What’s the Matter With U.S. Soccer?

Some observers say the disappointing results of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team are due to a pay-to-play system in America’s youth soccer program.

On the most fruitful day of his recruiting career, Paul Krumpe, who had just taken over as LMU men’s soccer coach, went looking for a goalkeeper. He found a forward who would go on to become the most decorated men’s soccer player in LMU history.

Arturo Torres Jr. ’04 didn’t even score that day for Wilmington Banning High, but the way he moved with the ball and the dizzying pace with which he played against rival San Pedro convinced Krumpe to pursue him. After setting nearly every school record during his four years as a Lion, Torres played for the Los Angeles Galaxy and became the first official player in the history of Chivas USA after the club selected him first overall in the 2004 Major League Soccer expansion draft.

The story of Torres’ discovery illustrates one of the most vexing problems with youth soccer in this country and its impact on a U.S. men’s national team that is still trying to shed its second-tier status.

“If Krumpe doesn’t go to that game,” said current men’s soccer coach Kyle Schmid, who succeeded Krumpe, “Art probably never goes to college and kind of is just another kid that’s out there, you know?”

Unlike other countries that have a stranglehold on identifying and cultivating top talent, often paying young athletes to join their academies and develop their skills, America isn’t always the land of opportunity for promising soccer players.

A pay-to-play system of youth club teams often excludes prospects who can’t afford the thousands of dollars in league and tournament fees, not to mention the additional costs of private coaching and travel for games played across the country. High school teams depend on college recruiters to avoid overlooking budding stars like Torres.

The MLS NEXT program has tried to develop emerging talent through its 151 clubs and more than 16,000 players — with plans to more than double those totals by next fall – but even its best efforts have limitations. Sixteen states currently have no MLS NEXT teams.

“Because the country’s so big,” Krumpe said, “it’s hard to hit every square inch of America, and you try to compare the U.S. with a European country — it’s a lot more feasible for those European countries to be more centralized and be able to do a better job. It’s hard beyond the scope of the MLS clubs to reach 500 miles or to reach 300 miles to try to bring players into their club. Geographically, it was always going to be a struggle for the U.S. to be able to grab everybody that should be able to play at that level.”

What’s at stake is the breakthrough America has been seeking long before that heady day in 1994 at the Rose Bowl when the U.S. stunned Colombia, 2-1, helping it advance past the initial round of the World Cup for the first time since 1930. The Americans’ showing on soccer’s biggest stage has been fraught with disappointment ever since, a quarterfinal appearance in the 2002 event notwithstanding.

The U.S. men have never approached the heights of their female counterparts, who have won four World Cups while also capturing five gold medals in the Summer Olympics. The reason the men have lagged so far behind might be instructive for narrowing the gap. It’s all about opportunity.

A 2018 study by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, showed there were as many female players in the U.S. as the rest of the globe combined. Meanwhile, Title IX has provided vastly more scholarships for women’s college soccer players than their male counterparts, allowing Team USA to pick from 348 Division I women’s soccer teams with 14 full scholarships each.

“The women have done a great job decades ago of getting ahead of the curve internationally and I think now the rest of the world has caught up a little bit,” LMU women’s soccer coach Chris Chamides said, “so it’s more competitive than ever on the women’s side. The men’s side has been the opposite — the entity of U.S. soccer has been around for many years, but we’ve only had 30 years of MLS and we’re still kind of new to the scene in that sense, relatively speaking.”

Cultural differences also contribute to the dominance of men’s soccer in other countries, where it’s almost the universal sport of choice and soccer fields dot the landscape. Contrast that with the United States, where a flight over any urban area reveals a hodgepodge of football fields, basketball courts and baseball fields in addition to soccer fields.

In many cases, families are paying top dollar to use those soccer fields. It might start innocently enough, with parents signing their young kids up for a local recreational league to provide a first taste of sports. A few years later, sucked in by the lure of wanting their kids to keep up with their peers, parents sign them up for a club team that can cost a few thousand dollars. As the kids grow into teenagers, the clubs become more elite and the team fees and travel costs multiply.

“For a family, if you’re paying $3,000 to $4,000,” Chamides said, “that’s your club fees, but you still have gas money to training, gas money to games, hotels at tournaments, there’s travel involved, etc., so it can get pricey very quickly.”

Some clubs cover costs for elite prospects or players with financial needs, Chamides said, but the messaging doesn’t always reach families who want to sign up and only see the price online, leading them elsewhere. One option is to play for their junior high or high school teams, with the hope they can get discovered.

