You hear a lot about pay to play in the US soccer system and how that puts us behind other countries in terms of player development. Legendary player, and outspoken individual, Zlatan Ibrahimovic gave his opinion, criticizing the structure. We’ll review what pay to play is, and it affects US soccer.
Definition of Pay to Play for youth soccer
Simply put, pay to play is a system where the families of each participant cover the expenses for playing soccer. For recreational soccer and younger kids, this cost is pretty affordable (anywhere from $75 to $150 per season, not including equipment and uniforms). As the kids get a little older and play more games, these costs increase but not monumentally, at least for recreational soccer (local league games and short seasons of maybe 10 games or so in the Fall and Spring).
Once they hit the competitive level around age 10 or 11, the costs escalate. A year of travel soccer can cost anywhere from a couple to several thousand dollars per player! And the family has to foot the bill if they want their kid in a competitive environment.
This is expensive. Even for a middle class family, it amounts to a significant amount of money, especially when you factor in equipment, travel, and other expenses. For lower income families, it is very difficult or impossible to meet these expenses. Even more so if you have multiple kids playing sports.
Some larger academies offer scholarships, but these are not easy to come by, and the requirements can be ambiguous. And some of the MLS teams are starting to develop free academies, but this is only a recent phenomenon here in the US, without much traction yet.
In short, competitive soccer is expensive. This expense causes problems further up the developmental chain. Let’s break these down.
Problems
Pay for play isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Someone has to pay for the refs, fields, coaches, and other expenses necessary for organized soccer. But the movement of money within the system perpetuates itself, which has caused these expenses to balloon. The system generates too much money from this model to change from within.
There should be a better way. School sports are low cost for participants. And other countries, who are much more successful at soccer than we are, don’t use this pay for play system. In fact, in Brazil, they almost exclusively play futsal until age 12. While there are differences culturally and geographically between the US and everywhere else, taking note of how other countries produce much more talent per capita than we do can help build our talent pool.
Let’s talk about how a largely pay for play system is negatively affecting player development, then we’ll explore some alternatives (both what other countries are doing and what we could do here, given the cultural differences).
Exclusion
The easiest shortfall to see is how this expense will automatically exclude players from lower income backgrounds. Unless certain players are sponsored or receive scholarships, they will have to stick to playing in local leagues (sometimes men’s leagues), high school, or have to think about more immediate priorities other than soccer.
Now there have been scholarship programs that have helped players. Clint Dempsey and Eddie Johnson, two US men’s national team mainstays (one of whom is arguably our best ever player) are two who come from lower income backgrounds and have benefitted from financial support to play competitive youth soccer.
I played against both of them, and luckily for us they were able to hone their skills at the highest level of youth soccer in this country. They were great youth players, and their development was surely aided by their participation at this high level of youth soccer. I also played with a couple of very talented players from lower income backgrounds that all the parents of my youth team supported by paying a little extra.
Neither of the two on my team ended up playing competitive youth soccer after the age of 16, and the dynamic within the team was all wrong. Sure, the parents from more affluent backgrounds didn’t mind paying a little extra (as far as I knew), but there needs to be a system in place that doesn’t rely purely on charity to keep these players playing and developing at the highest level possible.
I’m not saying they would have become national team players, but they were talented players that could have built up the overall pool of talent in the country. This is just one team too. Think about every area in the country that has a few very talented players that have to rely on charity to play competitively. Out of these thousands of players, surely a few would have deepened our overall talent pool.
On the scale of our entire country, how much talent has slipped through the cracks? We’ll never know. And until we can come up with a systematic way to identify, support, and develop these players, that doesn’t rely on the charity of a few individuals, we won’t know the type of talent we’re missing.
And this doesn’t even scratch the surface on the types of players we’re missing. We see it in other sports in our country – people from lower income backgrounds have that little bit extra determination to make it. That’s not to say that those from more affluent backgrounds aren’t competitive, but giving opportunities to those who are traditionally excluded could provide the diversity of background that enriches the talent pool.
Parents are the customer
Besides the direct effect on the talent pool, pay to play creates an incentive structure that prioritizes those who are paying. In short, the parents become the customer, and their needs become the priority rather than player development.
A lot of times development aligns with what parents want, but most parents have no idea what the successful long-term development of a soccer player looks like. They tend to focus on game to game and tournament to tournament, seeing success in terms of winning and losing. After all, they are paying thousands per year, and they want tangible results. It’s much easier to sell wins and losses vs. an improved first touch, composure on the ball, and creative problem-solving (if that means losing games in the short-term).
Of course winning is important, but not when it comes at the expense of development.
Winning overtakes development
How can winning hurt player development? Isn’t winning the purpose of playing a sport?
I agree that a winning mentality is important, but in youth soccer, you can definitely take shortcuts to winning that will hurt the development of your players down the road.
A scenario we used to encounter all the time, and from what I hear from current coaches is still prevalent in youth soccer, is putting your biggest, strongest, fastest kids up front (likely someone who has hit puberty before everyone else), and play long balls for him to outrun/outmuscle everyone to get close to the opposition goal.
