If the USA were to ever win a World Cup, there would be a long roll of people to thank. But this week another name was quietly added to that notional list:

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.

A day after Oxlade-Chamberlain scored the long range goal that may have tilted a Champions League quarter final decisively in Liverpool’s favor, one of his former mentors was rolling out a revolutionary system for US youth soccer development and recalling the player’s decisive role in shaping it.

James Bunce has been US Soccer’s high performance director since last year, but for eight years he was at Southampton as head of athletic development. It was there he first encountered a skinny kid called Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, and where he made a decision that altered the trajectory of the young player’s career, and now, perhaps, the trajectory of player development in the United States.

“Alex was my light bulb moment. He was a late developer. He was tiny; he hadn’t physically matured. But he was really talented, and you could see that he could do exceptional things with the ball when he wasn’t around pressure. But as soon as you put him into a game or a physical encounter, he would get knocked off the ball and look like one of the least-talented players. So we began to say, ‘We need to think about Alex very differently to how we think about the other people in his age group’. So we made the decision with Alex and his parents to keep him back in the under-14s and not promote him into the under 15/16s. And Alex talks about this to this day as a critical part of his development – allowing himself to go back and develop physically and compete. Then as soon as he went through his puberty kick-on, he went straight into the under-18s, and then played for our first team at 16 years and something days (editor’s note: Oxlade-Chamberlain made his debut aged 16 years and 199 days).”

It had been a heartening outcome for one player in the notoriously unpredictable world of youth player development, but it would also get Bunce thinking in more systematic terms.

“I thought ‘How many Alex’s are there in our club?’ And then, ‘How many Alex’s are there in soccer and sport in general in the world?’ Athletes who just miss out on an opportunity because of this physical development that they can do nothing about, because it’s just hardwired into their DNA.”

Bunce would go on to work as Head of Performance for the English Premier League, where he would begin to formalize his thoughts on “Bio-Banding” – grouping players by their level of physical maturation rather than their chronological age. He formed a panel of sports science specialists from around the world in formulating the approach, which in England existed largely as a reference for clubs to draw on as they wished, rather than as a mandated set of practices.

The next step would come in the US. When Bunce joined US Soccer he found the chance and the institutional willingness to develop the process at a policy level, which was exactly what was announced last week. Some 200 elite academies and 20,000 players under US Soccer’s control will now start employing the bio-banding principle to develop and monitor players, with benchmarking input from tech partners like Opta and STATSports (the latter is delivering some 6,000 GPS units to academy teams to help with data gathering and monitoring).

Given the potential rewards for efficiently developing young players, it’s amazing how unscientific the process can still be, even at elite world teams. The tendency is still for a kind of glorified hazing throwing young players into stressful environments and seeing who sinks and who swims. Even the language around kids who are going to “make it” suggests a Darwinian logic. It’s a model that has historically been neglectful of efficiency, relying on the plentiful raw material of young talent, rather than knowledge about uneven development.

But Bunce is part of the generation of coaches and directors shaped by the sports science enlightenment, and is relentlessly curious about testing and improving understanding. Its not a completely dry approach to making laboratory athletes he appreciates what a coaches’ eye can tell him about a player, so he talks of “reliable data points” and “meaningful longitudinal analysis”, but is also prepared to talk about the anecdotal experience of watching thousands of young players over the years and observing certain traits.

In that spirit Bunce also wants to clarify a misconception about Bio-Banding being an approach that only benefits the Oxlade-Chamberlain type of late bloomers. If anything, he says it’s the kids who are big for their age at 12 or 13 who benefit most:

“The biggest beneficiary of this kind of system, in fact, is the early-maturing kid who dominates his academy system, scores ten goals, gets high-fived every weekend and told he’s the greatest player. When they are not pushed on and given a challenging environment every day to deal with failure and deal with challenges, it’s a false dawn. They can easily slip off the radar very quickly when everyone else catches up. Anecdotally, it’s correct to say that those kids have this confidence and self-belief and slowly that leads them down a path of no return where they can’t cope with the change of the environment around them, because they’ve been thinking “I’m made. I’m going to get my pro contract” and so on.”

Of course, a huge part of the profile of a teenage athlete is the psychological component, which matures out of step with physical maturation. The latter is what Bio-Banding can realistically address in its current form, and Bunce describes psychological monitoring being as yet still in its infancy by comparison, even if he sees it as potential “low-hanging fruit” for the right innovators to explore.

But even with the shortcomings, Bunce is excited by this new control group and potential for the current experiment.

“Our kind of sample size is unique to any sport in any country of the world. To have two elite-level genders, and have such a high number of elite athletes, is unique. Which allows us to do things quicker, because the depth of the data is significantly higher than any other league in the world.”

Ever the empiricist, though, Bunce is cautious about over-promising:

“There is no magic sauce. You just need to have an environment that does not stagnate, that keeps challenging and over-reaching the players but that has a support network surrounding them that allows them to fail and then be picked back up and pushed back on forward again. So for me, bio-mapping is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to create 10,000 Christian Pulisic’s overnight. It is just another tool to help make better decisions. It’s just key with younger players not to make rash decisions, see the whole picture and get as much information as you can.”

Still, pressed to think in terms of the World Cup cycles that set the pace for footballing calendars around the world, Bunce is asked where the program expects to be by the time of a potential North American World Cup in 2026.

“I envisage that we would have the richest database of performance and tracking data in the world by that point.”

After the winter of discontent following the USMNT’s elimination from the 2018 World Cup, the idea of the US as a world-leader in any aspect of the game may currently seem truly far-fetched. Yet the sheer number of youth players in the US at any given time is a given, and if systematic efficiencies can be found to harness that potential, the idea of the US as a world-beater is not so far-fetched.

If that happens, thank Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.