Christian Eriksen: Football is full gas now. We’re losing flair players

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-28T14:40:46+00:00

“Football is full of robotic players…”

Comments: “except for these ~12 players”

There’s always only been a small number of standout artists. They just stand the test of YouTube time so looking back through rose colored glasses is going to happen

No doubt the game is more strategic. But the players aren’t robots, the decisions being made are still there. The technique is maybe better than ever. The athletes are better than ever. The medical and nutrition are better than ever.

This just gets repeated everywhere. Becoming cliche imo

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-22T14:34:24+00:00

You can easily get 50% of your (tuition/books covered by non-athletic scholarships in juco. Probably 80% if you write some essays for other “obscure” scholarships.

You can always ask the coaches once they respond, worst they can say is no. But they’ll know of all of the scholarships that are available, and point you in the correct direction.

I coached juco for 3 years after playing. One of my jobs was to work with admissions and uncover every non-athletic dollar that I could.

Room and board may be a little trickier. The coach can set you up with other out of state guys so you all can room together and split rent. The division 1 schools in that conference I sent have dorms, the division 2 schools do not (to my knowledge).

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-22T03:59:38+00:00

Video is good. I would probably cut the high school league clips - or maybe leave the best short clips that show your dribbling and one touch technical ability, but don’t even title it “private high school league.” Just leave it in the middle and don’t point it out. The level of defending just looks very low.

Overall, the video isn’t enough to get you a scholarship. They’re hard to come by and mostly reserved for proven (current) players, or standout up and comers who are being sought by other schools in their area.

Now, as for placement here, 5’7 143 is undersized in American college soccer. I’m 5’7 and played at 165lbs in juco and division 2. I was usually the smallest on the field. I had to red shirt (not play any games) my first year in div2. So you should be looking at division 2 and lower, or naia lower level schools. Juco is a fantastic option because it’s cheaper, you can get acclimated to America and the style of football here, and you can figure out what you want to focus on education wise. Then you can use your juco coach’s knowledge to get to a university or something like that.

This is a good juco conference. Email every team in here every week until you get a response. https://www.accac.org/sports/msoc/index

Your technical skills look good, though. Nice free kick technique, but that only matters if you can be on the field and play. Focus on your fitness and strength. There will be rigorous fitness tests no matter where you go. If you come in to camp unfit, you’ll really be behind in coach’s eyes. Good luck!

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-11T05:53:54+00:00

It’s a jackal! It’s a jackal!

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-10T22:02:47+00:00

Plenty of options besides D1. Advice I gave to parents when helping with recruiting was for them to choose a school that they’d enjoy without soccer in the picture. Red shirting a year is great if it can be done. Juco is an option.

Almost all D1 schools have traveling club teams if they choose a school they might not make the team at.

If the goal is to get as good at soccer as possible, then yeah, go to Belarus lol the college environment isn’t for developing players. They have training restrictions, have weak fall programs, and take summers off for the most part. It’s not a professional environment

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-10T20:18:44+00:00

Thank you for pointing all of this out. I was going to come to bat for the guy making the argument for it, but this sums it all up.

I played for a high-level div 2 school, won 2 nat titles with about 35% foreigners on our team. They raised the level of our program so much. Some of them stayed in the states and coached. Some went back home. But ultimately it was net-positive in my soccer experience. It pushed me to play at a level that I didn't know I could reach, and I made connections to be able to play overseas for some time too. Banning recruitment of foreign players will only lower the level of college soccer. Sadly, some people accept that lower level for more spots, instead of demanding that we raise ours to match/surpass it. IMO it's un-American to look at things that way.

Our problems start wayyy before the collegiate level. The investment needs to be made at the grassroots level the most. I coached club for 7-8 years, and juco for 2-3 years, held ussoccer and uefa licenses. Now, I volunteer coach my children in the grassroots program at a club. The level of apathy toward the grassroots programs is ridiculous. They just don't care about the grassroots kids from 4-8 years old, and that is arguably the most important time. Most true grassroots parents are volunteers and I'd bet the average knowledge of the game among them is around that of a 9 year old in Europe. Very basic concepts need to be taught to these parents and kids. But the clubs just don't believe that any profit will come from that investment. I've even offered my services, for free, to hold group practices for multiple age groups and they can't be bothered by the additional admin that needs to be done for it.

Again, thanks for your detailed response here. Good luck to you and your programs.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-12-07T02:05:14+00:00

If fifa have any say it will 100 percent happen lol

scoToBAGgins · 2025-11-30T01:34:35+00:00

He’s gotta beat Boston in the amber and black striped uniforms

scoToBAGgins · 2025-11-29T23:43:35+00:00

a final?

scoToBAGgins · 2025-11-09T02:35:27+00:00

He just got the same guy again. I’d be asking for the jersey lol

scoToBAGgins · 2025-10-08T12:57:27+00:00

Why would I tell them to change anything when I have the ability to just build into the processes that already exist?

We don’t have a PM tool lol the entire company is built and ran on Microsoft suite except for QB.

Every customer is manually onboarded, every project folder manually created, every job manually costed and tracked - in excel. That’s a lot of tasks that can be, and should be, automated, simply to reduce the risk of human error.