This tactic has worked well for generations at the youth level. But it does a great disservice to everyone on that team. The big kid up top never learns how to control or pass the ball properly, and his only movement is running toward the goal – not much creativity there. And everyone else on the team is just kicking the ball forward, with much less emphasis on ball control, passing, or intelligent movement.
You can employ other tactics too. Fouling and aggressive play can get you results at this level without developing any skills.
When everyone catches up physically, these tactics are no longer effective, and these players typically haven’t developed the skills necessary to succeed at the next level.
I saw this time and again growing up, and all of these early bloomers ended up flaming out or slowly fading into mediocrity. I honestly can’t think of one who even played significant minutes at a mid-level college.
Unless you have very patient parents on a team (and anyone who has been around youth soccer at all knows how rare this is), they will always be happier when their team wins. Player development is a long, uncertain game, and like any customer, they want a return on their investment immediately.
Player pool impact
This “win now” mentality affects the player pool in two major ways. You don’t properly develop the players who play this style, and you ignore players with technical attributes who may not be physically effective to play this way.
Many times these smaller, late-bloomer players catch up physically to everyone else, and then you have the benefit of their technical ability too. We can’t discard these players because they are less effective as 12 year olds – we have to look at potential too.
Freddy Adu (yes that one) mentioned recently that he wasn’t sure if a Messi or Modric would have realized their potential if they grew up in the US. They were very small, technical players growing up. I’ve seen so many of these types of players (not of this talent level, but this type) overlooked.
I don’t think Freddy is that off base with his assessment based on my personal experience in the system. If you don’t give these players the opportunity at ages 12-14, they can become discouraged and quit before they have the chance to catch up (or they’re playing against inferior competition and not developing to their potential).
Are we missing athletic early bloomers who are also technical? Of course not, no one is. But are we missing crucial pieces of the puzzle that could give us a better pool of player talent? Are we missing a Modric or Messi-like player every now and then? No doubt. And other countries are not.
Why it Persists
Youth soccer is a big business. They have no reason to change their structure, and we shouldn’t expect them to out of the goodness of their hearts. After all, they are a business, and a business employs people (coaches, administrators, referees, etc…) who love their jobs and deserve a living wage. These folks are not making tons of money.
The club has to turn a profit to meet these needs, just like any other business. The overarching goals of US Soccer don’t really concern them when they have to employ people and put food on the table.
I know a lot of people who run clubs across the country and they are good soccer people who do what they love. They aren’t greedy fat cats making millions of dollars, but the system demands that they charge a certain amount to keep their clubs afloat. This incentive structure will not change without some kind of intervention.
So What’s the Solution?
Implementing a solution is above my pay grade (which is zero dollars), but I think a couple things are already in place that will help.
The MLS teams need to prioritize free player development at a certain point. Not scholarships or need based funds subsidized by parents, but a free system for all of their developmental players. The financial incentive needs to be for them to develop players to star for their first team and then sell off for a profit.
Some academies are moving in this direction, and recent player sales should create more incentives to invest in player development. This aligns everyone on prioritizing the long-term development of players, and hopefully sets up a fully free system for all involved players. If no parents have to pay, then they have zero input on what the clubs are doing, which is the ideal set up.
How far could such a free system trickle down? I’m not sure. And there will be talented players outside of the MLS academy system given the size and scope of American youth soccer. It would be great if US Soccer could allocate a certain amount of budget specifically for lower-income players. While a scholarship system isn’t perfect, it’s the only way for teams outside of the MLS academy system to include players who can’t pay the very high fees for competitive soccer.
There is also value in local leagues and school sports. These are inherently less costly than travel sports, plus talented players can always play up a few age groups, or in a local men’s league, to stay competitive. The traditional system (i.e. MLS academies) should have some scouting in-roads into these local set-ups, so they can give trials to promising players that have gone under the radar.
They do this all the time in Europe. You’ll see players from very small youth clubs get the chance to train with a big club once or twice, and sometimes they are offered a spot. I saw this when I played in Germany for a Bundesliga U23 team – every few days they brought in some local players for a one-day trial. If they can hang, the coaches will let them stick around. If they are not at the level of the team, it doesn’t hurt too much to have them in for one session, and it shows that you are giving local kids a shot.
The ODP system, while flawed in some ways, at least gave everyone a shot to funnel into a youth national team. Maybe some kind of open trial system to identify players that have been missed by the academies and other big youth clubs could open some doors.
I’m sure there are countless other ideas too. The important thing is that US soccer identifies the current set up as a big problem, then makes steps for optimizing our talent pool.
Verdict
I know some of these solutions that work elsewhere may not work as well here, given the size of our country. It’s easier for good players to play in local leagues in Europe, for instance, because of the population and talent density.
Pay to play will always have a place in US soccer, but if they care about development, the decision-makers need to put less emphasis on this system due to some of the inherent drawbacks (exclusion of certain demographics, win-now mentality, ignoring certain player profiles, etc…).
Hopefully the profit incentive for MLS to develop great players overrides the current system. It’s probably the only monetary solution that could subvert the pay for play model. But it will take more than that to mobilize the entire base of our youth soccer system to focus more on development. We need some kind of intentional change from the top.
