Nine days after the US national team was eliminated from the 2024 Copa América in the group stage, head coach Gregg Berhalter was fired.
Berhalter’s sacking was the right, if easy, way forward for the national team after a poor performance. But any assessment of this summer’s failures must be broader than one coach. Questions about the quality of the current squad are legitimate, but there is another possible culprit: the pay-to-play model.
The idea of pay-to-play is widespread in youth soccer in the US – and is not new. Nor are the claims that the model is harming the development of the game in America, from grassroots to senior international teams.
After the US national team was eliminated from the 2023 World Cup early in their history, the coaching, selection and exclusionary model were blamed for harming the development of young players.
The term “pay-to-play” essentially refers to the often exorbitant fees that parents and guardians of young people participating in organized youth sports must pay. In soccer, youth clubs can typically cost families thousands of dollars a year in coaching fees, administrative costs and travel expenses. Clubs in California have a sticker price ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 a year.
Opponents of pay-to-play have long argued that the system is too restrictive. They argue that more children need access to the sport to create a healthy soccer culture in the U.S. and ultimately attract the best talent to national teams.
“Unfortunately, I believe the model in football is getting worse than when I played competitive football. [growing up]”, said Alex Morgan in 2019. “It’s a very cheap sport and the fact that we’ve turned youth football into a business, I think, is damaging to the sport.”
A 2018 survey by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association found that more than 70% of children in the pay-to-play system came from households earning more than $50,000 per year; 33% came from households earning more than $100,000 per year.
According to the US Census BureauThe median household income in the U.S. that year was $61,937. But that figure fell below $50,000 in seven states. The USCB study also found that Hispanic households had a median income of $51,404, while the average for black households was $41,511. And in homes where the head of household was under 25, the median income was just $33,389.
“I think it is exclusionary to a certain extent,” former USMNT player Cobi Jones tells the Guardian. “Here in the US – and it’s not just soccer – you can’t have all those barriers to entry.
“I understand that it’s a business. And part of that business has come about over the last few decades, as the pay-to-play system has taken hold and it’s become very profitable for a lot of different organizations. To be honest, I think it would be hard to eradicate it. You couldn’t eradicate it. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have other options. Can there be something that sits alongside it, where you’re providing those opportunities to people who don’t have that kind of money?”
Others disagree. Former USMNT player Alexi Lalas is a defender of the model. “Pay to play is not ruin youth soccer,” Lalas recently said wrote on social media. “Millions benefit. It is a company that targets a market that is prepared to pay for the product. Football (like piano lessons) is not an inalienable right. Free football costs money. Someone has to pay. So who is going to pay for all this free football?”
Jones, who is involved in projects that aim to make football accessible to disadvantaged communities, has a different view than his former international teammate.
“You don’t want a good player to not be able to play at a higher level because he can’t afford the costs,” Jones said. “There has to be a way around that so that we always have good talent, so that people who can play at a higher level have the opportunity.
“We can’t just have the philosophy of, ‘Well, they’ll find us. They’ll get here somehow.’ No, that’s not going to work. If we want to have the best players, we can’t just be in certain areas of the country; we have to be in every area of the county. That includes places where people don’t have the money to play this game at a higher level, where it costs thousands of dollars to join a club, hundreds of dollars in tournament fees, hotels and travel all over the country.”
The idea of a prohibitively expensive pay-to-play system is particularly jarring for those outside the U.S., where no such model exists. In countries like Brazil, Spain and Germany, it’s the game of the working class, where people learn for free on the streets, in parks and in community clubs. At the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles earlier this year, FIFA president Gianni Infantino spoke out against the American model.
“One of the things that shocked me here in America is that kids have to pay to play,” he said. “We have to stop this. I’m Italian. I grew up in a small Swiss village in the middle of the mountains. There was a soccer team there that played in the sixth highest division, so it was very small, and they had 23 teams.
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“And this is all organized and privately funded. So the local guy who has a restaurant gives the shirts. The lawyer who has a little bit more money spends on shoes. Privately you create this movement that makes sure that every child plays.”
Anthony Hudson, the former assistant coach and interim head coach of the USMNT, was born in the US but raised in England. When he returned to the US as a professional soccer player in the mid-2000s, he was shocked to discover how industrialized youth soccer had become.
“When I got there in my early 20s, I found it incredibly shocking,” he says. “I started coaching at an academy in New Jersey and I quickly realized that you don’t always get the best players from the community; it’s just the ones who can afford to play.”
Hudson found that it wasn’t just children from families who couldn’t afford the fees who were the victims of the pay-to-play model. He also found that children within the system were being put under too much pressure at too young an age.
“There’s way too much adult involvement, whether it’s parents or coaches,” Hudson says. “I’d walk my dog and I’d run into people who wanted to talk about football, but the way people talk about football is [in the US] is way too businesslike and structured. I got into discussions about how the culture is different abroad. I never paid a cent to play football growing up. That is completely foreign to adults here.
“I’ve been in so many situations where parents ask me for advice. They tell me they have this coach for their child and they play in this team, they play every weekend and they train really hard. Everything is so structured; so forced. I don’t see any space for them to enjoy it. It’s too busy.
“The best players are made when kids can just show up on a field or an indoor court and just play.”
Hudson proposes a solution. He suggests that a middle ground can be found between Infantino’s description of private funding from local businesses and the kind of national subsidy found in many developed countries around the world. In England, for example, the British government, the Premier League and the Football Association subsidize grassroots soccer to the tune of more than $1 billion a year. Hudson believes it is the responsibility of US Soccer and MLS to do the same, in addition to fostering community-based support systems for youth clubs and leagues.
“US Soccer and MLS need to lead the way in this,” he says. “But it’s very difficult to have a national mandate. I think there needs to be state-by-state guidelines. And it needs to be community-led, with the money coming from the local federation, but also from sponsorships from local businesses; it’s more of a community push than local clubs trying to make money.
“Everyone should be able to play and the level of your play should determine which team you are on. No one should have to pay.”
It would be easy for US Soccer to become myopic with the 2026 World Cup approaching and think that a change of head coach and a roster overhaul will fix the USMNT’s problems. But if US Soccer wants to remain at the top of the international game beyond 2026, for generations to come, a deeper look at children’s access to the sport will be necessary.