\n
In Argentina, one of the greatest honors for a local soccer club may be producing players who move on to bigger clubs and then become part of the country’s historic national team. In the United States, if such a player appeared on a local soccer program, no one would be surprised if the program tried to extort a dime from the player’s parents before introducing him to the world.<\/p>\n
Therein lies one of the key differences in this country of 46 million people. it plays spain<\/span> 4th time on Sunday world cup<\/span> Another company with a title and more than seven times the population has never sniffed such success. <\/p>\namerican Early departure from the 2026 World Cup<\/span> posed a question that occurs every four years: What will it take to create a global men’s soccer powerhouse in the United States? <\/p>\nThis time, much of the answer appears to lie in rebuilding the so-called “pay-for-play” system that permeates American youth sports. Most youth organizations in the United States stay in business by developing players for a fee and keeping them in the program as long as their families pay.<\/p>\n
Upending this dynamic in football is not going to happen in four, eight, or 12 years. You might find a way to get better results out of it sooner.<\/p>\n
“Our strategy must not be to copy and paste what works in other countries,” said JT Baston, CEO of the U.S. Soccer Federation. “It’s about how we work with the professional clubs to design the right pathway for the youth here. This looks like a hub-and-spoke model that leverages the best of the professional clubs and leverages the best of the rest of the ecosystem here and the national team program.”<\/p>\n
Soccer is part of America’s increasingly expensive youth sports culture<\/h2>\n
In the United States, some families spend up to five figures a year in team fees, equipment and travel expenses to send their children to a system that includes more than seven national governing bodies and 54 state federations specializing in youth soccer.<\/p>\n
Costs aren’t just limited to soccer. Project Play estimated the typical family in the United States Paid $1,016 in 2024<\/span> Funding for children’s major sports has increased by 46% compared to five years ago. For so-called “elite” sports, costs can exceed $12,000 per year.<\/p>\nPlayers who cannot afford to agree to the so-called “pay-for-play” system may not take to the football field. <\/p>\n
This is another deeply ingrained fact of life in the United States, where between 4 and 6 million children play soccer, yet the sport remains, at the highest level, overshadowed by soccer and basketball across wide swaths of American sports fan conscience.<\/p>\n
“If I insist, erling haaland<\/span> said longtime U.S. goalkeeper Casey Keller of the Norwegian soccer star who captured the world’s imagination when his team reached the quarterfinals.<\/p>\nAmerica’s MLS is rebuilding its pipeline and trying to replicate the world’s club system<\/h2>\n
If there is an “official” pipeline, it belongs to: major league soccer<\/span>which took over the country’s major development programs in 2020 after the USSF shut down due to coronavirus-related financial strains.<\/p>\nMLS Next will be targeting approximately 53,000 players this fall, but only a fraction of those will receive fully subsidized training, including physical therapy, travel and equipment.<\/p>\n
The top level of the program, the Homegrown Division, has more than 17,000 players, including approximately 3,000 players who play for free from the academies of the league’s 30 teams (including three in Canada), as well as players from elite youth clubs outside of MLS. The rest are one level below, called the Academy department.<\/p>\n
MLS NEXT has established a grant program to provide funding to grassroots clubs to develop players to play in America’s top league. <\/p>\n
This fledgling system pales in comparison to what exists in Argentina and many other countries in Europe and South America. <\/p>\n
How is soccer run in many countries? Rory O’Neal, Penn State Grassroots Coach<\/span>we call it an “open ecosystem.” Under this system, thousands of professional and semi-professional clubs across hundreds of leagues, large and small, around the world are relegated and promoted annually based on performance. This relegation system creates a constant need for clubs to discover talent wherever they can find it. <\/p>\nPlayers who come through the club system can earn a spot in that club’s first team and make that team better. They can also be sold to clubs in larger leagues, providing a source of revenue to keep the system running. <\/p>\n
