Backpass: Pay-for-play is the American stumbling block
The US soccer pipeline... has some major kinks to it.
The other day, there was a bit of a kerfuffle inside the youth soccer club for which I serve as volunteer administrator here in Pittsburgh. I can’t get too specific for reasons of confidentiality, but suffice it to say we had something of a crisis that was centered around one funky issue. We’re what is referred to in the American soccer lexicon as a ‘community’ club, meaning all-volunteer, no paid coaches, and we do not have a highly paid professional infrastructure. Some of our better teams have progressed to the point that they compete at Division 3, which is populated by pay-for-play clubs.
The cost to play at our club - competitive, so-called ‘travel’ soccer - is $125 for Fall and Spring, plus your kit, shorts, and socks for $60. We do not change our kit scheme often because we do not want to make families shell out for it.
The cost to play at a local pay-for-play travel club is ~$2200 for Fall and Spring; Winter futsal (semi-mandatory), tournaments, and uniforms are extra. And that’s actually relatively affordable, by national standards.1 The specific problem in our club and region had to do with categorization and coaching - does it make sense for us to be the only low-rent team in the high-rent league?
But the larger problem is national - what to do about the disparities in wealth and affordability in American soccer which puts the sport completely out of reach for some families.
The cost-gap between paying $125 and $2200 and $12,000 is a massive chasm. And it’s a nationwide problem.
To some degree, you get what you pay for. Clubs with paid coaches typically have really talented women and men coaching, with the highest available US coaching licenses, called A, B or C licenses. Community clubs have what they have - a coach must at least have a USSF/United Soccer Coaches Grassroots license, formerly known as an ‘E license’ - but your own kids club might have a coach with a D or better. It just depends. And of course, licenses are only part of the story - we all know high school teachers with Associates degrees that blow your mind with amazing teaching, and college professors with three separate PhDs that couldn’t explain how to make mac and cheese effectively. But in general, it can generally be presumed that richer clubs with more affluent youth players get themselves more, better, and more successful coaches.
Effectively, soccer in America is still marketed to suburban white kids with affluent parents who want to get their kids into college and are willing to pay beaucoup dollars to make it happen. And yet some of our best soccer players - including Landon Donovan and Kortne Ford come from low or middle-income situations.
They got through the ‘system’ because, against the odds, they signed up for and fell for the sport, despite the fact that it is poorly marketed and not targeted at their socio-economic demographic. Another instructive story along this line is Marlon Hairston, who, in interviews, has made it clear that he ended up in soccer against the odds - Black kids in Mississippi are pushed towards football and basketball, not soccer. He fell in love with soccer; he was the exception to the norm, and the system didn’t really encourage him to succeed. He simply navigated through it.
A related story is instructive to this. I grew up in public school in the heart of the city ofLos Angeles - which due to its large, diverse population, gorgeous year-round weather, and strong Latinx community, should be a hotbed of American soccer. And it is! Except my public school - and almost EVERY public school in CA - has an asphalt yard for PE and recess. No grass. We played kickball and handball and basketball and American football and, if we were lucky and the equipment hadn’t all been broken or stolen, field hockey (by mid November, the equipment was always broken or stolen.) We never, once, played soccer. It’s not made for asphalt, and we didn’t have the goals. So how is a central-city LA kid supposed to get exposed to soccer? A lot of kids in LA do play soccer, but a lot, a lot, a lot more probably should than currently are.
The path from a kid’s first exposure to soccer to becoming really, really good is entirely dependent on finding the doorway to the sport - between the diversions for great athletes to football, basketball, and baseball - and then having the right people notice you and send you in the right direction. A recreational soccer coach needs to notice that you’re talented and motivated - they need to pass you on to a ‘travel’ soccer coach. That travel soccer coach needs to be pretty good. If your club has paid coaches and you can’t afford it, your club needs to have scholarships, and it needs to make it very public and obvious that scholarships are available and plentiful. Because otherwise, a parent puts their kid in rec soccer, sees that travel soccer is two-grand, says ‘eff that’, and signs them up for piano lessons or flag football. These problems generally occur in the critical handoff time between age 8 and 12, when kids decide to start ‘specializing’ and ‘get serious’ about a particular passion - the first travel teams are generally at the U9-U11 level. And thus, the pipeline from U42 tiny-tot soccer to the USWNT/USMNT has this massive dollar-driven kink in it that forms from age 7 to 13.
Now’s a good time to suggest that if you want this kind of insight in your email the minute it gets published, it’d be good to click ‘subscribe’ and join the hundreds of MLS and Colorado Rapids supporters who want to think a little more deeply about their league and their club.
