A few years ago, the idea that the US soccer community at large was neglecting youth soccer was met with silence or ridicule. At a May 2022 conference call announcing a new collective bargaining agreement that effectively ended the “equal pay” saga, players were asked how they would build bridges with grassroots organizers who, in a fit of anger over perceived slights, nearly restored Carlos Cordeiro to US Soccer’s presidency not long after he resigned under heavy pressure. They could have offered any vague platitudes about how they valued youth and amateur soccer.
Meanwhile, in the social media sphere, suggestions that US Soccer should be paying its able-bodied national teams a bit less and redistributing more resources to development – as is the case in more successful soccer countries – found a hostile reception. The heavily memed Simpsons reference “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” was a typical sarcastic response. Today, everyone’s thinking of the children.
But the thoughts are as chaotic and self-contradictory in the soccer world as they were when Helen Lovejoy squealed out her “think of the children” plea repeatedly on The Simpsons. When the US men’s World Cup campaign ended with a whimper this summer, fingers were pointed at the “pay-to-play” system and economic barriers that keep a lot of players out of elite youth soccer. The US Under-20 women’s lackluster World Cup performance in September was partially blamed on clubs refusing to release players (or, more broadly, blamed on Fifa for not scheduling such events during appropriate windows), but the result wasn’t an outlier alongside other recent US youth results.
Simply put, the kids aren’t all right. And it’s a problem that has been addressed not with a sustained effort to improve matters but with intermittent cries for help, often followed by simplistic solutions. In 2026, the most prominent voice sounding the alarm is US women’s coach Emma Hayes, whose track record of success at Chelsea and with the gold medal-winning US women in the 2024 Olympics commands attention.
In 2018, the most prominent voices were the nine candidates who sought US Soccer’s presidency after the US men failed to qualify for the World Cup. In between, various forces have yanked the discussion from one overarching solution to another. Claudio Reyna, US Soccer’s youth technical director at the time, unveiled a curriculum at the NSCAA (now United Soccer Coaches) convention in 2011 that was heavily influenced by Barcelona’s tiki-taka approach.
Three years later, at the same convention, one of the sessions grappled with the question of reconciling three different organizations’ curricula. Most countries don’t have such chaos. In Germany, if the DFB wishes to embark on a massive overhaul such as the heralded “Das Reboot” of the early 2010s, it can do so.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
