US soccer’s youth system is expensive, chaotic and overdue for reform

A few years ago, the idea that the US soccer community at large was neglecting youth soccer was met with silence or ridicule.

At a May 2022 conference call announcing a new collective bargaining agreement that effectively ended the “equal pay” saga, players were asked how they would build bridges with grassroots organizers who, in a fit of anger over perceived slights, nearly restored Carlos Cordeiro to US Soccer’s presidency not long after he resigned under heavy pressure. They could have offered any vague platitudes about how they valued youth and amateur soccer. They fell silent.

Meanwhile, in the social media sphere, suggestions that US Soccer should be paying its able-bodied national teams a bit less and redistributing more resources to development – as is the case in more successful soccer countries – found a hostile reception. The heavily memed Simpsons reference “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” was a typical sarcastic response.

Today, everyone’s thinking of the children. But the thoughts are as chaotic and self-contradictory in the soccer world as they were when Helen Lovejoy squealed out her “think of the children” plea repeatedly on The Simpsons.

When the US men’s World Cup campaign ended with a whimper this summer, fingers were pointed at the “pay-to-play” system and economic barriers that keep a lot of players out of elite youth soccer. The US Under-20 women’s lackluster World Cup performance in September was partially blamed on clubs refusing to release players (or, more broadly, blamed on Fifa for not scheduling such events during appropriate windows), but the result wasn’t an outlier alongside other recent US youth results.

Simply put, the kids aren’t all right. And it’s a problem that has been addressed not with a sustained effort to improve matters but with intermittent cries for help, often followed by simplistic solutions.

In 2026, the most prominent voice sounding the alarm is US women’s coach Emma Hayes, whose track record of success at Chelsea and with the gold medal-winning US women in the 2024 Olympics commands attention.

In 2018, the most prominent voices were the nine candidates who sought US Soccer’s presidency after the US men failed to qualify for the World Cup.

In between, various forces have yanked the discussion from one overarching solution to another. Claudio Reyna, US Soccer’s youth technical director at the time, unveiled a curriculum at the NSCAA (now United Soccer Coaches) convention in 2011 that was heavily influenced by Barcelona’s tiki-taka approach. Three years later, at the same convention, one of the sessions grappled with the question of reconciling three different organizations’ curricula.

Most countries don’t have such chaos. In Germany, if the DFB wishes to embark on a massive overhaul such as the heralded “Das Reboot” of the early 2010s, it can do so. US Soccer simply doesn’t have that power. Nor does it have the money, especially given the vastness of a country that would make a US equivalent of Germany’s regional training-center system impossible.

Incoherence is just one obstacle preventing a US youth system overhaul. The biggest obstacle is one that most of the US soccer community, Alexi Lalas notwithstanding, agrees upon: Youth soccer costs too much. It’s an easy problem to identify but much more difficult to solve.

It’s not that it’s difficult to find affordable soccer in the USA. Recreational soccer costs about the same as youth clubs in England, Spain, Germany and other more established soccer powers. Professional academies are generally free – in men’s soccer, anyway. Most high school soccer teams are free to anyone who can make the team. For all the fretting over barriers to entry in soccer, participation levels have roared back to life after the pandemic.

The problem is the middle tier that is largely unique to the USA – “travel” soccer that costs anywhere from the low four figures to the low five figures. Unfortunately, this tier is the only one that matters to professional and college scouts. Travel soccer is the key to any sort of future in the game and/or a ticket to admission to a school that rejects high school valedictorians but welcomes promising left backs. College and pro coaches may talk a good game about lowering barriers to entry, but they and their scouts are noticeably absent from high school and recreational games that would harbor the supposed thousands of outstanding players who can’t pay for travel soccer.

Travel soccer also appeals to parents who recognize their kids have little to no chance of making the cut in college. The snazzy uniforms are appealing to kids. The games are better because those with no aptitude for the sport are weeded out in tryouts. Teams are supposedly better because they have professional coaches, but whether they’re really better than parent coaches who have more experience dealing with kids is up for some debate. It’s also a social endeavor for kids and their parents, who wear their long-distance drives and depleted bank accounts as badges of honor.

While all of this may sound frustrating and pointless, it’s worth noting that travel soccer generates a lot of money that might not otherwise be available. That money goes toward suitable fields – and scholarships for players who couldn’t play without financial help.

So the soccer-industrial complex will be difficult to dismantle. A better bet is to reform it, in part by limiting the “travel” aspect of “travel soccer”. Players don’t get better in a car or an airplane.

The bold reforms of 2018 may have fallen flat. But US Soccer is making incremental progress. The federation is starting to tame the alphabet soup of youth organizations by integrating with US Youth Soccer, which had already joined up with rival US Club Soccer to merge a couple of redundant competitions into the new National 1 League. These changes should make it easier for neighboring clubs to play each other instead of traveling farther to play a club in League XYZ while the neighboring club is in League ZYX. The reorganization may also bring a halt to the incessant arguments over which “elite” league in a given area is more “elite”.

Parsing out how much US Soccer invests in youth soccer as opposed to senior-level national teams isn’t particularly straightforward. The federation spends well into nine figures on its “national teams”, but that includes everything from the able-bodied men’s and women’s teams to youth squads, futsal, beach soccer, deaf soccer, 7-a-side soccer for players with cerebral palsy or similar conditions, and power soccer (players in electric wheelchairs). What we do know is that US Soccer gives its players 80% of World Cup prize money while other federations take a majority of their winnings and reinvest into development so they can come back and beat the USA again in the next Cup.

The federation has a grant program that isn’t particularly well-funded. The 2025 tax form says the federation gave nearly $4m in grant money over that fiscal year -- less than it spent to pay five members of the women’s team. An offshoot foundation, Soccer Forward, is geared toward harnessing the legacy – read: money – of the World Cups and Olympics being hosted in the USA from 2026 (men) to 2031 (women) toward the next generation. Soccer Forward’s biggest endeavor so far is “Soccer at Schools”, which aspires to “make soccer possible in every school in the United States”.

That alone is a major change in US youth soccer programming, which has been divorcing itself from schools for a few decades now. It’s also sensible on a basic level. Every kid in the United States goes to school. Only a handful of kids can afford to play travel soccer, which takes place after the school day and on weekends.

But the biggest challenge for US Soccer (the federation) and US soccer (the community) will be sustaining the interest in making things better. If youth development is given the priority it deserves, the country can overcome some – not all, but some – of the challenges it faces as a sprawling nation in which soccer isn’t the most popular sport. If the soccer community only springs into action with every World Cup loss and otherwise sneers at the idea that the youth game matters, the game will stagnate. Or worse.