Back to our regularly scheduled program…
MLS has made strides against this with their academy system, which I’m a big booster of. The Rapids and every other MLS team3 (except Minnesota4) make soccer free for the top team in their academy at each age level. So 25 kids at each age get free, top level soccer instruction.5
Except… if you’re the 26th best kid on the Rapids U13 team, you play not on the ‘Rapids Academy’ team but for ‘Burgundy’. And … you pay thousands of dollars. Same goes for Real Colorado and PA Classics and Starfire SC and hundreds of other clubs. There’s cheap community soccer with widely varying degrees of success and coaching instruction. There’s free academy soccer for maybe a few thousand kids nationwide who have been picked out by scouts. And then there’s thousands more kids who pay. A lot. Hence, the pay-for-play stumbling block.
In Europe, it’s not like this. National investment in youth sports means soccer is free for all kids. Talent identification is easier because it isn’t stymied by kids being steered out of the sport due to rising costs. Clubs like Bayern Munich fund a much larger academy structure that runs all the way down to the youngest level. Countries like Iceland have committed A license coaches to the U4 level.6
How to fix it is a massive challenge that would take way more words to write than you’ve got time for right now. Suffice it to say that a number of tiny miracles had to occur for a player like Oliver Larraz to go from here:
to here:
It’s not all bad.
There are, of course, some bright spots and work-arounds to what ails us in America, and some unique things that help mitigate the challenges that pay-for-play represents.
My own little inexpensive youth club has a coach with 30+ years professional experience and an A license *volunteering* to coach the U12 boys. The former club president told me the story that once they had zero volunteers for a girls U10 team, and so somebody’s grandfather volunteered. Dude was an Argentinian former pro, and showed up to our hardscrabble mud-patch of a rec field in a suit and tie. Even Tata Martino didn’t dress up to coach Atlanta United.
And the best pay-for-play clubs are, as all coaches and athletes are, very competitive. That competitiveness means they will go into overlooked and economically disadvantaged communities, looking for talented players. When they find a great soccer player, often times, they will bring them aboard and fund their soccer education with scholarships. If they find you, your soccer path might suddenly go from precarious to unimpeded.
There is also the American high school sports system, which can serve as a feeder for late-bloomers or unseen talent to local clubs or the NCAA - in Europe, most schools don’t have after-school sports at all.
And for women’s athletics, there is Title IX, and the NWSL. Because America has been funding women’s college athletics for more than 40 years now, we have a women’s sporting infrastructure that is vastly superior to every other country on earth. Yes, girl’s soccer still has pay-to-play - but by comparison to most of the developed world, women in America have a clear path to a professional football career that other countries are only recently creating.7
A few weeks ago I wrote about Cole Bassett, in praise of the Rapids Academy program. A thing I kind of quietly ignored, of course, is that Bassett comes from the kind of family that can invest the time, energy, and money, into their child’s athletic passions. He is kind of a pay-to-play success story. By comparison, Landon Donovan is something of a pay-for-play survival story - the right people shepherded him through a potentially expensive and byzantine system. We shouldn’t have to wonder, though, whether scouts, coaches, the right grass field in the right place and the right club with the right scholarships will fall into play in order to produce the next Landon Donovan.
Hopefully, through expansion of facilities and coaching, greater public and corporate-partnered funding, MLS academies selling on talent and investing it back into youth development, and the desire to make soccer accessible and equitable, and maybe, ultimately, a full deconstruction of the pay-to-play system, we can eliminate the stumbling blocks and raise the level of soccer across the US to the betterment of all.
The Guardian did an amazing story on this years ago entitled ‘It’s only working for the White Kids’; and in it they noted that some parents spend as much as $12,000 a year on youth travel soccer.
Age-level soccer nomenclature is that a kid born in 2017 would be on a team called ‘U4’, meaning ‘under four’ but better explained as ‘4 and under’. Academy coaches generally don’t use these terms - they speak of a group by year: “Our Oh-nines are having a great year.” Slightly confusing. It was worse six or so years ago, when the US suddenly switched from the school year calendar (Birth Years by September to September) to the FIFA standard calendar (January 1).
Many USL teams have academies now too, which is great. Their fee structures vary from free to expensive. Again - stumbling blocks.
Minnesota’s academy was so poorly run that they disbanded it and now are planning to assemble kind-of an ‘all star’ team of traveling tournament youth MNUFC kids from local Minnesota youth travel soccer teams, which is a decent way to identify talent on the cheap, but is also cheap and weak and will almost certainly mean that Minnesota doesn't develop MLS-signable talent by age 18. At best, maybe they get a look at a guy, send him to college, hope for the best, and sign him when he’s 22 - having hoped that his NCAA coach developed him with as much focus and detail as a fully funded high-end academy would. I am not optimistic.
It is not so for both boys and girls. At least for the Rapids, the top academy team for boys is free; for girls, it is pay-to-play.
The sentence “The idea is that the biggest number of kids should be able to practice the most amount of time possible at good facilities and under good coaches” made me want to burst into tears. ‘Why can’t we have thaaaaat?!?’
Once Europe puts women into the same ‘free from age 4 to 18’ system that the men have been in, well, we’re probably going to stop winning World Cups automatically.