Podcast Transcript
In the summer of 2026, the United States caught World Cup fever, just as we do every four years.
And just like we do every time, we were eliminated by a much smaller country.
The United States is a large, rich country. We win a disproportionate share of Olympic medals and Nobel Prizes. Yet, when it comes to the world’s most popular sport, we don’t do very well. At least the men’s team.
Learn more about the structural challenges standing in the way of American soccer success on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
The closest the US Men’s National Soccer Team came to winning the World Cup was a third-place finish at the inaugural tournament in 1930. Third place sounds great; a top-3 finish in a modern World Cup is a remarkable achievement.
But in 1930, most European countries boycotted the tournament, believing it should have been held in Europe, meaning Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain did not attend. England was not a member of football’s governing body, FIFA, so England, Scotland, and Wales did not attend either.
A tournament without that roster of powerhouse countries makes for a very different tournament, which helps explain why the United States did so well. That being said, doing well meant winning only two games and then losing to Argentina, 6-1.
Since then, it hasn’t been great for US soccer. The United States has participated in 13 World Cups but has failed to qualify 11 times, including nine straight tournaments between 1954 and 1986.
It’s reasonable to ask why the United States has not been more successful on soccer’s global stage. The United States is the 3rd-largest country in the world by population, has had the world’s largest economy for almost 150 years, and has a tradition of athletic success across multiple sports and the Olympics.
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However, there isn’t a simple formula for World Cup success.
Take, for example, England. They invented the sport; the English Premier League is unquestionably the best league in the world, and it is very well funded. England has produced multiple legendary players over the last century, yet they have only won a single World Cup in 1966.
Italian soccer has won the World Cup four times, guided by a legendary defensive system and world-class players. To the dismay of everyone in Italy, the Blues have failed to even qualify for the last two tournaments.
Germany has won four World Cups, and their program has produced some of the sport’s most brilliant players, and it had a pattern for success…until it didn’t. Since winning the title in 2014, Germany has fallen woefully short of national expectations.
Brazil is the most decorated soccer program in the world. Yet, the last time they won the tournament was almost a quarter-century ago, in 2002, and since then, they have experienced a cycle of early exits and embarrassing losses.
There are 211 FIFA-recognized National teams, all chasing the same title. Yet only 8 nations have accomplished that feat, and all are in Europe or South America.
These 8 nations hold structural advantages that are very difficult to replicate, even for a country like the United States.
The strength of a nation’s top professional league is usually a strong indicator of a national team’s success. All the teams that have won a World Cup title boast powerful, historically successful leagues.
Consider England’s Premier League, the successor to the First Division, which dates back to the 19th century. Over the last 150 years, it has showcased historic clubs across England. The earliest clubs were connected to Industrial and coal-producing centers in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Leeds.
This deep loyalty of these working class cities gave these clubs an unmatched fan base, historic stadiums, and staggering financial value. For example, London’s historic Chelsea club was sold in 2022 for £4.25 billion.
Clubs like Chelsea do not just consist of their top team. They have youth programs for the children near the club. These youth teams are not just something that they sponsor to support the community. They are a vital part of the long-term success of the club.
Consider Arsenal, the 2026 Premier League winner and UEFA Champions League runner-up. Arsenal has a youth soccer academy for toddlers as young as 2. These academy offerings are primarily for Arsenal fans who live in North London.
The parents pay for these club-subsidized toddler programs, which focus on ball skills and fun. As kids grow up, they benefit from the deep well of Arsenal coaches, all UEFA-certified, who coach competitive teams for kids as young as 6. The coaches of even the youngest players are highly skilled, and unlike teams in the US, are not parents of the players.
These coaches keep a keen eye out for young players with passion, coordination, and speed. Kids recognized for these traits are funneled into a special academy paid for by Arsenal.
The coaches, facilities, and competition all get better as the players advance. The best players in England don’t pay for soccer beyond age 6. Beginning at age 9, the players and their families can sign a schoolboy academy registration.
This is a non-binding annual contract of sorts that establishes a bond between the family and the club and passes the financial burden on to Arsenal.
A schoolboy contract provides higher levels of coaching, training gear, travel expenses, and access to Arsenal’s sport science program, all at no cost to the family. The parent club, Arsenal, pays for all of this as a scouting initiative.
As the kids get older, they sign contracts with Arsenal as they move up the ladder towards the top club team. Arsenal Program director Edu Gaspar described Arsenal’s Hale End youth program in 2023: Arsenal’s youth academy, historically speaking, is the club’s identity.
Many of the best players in the world star for the teams that raised them, such as Arsenal’s 24-year-old Bukayo Saka, who joined the Hale End Academy at age 7.
When they reach the heights of truly elite players, they often transfer between clubs in high-profile, lucrative deals. Yet the entire process starts at the club level when they are very young, at a very minimal cost to players’ families.
This process is mirrored across Europe in the German Bundesliga, the Spanish La Liga, and the French Ligue 1. This same type of club structure is also in practice in South America.
The end result is a parent club that develops soccer talent in its area at its own expense, builds a rabid fan base, and develops a talent pipeline directly to the club’s professional team.
