I would say that until it becomes a common thing for a kid to go down to the park and get a game of pickup going, the game will never attract athletes of the calibre of Allen Iverson. At least not in any real volume, maybe we'll find a standout here or there. I have often thought that someone like Barry Sanders would have been a monster of a creator in the midfield. But it's not a question of finding Barry Sanders at 5 years old and developing him as a player (the current tennis model), you need to have large groups of people in the system to increase the likelihood of finding one or two players that might develop into standouts. Maybe this will change as a result of the influx of Latin American emigres, but that remains to be seen. On another note, but I lived in France, Italy and Germany for a few years for work and school related tasks. Routinely I would head down to whatever park was closest on a Saturday morning, and get into a game of pickup. First time I did it was an eye opener. Those guys play hard. Full on tackling, fierce challenges and whatnot. If you were going to take the ball through a crowd, you better be prepared to be taken down otherwise you would be in for quite an unpleasant surprise. By contrast, American pickup soccer games in city parks - if you can find them - tend to be somewhat genteel affairs (perhaps owing to the largerly upper middle class suburban soccer tradition that has persisted in this country since the 1970s) which are more casual than competiive. Again, until that ethic appears here, we're lost. I think the proper allegory is street hoops in this country. Though I don't play basketball, I used to live near the West 4th street courts in NYC. As a casual observer, I would say that the level of physicality, fearlessness and ability there was on a par with the sandlot football matches I participated in in Europe. I'd love to know what it would take to get some of those guys to want to play soccer, but I don't think it's likely to happen. At least not without some cultural and attitudinal shifts, and investment at the grass roots level. As a kid, it made a huge difference to raise the level of the sport's profile when Pele came to New York, and managed to jump start the middling NASL and the Cosmos (it made a tremendous impact on me), but sadly, it only lasted a couple of years before Pele retired and the NASL went out of business, and soccer was once again banished third tier status, somewhere behind bowling and funny car drag racing.
