We still don’t really know what’s going on with Preki, who as of last week was the head coach of defending USL champion Sacramento Republic. Wherever he’s going to coach in the UK (Leicester City, probably, although that has yet to be confirmed) he won’t be in Sacramento anymore. Or anywhere, for that matter, in the United States.

On his way out the door, Preki grilled a morsel of food for thought over the fire until it was a hunk of flame-deadened animal and plunked the chewiest bit on our plate. Among other things, Preki recently said this to the Sacramento Bee before skipping town.

Preki is correct, of course. But instead of drilling into the fundamentals of why the system has faltered in key spots, today I want to turn the attention back on the players themselves. We’ve done plenty of sniping at the mechanisms we’ve failed to adequately lubricate here in search of our own little slice of Messi, but, in my opinion, we have yet to really aim any of the wider fire on the will and desire of the players.

Before we seek out the player, understand that of course the biggest impediment is the construct in which young players are developed. World class coaching and world class players aren’t so much a chicken-egg proposition as they are a mother-child one. A player will not simply grow up on his own. But (and this is important) the player, young as he is, needs to lift half the weight. With the best players, we have to place expectation on his shoulders that may divest him of his soccer interest. And that’s OK. Because without a winnowing process, we will not distill the game into its purest essence. Soccer should be fun. But it should also be life-defining work for those who wish to make it their life.

So today I speak to those Players Who Would Be King. If we wish to follow Preki’s parting words and develop players with the technical ability to stand up to the wind tunnel of world soccer, here’s what we need to begin asking of our best players.

Be a soccer junkie

There was a time when I covered high school football in Texas each fall for my job. In this way I have seen all manner of insanity. I have seen a rural, dying farm town with 2,000 residents house a football stadium with a capacity of 5,000 and fill it every Friday night. I have seen a sideline packed with head football coaches from six Division I schools in power conferences, Brett Bielema and Art Briles shifting thirsty eyes from one another to a particular recruit they’d both targeted. I have seen a player fill an entire gymnasium to commit to a school, his fingers dancing over a lineup of hats as a thousand people stood in anxious thrall. When he picked up his hat, Oregon green, five people suddenly burst forth from the crowd, duck whistles blaring.

There is a thread than runs through the football season every Texas fall, from the high school level to the pros. It was almost religious. Every summer, a magazine called Dave Campbell’s Texas Football hits magazine shelves at vendors across the state. Released every year since 1960, it is referred to without a shred of irony as The Bible of Texas Football. It is devoured in the thousands every year, from its pro and DI writeups to its previews of small high school districts from places as far-flung as Canadian and Refugio. Literally every football program in the state from the time a player hits the age of 14 is covered.

This is fanatic devotion, even in a country that counts football (of the American variety) as its No. 1 sport. But it is devotion that’s made the state of Texas the chief exporter of top football players, the most violently invested geographic tract in the sport anywhere on the planet, and a place that nurtures and accepts players who devote nearly every waking hour to the love of the sport. I spent several Julys baking in the Central Texas sun covering a state 7-on-7 tournament – flag football, mind you – which was covered in some depth by every major media outlet in Texas.

The point here is that it was never enough. No matter how much football the state is fed, it always nurses a thunderous hunger. This is what we ask of our top athletes. Only everything you have.

Soccer is still coming around in this country, but not in the oft-cited way of participation numbers and viewership and whatever else. It’s in the knowledge of the game itself. Watch ESPN. Watch Fox. How do we analyze the game? How are we talking about it? Football analysis, though we have become largely inured to its presiding residence atop the heap, is so common now that when we talk about defenses, we talk about 3-4 vs. 4-3 and one-gap vs. two-gap and Tampa 2 vs. Man and Mike vs. Will and Jam vs. Sag. As much as I’ve made fun of John Gruden down the years, his QB Camp sessions reveal a simple truth about even those players without cerebral reputations: everybody with professional aspiration knows the game because they breathe the game.

We don’t access our inner analytic enough in soccer media, a fact that is slowly but surely changing and then trickling down to those who watch, read or listen. Which leads us to our next bullet.

We need a higher soccer IQ among prospects

Soccer is not this convoluted, but it’s complicated in its own way. Forget for a moment whether a player has the technical ability to dribble in a phone booth and let’s discuss whether he has the IQ to avoid the phone booth in the first place.

Study through emulation isn’t merely the highest form of flattery. It’s also the most direct way to learn. Comac McCarthy, arguably the greatest living American writer, once said, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books.” I’m not so certain it’s ugly. Steven Pressfield, most famous for his book The Legend of Bagger Vance, would sit at a computer and feed in thousands of lines of Ernest Hemingway, copying entire books to break down their pacing, style, rhythm. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins made imitation Wallace Stevens poems to better develop his own voice.

This takes a form of dedication and pure desire that can’t come from anywhere other than the core of your being. To (fittingly) borrow from Hemingway, there is nothing to soccer. All you do is walk out to a field and bleed.

What is changing now, and what needs to continue accelerating, is the smarter side of the game. Through emulation and study, what can we learn about the game through Nemanja Matic’s marking of Zlatan Ibrahimovic? Or through the vehicle of Robbie Keane’s movement in space? Or upon what noble cobbles Liverpool’s collapse in 2014 was predicated? How can a formation with a dropping second forward interact with a three-man back line with a dedicated sitting defensive midfielder? What does a marauding fullback do if he’s caught outside his castle walls with an overlapping runner steaming on past the man on ball?

What I want to know from a top prospect is whether he’s devouring the game. Regardless of your position, are you watching players from every end of the skill timeline? Neymar and Thiago Silva and Thibaut Courtois? Why are they good? What can you visualize yourself doing better?

Watch the game like a professor (with the ability to turn off the analytical spigot, too). Play FIFA. Chip soccer balls into trash cans from 20 yards. Learn about top players, teams, the opposition, your teammates, every position on the field. Play Football Manager. Engage in pickup games with strangers, and then make them listen to you drone on about Total Football for a half hour. Know the inanities of kit culture. Have opinions on the way teams play. Study the history of the game. Be conversant about Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Garrincha, Joe Gaetjens. Pay attention to your local club. Play always.

But more than anything, delve into the game like it’s feeding you. Because in more ways than one, it can.

Soccer is not a book report. It is a beautiful, breathing thing that’ll produce the best years of a professional’s life. But it also requires more dedication than that of a fleeting hobby, something a Development Academy player commits to four times a week in between more important hobbies. If you wish to follow the narrow path cut through the underbrush by David Luiz or Clint Dempsey or Eden Hazard, this can be no hobby.

As Preki alluded to, you can’t out-athlete better teams in soccer. That isn’t how the game works. The more our players become hopeless devotees to every corner of the game’s nuance, the more likelihood he’ll be the best player we’ve ever produced.