“For people who aren’t part of that ecosystem, it can be difficult to understand, ‘How is what’s happening at the professional level going to impact my son’s or daughter’s 12-year-old soccer team?'” O’Neill said. “But it has a huge impact. It’s just a completely different hurdle to jump over than in America.”<\/p>\n
We are far from Nirvana. In addition to the mental strain placed on them by the grueling nature of constant talent evaluation, Argentina’s top clubs have long charged with exploitation and sexual abuse of minors<\/span> in their program.<\/p>\nFor some families, \u201cthousands of dollars.\u201d<\/h2>\n
Dan Chisese is a former salesman from Colorado Springs, Colo., and his son and daughter, now in their 30s, spent their childhood playing together.<\/p>\n
He said neither of them had any big ambitions to play beyond high school. He said they both have many fond memories of traveling around the country playing soccer as children. <\/p>\n
“It cost thousands of dollars,” he said, although he never calculated the cost.<\/p>\n
He said he often wonders what he lost by spending every weekend, holiday, and season “dividing and conquering” all the car rides, banquets, practices, flights to out-of-town tournaments, and other logistics with his wife to get his two children deeply committed to one sport. <\/p>\n
Yes, he would try again. And while he doesn’t care if he’ll ever be on the field for a youth soccer game again, he’s a soccer fan, obsessed with the World Cup, and a little disappointed that America didn’t make it to the finals. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think youth sports have become somewhat elitist,\u201d Chisese said. “I think we’re missing out on a lot of talent because people can’t afford to have competitive travel teams. There are kids out there who aren’t on the radar. I don’t know how we’re going to solve that.”<\/p>\n
Former sports leader says there are too many chefs in the kitchen<\/h2>\n
One person with an idea is Skip Gilbert, a longtime sports executive who left last year as CEO of U.S. Youth Soccer after five years.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, Gilbert, who almost expected the question to arise this summer, dusted off and updated a three-year-old essay titled “The Future of Youth Soccer. A Call for Structural Change.”<\/p>\n
He called American soccer, with more than 50 governing bodies, the most “fragmented” of all youth sports, with “more attention focused on the cannibalization of players by teams from competing sanctioning bodies than on a concerted effort to build the most dynamic player development pipeline in the world.”<\/p>\n
His solution, he says, is to consolidate many organizations under one umbrella (U.S. Soccer), which would create a powerful database to single out America’s top talent in one place. <\/p>\n
His critics say it is a plan aimed at consolidating data and power between the same organizations that already run soccer. Gilbert sees it as a way for programs to break the cycle of competing for players by telling parents, “When your child turns 8, he’s going to earn a DI scholarship.”<\/p>\n
“And parents, God loves us all. If we think it will help our children, we’re happy to write a check,” Gilbert said. “The downside is there’s no other way. You have to go to a pay-or-play model.”<\/p>\n
US leaders are committed to their own system and trying to make it better<\/h2>\n
Brad Sims, CEO of MLS’s New York Football Club, tells the story of Seymour Reed, a Jamaican boy living in New York who was no longer playing organized soccer five years ago. When the team’s scout saw him at a pickup game and asked him what club he played for, Reid’s answer was, “I don’t play for any club.”<\/p>\n
He does that now. The 18-year-old has signed a contract with NYCFC and is a finalist for the inaugural MLS Pathway Player of the Year award in 2025. While this is a success story, Sims wonders how many kids around the country “don’t have the connections and don’t have the financial means to play.”<\/p>\n
“But this is a bigger problem that is not something that MLS clubs and perhaps the MLS league are going to solve on their own,” Sims said. “I think U.S. Soccer obviously wants to understand that more than anyone else.”<\/p>\n
Michael Bradley, a former U.S. national team captain and current coach of NYCFC’s rival in MLS, the New York Red Bulls, agreed that the U.S. needs to chart its own path to play against the likes of Argentina and Spain.<\/p>\n
“We have our own soccer culture,” he said. “The way the game looks and feels in this country and the way we are as a footballing nation will be different than in other countries and that’s okay. We don’t have to pretend we’re different.”<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/fifa-world-cup<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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