In Argentina, one of the greatest honors for a local soccer club might be to produce a player who moves to an even bigger club, then maybe becomes part of the country\u2019s storied national team. In the United States, if a player like that walked into a local soccer program, it would surprise nobody if that program tried to eke every penny out of the player’s parents before showing him or her off to the world.<\/p>\n
Therein lies one of the crucial differences between a nation of 46 million that plays Spain<\/a> on Sunday for a fourth World Cup<\/a> title and another with more than seven times the population that has never sniffed that kind of success.<\/p>\n America\u2019s early departure from the 2026 World Cup<\/a> raised a question that arises every four years: What would it take to produce a global men’s soccer superpower in the United States?<\/p>\n This time around, many of the answers appear to lie in retooling the so-called \u201cpay-for-play\u201d system that permeates youth sports in America. The majority of youth organizations in the U.S. stay in business by developing players for a fee, then keeping them in the program for as long as their family is willing to pay.<\/p>\n Upending this dynamic in soccer won\u2019t happen in four, eight or 12 years. Figuring out how to get better results from it could happen sooner.<\/p>\n \u201cOur strategy should not be to copy and paste what works in another country,\u201d said JT Baston, the CEO of the U.S. Soccer Federation. \u201cIt’s, how do we, in partnership with the pro clubs, design the right youth pathways here. It looks like the hub-and-spoke model where you’re leveraging the best of the professional clubs, leveraging the best of the rest of the ecosystem here and the national team program.\u201d<\/p>\n Soccer is part of a growingly expensive youth sports culture in America<\/strong><\/p>\n In America, some families shell out up to five figures a year, including team dues, equipment and travel expenses, to place their children in a system with no fewer than seven national oversight bodies and 54 state federations dedicated to youth soccer.<\/p>\n The expenses aren’t unique to soccer. Project Play estimated a typical U.S. family paid $1,016 in 2024<\/a> to bankroll a child\u2019s primary sport \u2014 a 46% increase over five years earlier. For so-called \u201celite\u201d sports, costs can rise above $12,000 a year.<\/p>\n Players who can\u2019t afford to buy into the so-called \u201cpay-for-play\u201d system sometimes never get on a soccer field.<\/p>\n That\u2019s another ingrained fact of life in the United States, where between 4 million and 6 million kids play soccer but the sport, at its highest level, remains buried behind football and basketball across large swaths of U.S. sports fans\u2019 conscience.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d make the argument that if Erling Haaland<\/a> was a kid in America, he\u2019d be playing in the NFL right now,\u201d longtime U.S. goalkeeper Kasey Keller said of the Norwegian soccer star who captured the world\u2019s imagination during his team\u2019s run to the quarterfinals.<\/p>\n America’s MLS tries to retool the pipeline and replicate the world’s club system<\/strong><\/p>\n If there is any \u201cofficial\u201d pipeline, it belongs to Major League Soccer<\/a>, which in 2020 took over the country\u2019s main developmental program after the USSF shut it down due to COVID-related financial strains.<\/p>\n MLS Next this fall will cover around 53,000 players, only a fraction of whom have their training \u2014 including physical therapy, travel and equipment \u2014 fully subsidized.<\/p>\n The top level of that program, the homegrown division, includes more than 17,000 players: around 3,000 from the academies of the league\u2019s 30 teams (including three in Canada), who play for free, plus players from elite youth clubs outside MLS. The remainder are in the next level down, called the academy division.<\/p>\n MLS Next has established a grant program in which grassroots clubs are paid for developing players who go on to play in America\u2019s top league.<\/p>\n That fledgling system pales in comparison to what exists in Argentina and many countries across Europe and South America.<\/p>\n Soccer in many countries operates in what Rory O’Neill, a Pennsylvania grassroots coach<\/a>, calls an \u201copen ecosystem.\u201d In that system, thousands of pro and semi-pro clubs across hundreds of leagues, big and small across the globe, are relegated and promoted yearly based on their performance. That relegation system creates a steady need to uncover talent wherever clubs can find it.<\/p>\n Players who come up through the club system can earn a spot on that club\u2019s top team and make that team better. They can also be sold to clubs in bigger leagues, which provides a revenue stream that keeps the system running.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re not in that ecosystem, you might have a hard time understanding, \u2018Well, how could what happens at the professional level have any impact on my son or daughter\u2019s 12-year-old soccer team?\u2019\u201d O\u2019Neill said. \u201cBut it has a huge impact. It\u2019s just a very different bar to cross” than in America.<\/p>\n