Pay-to-play, MLS academies and the growth of the US player pipeline: Have we reached a tipping point?

I have decided, periodically, that I'll be running what are essentially "Letters to the Editor." There's so many smart, thoughtful, knowledgeable and hopeful soccer people out there, and it's often hard to isolate their signal in the midst of all the noise. Maybe I can help do that here.

Today's comes from Shawn Brooks, someone I've been talking ball with on various forums going back two decades (maybe longer). Shawn and I don't always see eye-to-eye – and I will say straight-up that I think his take below, which he first posted on Reddit and repurposed/expanded here, is an order of magnitude too rosy* – but I also think he is directionally correct. And even if I felt he was 100% wrong, I've found, over the decades, that his thoughts are always worth reading.

(*) To outright steal a line from a friend: most structural/institutional momentum in the sport is aimed at concentrating competitive gains into the existing power centers. And while that will provide growth, I don't think it'll provide the type of growth that sees us reel in the top ~9 national teams in the world.

So to me, Shawn's thoughts are much more compelling than the usual, unexamined "end pay-to-play!" shrieking and recriminations, because Shawn is doing more than just just wishing the system would change: he's analyzing why the system exists, how and where it actually works well, how it's changed already, and how to optimize that while attempting to expand the pathway and eliminate developmental bottlenecks.

He is providing both context and reason for optimism. It's a good read.

In we go:

We're Never Going to Out-England England

MLS academies plus volume are our most viable path. That train is already moving, and we're closer to the tipping point than people think.

I've spent a lot of time comparing American youth soccer to England and France, and I want to lay out where I landed, because I think the usual "pay-to-play is killing us" conversation misses what's actually happening.

What do I mean by that? The pay-to-play conversation is really two different problems tangled together, and you have to pull them apart to get anywhere.

The first problem is the cost of competitive soccer for families. That one is real and I don't want to minimize it. By some estimates Americans spend around $5 billion a year on youth sports. But solving it at the root, by making all competitive soccer affordable or adopting a publicly funded model like France's, would take billions in taxpayer investment. A country that cuts funding for education and healthcare isn't making that investment in soccer development in my lifetime. I'm not against it. I'm just not planning around it.

The second problem is competitiveness on the world stage, and that's the one this piece is about. Why don't we have a team full of world-class stars like France or England? Where is our Haaland? The good news buried inside the bad news is that to solve the second problem, we don't have to solve the first. We don't need every American kid coming up through an equitable pipeline to become a top-five soccer nation. We need a viable economic model that develops and recruits enough players to find our superstars. A pipeline that beats pay-to-play for a selective population.

And that's the key historical difference between the American system and the European ones, the one the usual conversation misses. European development is aligned with an economic model. Clubs in Europe don't develop players because someone subsidizes it or because the culture demands it. They develop players because it's profitable. The academy is a business unit that can pay for itself.