Those who go the club route often find themselves at the mercy of coaches who prioritize winning over player development.

“Unfortunately, you get into situations where you have coaches who want to win their league under 10 years old,” Krumpe said, “so you might tend to bring in players that are bigger than the other kids because athletically, they’ve advanced at a younger age, and overlook maybe some of the smaller, more technical players who will develop later and just aren’t developed right away. So, you get into a situation where, yeah, of course, any team you coach you want to win, but the main priority as a country should be to develop talent as much as possible at all levels.”

Another issue confronting young players is that the U.S. Soccer Federation has traditionally pitted its academy system against other teams, often discouraging — or outright forbidding — players from participating in high school or college soccer.

“I’d like to think that soccer’s evolved to the point where if you’re a talented kid,” Chamides said, “you’ll get seen at some point, but pay-to-play is not ideal and it’s not the global model.”

Hope Solo, the goalkeeper on the 2015 U.S. women’s World Cup champion team, famously went so far as to call soccer “a rich, white-kid sport” in 2018, noting her family would not have been able to afford to put her in the sport if she had grown up with the new generation of players.

Hoping to eliminate the financial burden, Brad Rothenberg co-founded Alianza de Futbol to provide opportunities for Hispanic youth in soccer outside the pay-to-play system. The program, which supplies free access to youth clinics and tournaments, has cultivated roughly a dozen players nationwide who went on to play professionally.

Long a critic of U.S. soccer’s ability to identify top minority talent, Rothenberg said the academy system run by MLS NEXT is now doing a much better job of casting a wide net. He pointed out that the Los Angeles Football Club’s academy offers free training to more than 120 players across various age groups, many of them emigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Late last year, the MLS NEXT Pro league announced plans to place a team in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Why is that significant? It’s the same place where Alianza once discovered one of its best prospects, meaning there will be one less dead zone for identifying talent.

“The network that U.S. soccer has in place,” Rothenberg said, “it’s finding kids, it’s not the same broken system that it was 20 years ago. I would say we do miss kids who are 8-, 9-, 10-year-old prodigies who aren’t being properly developed because we don’t have the network to go to every corner of this country.”

One solution proposed by Krumpe is to make it mandatory for every pro team in the U.S. to sponsor an academy to develop talent “rather than just haphazardly grabbing kids from around the country.” Currently, at least on the men’s side, most of the young prospects are being funneled into MLS NEXT or the Elite Clubs National League, which supplies many of the top players for Division I college teams.

What about more assistance from the U.S. Soccer Federation? Unlike European countries, whose federations are actively involved in player identification and development, America’s federation has taken a more hands-off approach.

“It’s almost as if the federation has delegated to the states and then that really hasn’t been a player-development factory,” Chamides said, “so therefore these elite leagues show up like ECNL, and that’s what’s tying the country together, the difference being that it’s not a unified vision where a federation for a country can be a unified vision. So in the best-case scenario we have strong leadership in U.S. soccer and they develop a path forward that leads the way and ties the landscape together.”

In a fortuitous development, the U.S. men’s national team is guaranteed a spot in the 2026 World Cup because it’s one of the host nations alongside Mexico and Canada. Hopes for a breakthrough remain high given the American talent on display in some of the world’s top leagues. Christian Pulisic, the 26-year-old star of AC Milan, remains in the early stage of his prime. Weston McKennie of Serie A club Juventus and Tyler Adams of Premier League club Bournemouth provide a strong supporting cast.

“To be honest, I don’t think we’re as far off as you may think,” said Krumpe, who played for the U.S. in the 1990 World Cup. “We’ve got an amazing group of young Americans that are playing on the national team level right now. You look at the English Premier League and there’s several Americans playing in all those European leagues and it’s a great thing to see, and then to be able to bring all those players back into our national team and you’ve got the right coach in place, good things are happening and good things are going to happen.”

The question becomes if those things happen because of, or in spite of, a youth soccer system more focused on spitting out dollars than top prospects.

Ben Bolch, a frequent contributor to LMU Magazine, has been a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times since 1999. He covers the UCLA basketball beat and is the author of “100 Things UCLA Fans Should Know & Do Before they Die.” His “Your Move,” about the NCAA transfer portal, appeared in the winter 2023 (Vol. 11, No. 2) edition of LMU Magazine. Bolch also discussed college sports and NIL issues on LMU Magazine’s Off Press podcast. Follow him @latbbolch.