, after a Gold Cup game, after a Euros match — can you text the parents and say: get outside after this one, have a kickaround on the street. Watch parties where the kids play in the garden at halftime and then come back in to see the second half. This is how pickup culture gets built — not by lecturing players about street football, but by creating the conditions for it to happen naturally.
Part Two: Getting Them to Watch
This is harder. A tight international final — one goal, tactical, two organized defenses — is genuinely difficult for a twelve-year-old to appreciate. The highlights show the assist and the finish. They don't show the press that forced the turnover that led to the passage that led to the goal. You can't blame kids for watching the highlight reel version. That's where the excitement is, visually.
But you can help them see more.
Watch parties work because the social environment changes the experience. A group of players watching together are going to react, debate, argue — and that's actually engagement with the game, even if it's chaotic. Let it be chaotic. The point isn't that they watch it like analysts. It's that they watch it together.
A good challenge for older players: watch the first half and write down three things you noticed. Not "we scored" or "they missed" — three tactical or positional things. Where did the press start? Who tracked the runner? When did the fullback overlap? It doesn't need to be submitted or graded. It's just a framework that turns passive watching into active watching. Done well, it doesn't feel like homework. Done badly, it definitely does.
You can also give them timestamps. Watch the replay and mark the moments that connect to what you've been working on. Send it to the group: watch 38:15, watch 62:40. Two minutes of homework. Total engagement with what you've been coaching.
The TikTok and Instagram clips players are already watching are actually useful here. If you're on those platforms — even briefly — showing the nuances of the game that highlights skip over, you become a filter between the noise and the knowledge. What does a press trigger look like before the ball is won? What's the movement of the nine before the pass arrives? These things happen in the game. Most clips don't show them. You can.
Part Three: Support What's Local
This is the one coaches don't want to hear.
If you're a coach in the US — especially if you're from somewhere else, as many of us are — it's very easy to compare MLS to the Premier League and find it lacking. It's easy to dismiss the US national team, talk about the closed pyramid, explain at length why the youth development system is broken.
And when you do that in front of your players, you've just told them the game they love isn't worth watching at the highest local level. You've undermined USL. You've undermined the national team. You've made it harder for them to care about the game that's actually on their doorstep.
The comparison kills the culture. And the culture is the thing we're trying to build.
Go to a local game. Take your team to a USL match or a college game or whatever is accessible to you. It doesn't matter that it's not the Champions League — the energy of being in a stadium watching live soccer matters. The chip that goes over the goalkeeper. The tackle that saves a goal. The atmosphere when the home side scores. These things are formative.
If you've been skeptical about local soccer in front of your players, this is the summer to stop. Not because MLS is perfect, but because your job is to build a generation of people who love this game enough to keep playing it, coaching it, watching it, and supporting it. That doesn't happen if the message they get from their coach is: the stuff near you isn't worth caring about.
I'm from England. I don't plan to go back. But I miss the culture — the way the whole country slows down when a major tournament is on, the way school start times get pushed back the morning after a big game, the way it's impossible to avoid it. I want that for the kids I coach here. I want every player to feel the way I feel when England are in a tournament.
We are the ones who can create that. Not by coaching more. By caring, out loud, about the game in all its forms — and making sure our players see us doing it.
This summer is the window. Use it.
Listen to the full episode: Ep. 60 — Summer of Love. And Opportunity
@LeeDunneSoccer