“USYS members took a historic step to make the game more affordable and accessible to kids and their families across the country.”
— Tina Rincon, US Youth Soccer’s Chair of the Board, on Saturday’s announcement that the state associations of the country’s largest youth soccer organization approved a move to integrate into U.S. Soccer.
When the American youth soccer boom took off in the 1970s, low cost was among the sport’s touted attributes: a popular comparison noted that outfitting an entire soccer team cost less than equipping a single football player.
Soccer’s various other appeals — reasons it had long been the world’s most popular sport — fueled a participation boom. By the 1980s, more than five times as many children were registered with American youth soccer leagues than played Pop Warner football. By 1990, U.S. Youth Soccer registered 1.6 million players and AYSO was nearing 400,000. In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported that more children played soccer in Los Angeles than football and baseball combined.
For those of us who loved soccer when it still occupied the margins of American sports, its rapid growth was exhilarating. Newcomers to soccer delighted in seeing their children play a free-flowing sport. The players relished a freedom on the field unlike traditional American sports.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the proliferation of youth soccer was frequently attributed to lack of body-type requirements (“anyone can play”), continuous action and the sport’s accessibility.
But then came other terms that are now commonplace in discussions of American youth soccer: pay-to-play, turf wars, alphabet soup and Wild West.
Today, parents of Pop Warner football players pay significantly less for their children’s participation than parents of competitive soccer players, whose uniforms alone come in the $250–$400 range. Club fees have sky-rocketed to pay coaches and club directors, cover field usage and maintenance, and competition entry fees. And then you’ve got tournament travel, which has continually moved to lower ages and has been exacerbated by the emergence of various national leagues.
The USA has travel tournaments for 6-year-olds, state cups for 7-year-olds and national championships for 12-year-olds. Figures as high as $10,000-plus a year have been cited as the cost of playing for an elite youth club.
The alphabet soup? After USYS, AYSO and SAY came US Club Soccer, which sanctions the ECNL. There’s the boys MLS NEXT and the GA (Girls Academy), which just launched ASPIRE. The USYS and U.S. Club Soccer recently partnered to create the National 1 League.
The boys MLS Next and the GA launched in 2020 after U.S. Soccer folded its Development Academy leagues for both genders. Now the Federation has returned to the youth game in a massive manner.
In a move approved on Saturday by a vote of U.S. Youth Soccer’s 54 state associations, U.S. Soccer will, by 2028 absorb USYS, which has nearly 2.7 million registered players, and 10,000 clubs and leagues.
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