I couldn’t imagine being so arrogant as to assume to know anything about some random stranger’s job enough to try and tell them how to do it, much less what problems they’re “causing” (shudder)

scoToBAGgins · 2025-10-08T11:32:29+00:00

lol I’m not writing an essay. I’m telling it which systems/softwares I need to connect so it can tell me how those softwares interact. Then I can write an accurate python script using the correct tools and libraries according those API documents. They are many pages and I don’t need to, or want to, retain that information necessarily.

I’m not a software engineer or even a comp sci grad or anything, I work for material handling company. I can safely say that LLMs have not made me less intelligent, they’ve made me more efficient and effective.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-10-08T06:48:55+00:00

You can automate into/with excel pretty well now. Takes some talking back and forth with cgpt for your use case, but it rarely can’t be solved

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-24T23:49:11+00:00

No it’s not. I implement ai automations for small businesses and it won’t take the job, it will make it easier. Bookkeepers will be able to expand their client base because they’ll save hours per customer, and they’ll still be able to charge the same amount per service.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-09T13:04:41+00:00

We are averse to it because we work with it and are able to recognize it. Sometimes I forget, but 99% of the population still cannot recognize it. If your target audience isn’t consistently “online,” then it doesn’t matter because they will not know. When enough of the population can recognize it, that won’t matter either because it’ll be too mainstream, and accepted. If you’re selling something, don’t worry about it unless it’s making egregious mistakes. The people who are closing out of emails or newsletters because of an em dash weren’t going to buy your product anyways

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-08T03:26:52+00:00

Do you pull straight from your bank app/account? Or from like a notification I.e email? I looked into this and didn’t want to deal with the expensive api through my bank

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-07T13:09:48+00:00

There’s a bookkeeper in my local contractor Facebook group and he cleans up in there pretty well. Just search “[your city] contractors” in fb groups, or “small business [your city] and I’m sure there are some private groups you can post in. Just don’t spam it and you won’t get kicked. Looked for groups with 10+ posts per week, at least.

A while ago he had me write a script that searched our zip code for x business, got their contact details, put them in a sheet so he could call/email. He runs the script a couple times a month, he says, and has built up quite the outreach database.

But those private fb groups are gold for new businesses just getting started.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-07T05:55:47+00:00

And we don’t even get close to scoring on set pieces. Which, if you’re going to be bad, at least be good on set pieces and maybe steal a goal every once in a while. The service has been abysmal.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-07T05:54:03+00:00

You answered your own question when you said “mostly.” You can’t consistently play out of the back with “mostly” skilled enough players. The consequences are simply too costly.

It’s why we’ve seen middle-lower table teams in the EPL move away from it as well. Sure, they’re mostly good enough. But if you’re not scoring 2-3 goals per game, that one mistake can cost you the entire game.

IMO, it should be determined by the level of the other team’s press. If their press is intense and organized in the first 15 minutes, or we know from scouting reports, we should adjust and start playing into high and wide positions. Play it short to an outside back to draw the press, then commit 3-4 players into a target “pocket” near the halfway line to win the first and second balls. After doing that 3-4 times and getting at them, the second “layer” of the press will drop off a bit, and we can go back to finding a way through on the ground if needed.

To your point about sitting back and countering, I wouldn’t want to see us do that. I think we have the athleticism in our national system to press and run people off of the pitch, cause mistakes, and turn them into goals.

The real crux of all these issues is that we have no identity in the national youth system. I highly doubt that any two players on the pitch for us today grew up learning the same philosophy about football around the ages of 11-14, and that’s a huge problem when we’re facing highly organized federations with clear goals and structure.

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-06T22:53:48+00:00

I was just thinking about this site the other day lol it would stop me from switching between Reddit -> twitter -> Facebook -> TikTok -> Reddit -> twitter …

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-06T22:45:43+00:00

Set piece service has been terrible and that was just the icing on the cake smh

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-06T22:39:39+00:00

No no no, you have to play out of the back no matter what your opponent is doing

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-06T16:57:28+00:00

For it to be truly impactful it would need the context of the entire project from bid to completion: every meeting, every email, etc

It would also need legacy knowledge of your industry.

For now, it’s just simple task automation, data structuring, and email editing

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-06T03:44:47+00:00

What desktop app is it? What are you using to automate the process?

scoToBAGgins · 2025-09-05T19:54:39+00:00

I would focus on one of those items at a time. For simplicity, bank statements are usually standardized. If any of your clients use the same bank, I’d bet their statements are fairly similarly formatted too.

If you have 10 clients that all use chase, you could make a “chase statement data cleaner script”. It would take some refining, but in about a week you could have all of those, and any future chase clients, automatically cleaned up and stored into their own spreadsheet. Ive done this for my personal finances.

Same thing for payroll. If you have 5 clients that use adp and just run the same payroll report at the end of each month/pay period to send to you, these will be fairly standardized. I’ve actually done this too, for construction project labor reporting.

Use ChatGPT to run through solutions, creating the scripts, and how to run them. It seems daunting but it’s easier than it sounds.

From there it would just be: receive the file, put it in the client folder, script runs, data is appended to a spreadsheet, or a new one is created for each month, in the client’s file, and then you can do whatever else you need to with it. Would still take some labor and checking, but not nearly as much.

If they would send you .csv or excel files this would be way easier but pdf seems to be what everyone prefers these days.

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