He's the coach's kid, but Bradley is addicted to soccer

Michael Bradley, 20, has proven he belongs among the regulars on the U.S. national team. Andy Mead/WireImage.com

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How much of a soccer junkie is Michael Bradley? Well, the rising 20-year-old U.S. midfielder just bought an apartment right across the street from the stadium at Heerenveen, the Dutch club where he plies his trade.

When he's not playing games or training, he devours European soccer broadcasts, to say nothing of repeated viewings of his own matches. And if you're looking for Bradley to join the chorus criticizing the overloaded European soccer calendar, think again.

"There's no breaks, and I think that's a really good thing," says Bradley, who has won starting jobs in both the U.S. and Heerenveen midfields in recent months. "Our season's 11 months long. We get three weeks off in June. So for 11 months every day to go into training and know you've got to play well and perform and improve yourself to make sure you're getting on the field, that's how you really get better as a player."

More than anything, Bradley's unyielding appetite for soccer explains why he has improved more (arguably) than any other U.S. player over the past year -- and why he didn't bother to take three weeks off in June, playing instead for the U.S. in both the Gold Cup and the Under-20 World Cup.

"I didn't want a vacation on the beach or whatever," Bradley says. "When you're a soccer player and this is your profession, this is what you want to do every day. So you pay attention to things. You watch games. You talk about games."

And when Bradley talks about soccer, the similarities to his father, Bob, the U.S. national-team coach, are almost eerie. I've been covering Bob since 1992, when he was the coach at Princeton, but this was the first time I had ever interviewed Michael, and at times I swore I was listening to Bradley the Elder. Michael's speech has the same drawn-out pauses, the same expressions ("inside the team"; "it is what it is"; "knowing how to play"; "Look, ..."), the same cerebral deconstruction of the sport itself.

Make no mistake, that last similarity is a good thing. So much of the media coverage surrounding the Bradleys has addressed the surface impact (and potential conflicts) of a son playing for his dad on the national team, leaving aside the more important point: The U.S. now has a 20-year-old national-teamer who approaches the game with nearly the same thought process, passion and work ethic as one of the most accomplished soccer coaches this country has ever produced.

And at 6-foot-2 and 175 pounds, the younger Bradley has the elite-level physical tools his pops never possessed. Granted, he's still a work-in-progress -- witness his red card against Canada in the Gold Cup and his penalty against Brazil last month, both fatigue-induced brain locks -- but you could also argue that Bradley was the U.S.' most effective player in the 4-2 loss to the Samba Kings.

When asked how much influence Bob has had on how he views the sport, Michael doesn't hesitate. "All of it," he says. "Everything."

From the time Michael could walk, he was kicking a soccer ball around the Bradley house. As a kid he'd tag along on Princeton road trips, and he was a fixture at Chicago Fire practices after Bob took over there. As a teenager, Michael played for his father on the MetroStars and even scored the team's playoff-clinching goal in the emotional 2005 regular-season finale, three games after his dad had been fired.

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