This is extremely different from the US model.
Many people, including some Americans, are shocked to discover that the United States has more children playing organized soccer than any other country except China. It is the most widely played youth sport in the country, surpassing even basketball and baseball.
Recent estimates suggest that more than 3 million American kids play organized soccer, which is nearly twice the size of the youth player pool of Germany and France.
Unlike the rest of the world, in the American model, the cost of player development falls on the players and their families. In the United States, as kids move beyond the earliest recreational teams into suburban or local club teams, costs begin to multiply; in many cases, the increase is more than many families can afford.
This financial burden falls disproportionately on urban communities, where many talented athletes are priced out of competitive soccer entirely due to high costs and limited access to facilities.
Putting the cost of American youth soccer into perspective is America’s leading World Cup scorer, Landon Donovan, who offered this appraisal: “It has become, at best, a middle-class sport, and it’s really a middle-to-upper-class sport. It’s four, five, or six thousand dollars a year before you get into uniforms and travel. We grew up in a 900-foot home. My mom was a special ed teacher who made $30,000. There’s zero chance I could have played soccer in this country (today)…I wouldn’t have been able to afford to play.”
This is a stark contrast to European or South American clubs, highlighting a massive structural gap: there is no coherent, interconnected club system in the United States.
Major League Soccer teams may offer some camps and academies, but they are often fee-based and don’t connect players to clubs for the long term. MLS recently launched a club-sponsored academy program called MLS Next, but it is only 6 years old and very small compared to other leagues worldwide.
Player acquisition in MLS, and in all professional North American sports, has traditionally been done through a draft. The draft is organized so that the worst-performing teams get the highest picks, so the best American draft-eligible players are selected by the teams that had the worst seasons.
In a closed-draft system, there is no financial incentive for a local club to absorb the massive cost of player development if those players end up playing for another team.
The cost of coaching in American youth clubs is high for those that have paid certified coaches. In lower-level leagues, coaches are usually volunteer parents, and most of them don’t have advanced knowledge of the game. They are mostly there to chaperone and organize the schedule, not to actually teach the intricacies of the game.
This is in stark contrast to the fully certified, professional coaching ranks of Europe.
Also, while American kids primarily divide their athletic attention among baseball, basketball, and football, children in Argentina and Germany grow up with a singular, hyper-focused cultural preference: they play soccer.
Conversely, kids in Argentina or Germany don’t play other sports, especially team sports, as often as kids in the United States. A gifted American athlete who can play anything is likely to be steered toward a sport such as basketball, football, or baseball, where there is more and better coaching and greater cultural awareness.
One final reason why certain nations have greater success in soccer is the concept of relegation. Relegation is the penalty for the worst-performing teams at the bottom of a league.
Teams in the bottom 3 are automatically kicked out of the top division at the end of the season and forced to drop down to a lower, less prestigious league for the next year.
Relegated teams have to fight their way back into the top league by finishing at the top of the lower league. Relegation is a catastrophe for a soccer club.
When a team gets relegated, it loses most of its television and advertising revenue. Relegated teams lose more than 80% of that revenue because lower-league TV contracts are a fraction of those in the top league.
Teams that are relegated and committed significant sums to player salaries are often forced to sell the contracts of their best players to avoid bankruptcy. Knowing their entire future depends on avoiding relegation, clubs have to devote far more money to players and development than North American sports teams.
Your average Premier League team often operates at break-even or even at a loss, whereas the worst NFL team will still probably make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating profit.
Perhaps the most important factor in all of this is history. Soccer clubs around the world have data going back more than a century on coaching methods and strategies. America simply does not have this legacy to rely on.
Of course, none of this applies to women’s soccer. The US has built a legacy in women’s soccer, winning 4 of the 9 World Cup tournaments since its founding in 1991.
Because the international women’s game is far newer, the U.S. was able to build an early empire thanks to Title IX. Passed in 1972, the landmark legislation legally required American universities to fund scholarships, facilities, and coaching for women’s athletics.
As a result, nearly every college in the country added a women’s soccer program at a time when opportunities in global soccer clubs were limited. European nations have begun using the same club strategy with women’s teams to overcome the head start the American women had. As a result, the US women’s team isn’t as dominant as it once was, simply because the rest of the world has gotten better.
Winning a World Cup isn’t easy. Putting a championship team on the field is a process that is decades in the making. In 1993, Japan began a program to win a men’s World Cup by the year 2050. Assuming that they actually win in 20250, the grandparents of those players would have been around in 1993. Many in Japan will consider the program a success if they can win a single World Cup during the 21st century.
The US men’s national team has gotten better. There is no doubt about that. But there is still a long way to go if the United States is to ever find itself among the elite countries in the sport.
It would probably require a complete overhaul of how youth soccer is played, as well as a major cultural shift towards the game. Currently, the American TV rights for the English Premier League sell for more than the MLS TV rights.
Over the next decade or two, success will more realistically be measured by whether the team advances to the quarterfinals than by winning the tournament outright.
