‘Crisis’ in youth sports comes into focus after early U.S. World Cup exit

Kids heading a soccer ball during a game (Pexels)

ATLANTA/NEW YORK --Another early World Cup exit underscores a fractured youth sports culture in the United States, as the nation hopes to catch up with footballing powerhouses that have no clogs in their talent pipeline.

The Americans have not reached the quarter-finals of the global showpiece since 2002 and their last-16 exit this year rekindled a longstanding debate: Why is the world’s richest country - and one of the largest - unable to compete with the best?

“We need to fundamentally restructure the youth side of the sport in our country,” U.S. Soccer’s Chief Operating Officer Dan Helfrich told Reuters.

“That means everything from lowering costs and lowering barriers to participate. It means increasing access in all parts of our country, this vast country, where right now it’s inconsistent the level of participation that happens.”

The national governing body for the sport opened its first centralized training facility in Fayetteville this year, decades after many of the European titans have, marking the first time “U.S. soccer has ever owned a blade of grass,” the center’s general manager Tom Norton told Reuters.

Helfrich said the facility, which came about through a US$50 million investment from NFL team owner Arthur Blank, would announce plans in the coming months to host elite youth academies and all national youth teams.

“The fragmentation that exists in the youth leagues in the country needs to be joined together. We have an active plan that we’ve been building and will roll out in the months to come to tackle costs, to tackle access, to tackle alignment,” said Helfrich.

More costs, less participation

Those costs are at the heart of a heated debate over American soccer’s “pay-to-play” model that spilled over into national headlines after co-hosts the U.S. tumbled out of the World Cup in a 4-1 thrashing by Belgium.

One of the team’s most celebrated former players Landon Donovan told “The Late Run” podcast there was “zero chance” he could have played youth soccer if his family faced the same costs to play that exist today, with elite academies frequently demanding high fees.

“There’s a real crisis in youth sports today,” U.S. Senator Chris Murphy told Reuters. “It is true that increasingly if you want to play sports in this country, you have to have a family with some substantial income.”

Murphy introduced a bicameral bill in May aimed at eliminating private equity from youth sports, blaming the sector for driving up expenses, citing an average cost across all sports exceeding US$5,000 per year per family. The “Let Kids Play Act” would mandate private equity exit youth sports.

However, he cautioned against the media momentum for looking at kids sports as a means to an end.

“The way to fix youth sports in this country is frankly less professional-looking experiences, more rec level-like experiences, lower costs, not higher costs that just have to be borne by the government,” said Murphy.

Costs rise, participation falls

Murphy is among many who point to the Norwegian system as a model of success, with the country disincentivizing competition.

Norway reached the World Cup quarter-finals for the first time this year, a couple of generations after introducing “Children’s Rights in Sports,” a governing document that guarantees youth access to sport but forbids keeping score or maintaining standings for children under 11.

“There are policies and then there are stated enforcement mechanisms around this as well (in Norway) that can be attached to funding because it’s more structured from the top and from the government where funding comes from,” said Jon Solomon, research director at the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program.

“It’s also just giving kids what they want and need at developmentally appropriate stages.”

The Aspen Institute, a nonprofit think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C., found that U.S. families spent 46 per cent more on their child’s primary sport in 2024 compared to 2019, even as overall participation declined from 56.1 per cent to 54.6 per cent.

“I don’t think the model that we currently have will lead to us having tremendous success,” said Solomon. “We are so far behind other countries, and the culture is not as ingrained in America.”

Beyond pay-to-play

Alan Rothenberg, former president of U.S. Soccer, said the domestic World Cup had the chance to create a new generation of athletes like Donovan, who was inspired as a child watching the tournament that Rothenberg oversaw in the U.S. in 1994.

“(The World Cup has) given so much more exposure to the sport that young, talented athletes will give a second look at soccer,” said Rothenberg, who praised the new U.S. Soccer training facility.

“They’re going to be able to assemble all these various scattered youth teams and high-level professional players into one place where they’re all together and they get to know each other and develop a system, if you will, not unlike what the French and the Spanish have done.”

U.S. Soccer, through the Soccer Forward Foundation, announced earlier this year an initiative to expand access to places for youth and community soccer to be played.

“(We have to) somehow go beyond the pay-to-play system that we have now,” said Rothenberg. “Because almost by definition, that means you’ve got middle class and above kids playing soccer in huge numbers, but they don’t tend to be the kind of kids that end up being full-time professional players.

“There’s millions of young, talented athletes out there playing soccer either on a non-organized basis or just kind of freelancing that we have to tap into,” added Rothenberg, whose book “The Big Bounce” chronicles the trajectory of the sport’s popularity in the U.S.

Reporting by Trevor Stynes in Atlanta and Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by Ken Ferris