We are all products of our environments and there is no reason to pick on anyone because they end up being raised in a certain area. Generally, Americans tend to not really care about soccer / football and because of this the coaching and sport education of the game is not very good. Had I not been moved to private leagues I likely would have continually been coached by parents of one of my teammates, or in the case of one of my high school teams, the coach would know almost nothing about the sport but was being paid extra to be the coach.
On the other hand American football teams, even at the youngest levels, tend to have coaches with a great deal of experience and knowledge of the game.
As a youngster, I never even knew that the rest of the world referred to the sport at football, nor did I realize that it was the most popular sport in the world. This was a pre-internet time-period and there was no good reason that I would ever hear about such things.
It wasn't until I got to high school and a couple of foreign exchange students came to the soccer field and almost immediately wowed everyone with their abilities.
One of them was a kid from Greenland and another was a girl from Sweden. Both of them were much better than most of the other kids in my town.
src
This is not them
Now if you know anything about global football / soccer, you already realize that these two nations aren't generally known for their excellence in this sport, but still, they were miles ahead of their American youth counterparts. This was especially true of the Swedish girl, Maya, who was so good they moved her up to the boys team because there wasn't much participation in the girl's teams anywhere in the state.
Maya was a bit slower than the boys her age, but her ball control was outstanding. She was considerably smaller than a lot of the boys as well but this didn't matter so much because she has an amazing ability to get around people, and keep the ball from being taken from her. She played forward, normally on the right and she was an integral part of our team - which surprised everyone because this was a different time and girls didn't even try to play on the boys' teams.
I don't remember the guy's name from Greenland, but he was excellent as well. When we would talk to these two they informed us that soccer / football is very popular in schools there and while they also had hockey to contend with, soccer was a close 2nd as most popular sport. At least as far as Sweden is concerned, they are also very nearby nations where the sport is almost like a religion. Therefore, there is a lot of pressure on the youth there to excel at this sport, kind of like American boys are basically forced into playing American football.
This was the 80's, so nobody was terribly global in their knowledge. So to find out how popular soccer was overseas was a real eye-opener to me.
Later on when I would join private club teams and play with a much higher caliber of players and coaches I would discover that this was even moreso the case with people from Central and South America. I was on a team with a Mexican exchange student who was even more impressive than the Europeans I had encountered playing for my high school team.
I ended up being a rather dominant player and also ended up with a Division-1 scholarship to play soccer. When I got to college and was playing in what was at that time the highest level of competition that existed in the USA for soccer, I ended up playing with and against a lot of people that had received scholarships as well, only they traveled from another country to make that happen. This is where I started to figure out that my arrogance and dominance in the sport early in my life was nothing compared to the level of competition that existed south of the US border.
Now if you asked any of these people to play American football they would get their butts kicked and probably not understand that rules.