The Cross Over Movement Blog

Henry Abbott of True Hoop posted a link to an article about Manchester United signing a nine-year-old. He said, “If this happened in basketball people would FREAK OUT.”

However, this does happen in basketball. Maybe not ten years old, but clubs in Russia, Italy, Greece and Serbia recruit young players to play for their youth clubs or train with their academies.

The difference between the European culture and the American sports landscape is the professional club’s involvement with the development of the next generation of players. Here, there is no involvement. The Los Angeles Lakers do not have a youth club system to develop the next Kobe Bryant, while Manchester United does have a club system to develop the next David Beckham. It is a major philosophical difference in the roles of professional franchises. As the article states:

“Manchester United is proud of its history of developing talented young players, and invests considerable time and resources into trying to find the best young players of the future,” the club said in a statement.

This precocious Aussie youth (with a British passport and grandfather living in England) is not being signed to a professional contract; he is signed to a development deal, much like a college scholarship, where he can train and live at the Academy while attending school. He gets access to the best coaches and facilities during his formative years, and the English Premier League academies even limit the number of games youths play. Because Man U. invests its time and resources in the lad, they have a contract; if and when he makes it to a professional side, he either plays with Man U., or Man U. loans him to another club but retains his rights (like an NBA team loaning a player to an NBDL team) or Man U. can agree to a transfer fee (like the Phoenix Suns selling the rights to Rudy Fernandez for $3million). So, Man U. has an incentive to develop the lad; the NBA has no such system and no such incentive to involve itself in the development of youth players, which creates an open market, which has its positives and negatives, and, lately, more negatives than positives, in terms of actual player development.

FoxSports Jeff Goodman noticed the same thing I have been saying: there is no difference between the “old” system and this year’s “new” version of the AAU/exposure circus. After covering AAU ball coast to coast, he writes:

There really wasn’t all that much different about the summer landscape except for Sonny Vaccaro’s absence on the circuit. The LeBron James Camp in Akron was certainly an upgrade over the previous Nike All-American Camp, but the bottom line is that the level of play was still fairly low by the time the second half of July rolled around.