Pay to Play and the Impact on US Soccer Youth Development

A conversation with youth development expert Marcus Chairez

Players come and go but the system of US Soccer development has stayed the same for decades. That system is different from the rest of the world in that in America players and their families are burdened with the cost of playing organized soccer. Pay to play is exactly as it sounds - a system in which is exclusionary to those that do not have the means to pay.

This is part one of a three part series on the pay to play system. This is a conversation with US Soccer development expert Marcus Chairez. Marcus is an amazing human, and like me started his soccer fandom through sharing content. He is the founder of the US Soccer Collective which covers deeply the top levels of youth development in the United States.

All three parts of the pay-to-play series will be a full video on the YouTube channel out in a few weeks. Enjoy this conversation with Marcus Chairez.

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Jake: All right, Marcus, thanks so much for joining me. Can you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you've been involved in US Soccer?

Marcus: Great to be here, Jake. It's good to talk to you again. I classify myself as an independent soccer consultant and scout, primarily focused on the youth game, from the U-14 to the U-19 level in the United States. I write about top-tier American players, both domestically and internationally, and work with a lot of individual players on evaluations, development plans, and connections to trainers. I also help them make decisions on academies, long-term positional fit, and eventually refer them to agents to help them make good decisions, because it can be really critical. I'm very much concerned with and informed on the youth development pipeline in the U.S. It's very complicated, and that complication is probably the biggest reason why I have demand in what I do.

Jake: Amazing, and you kind of built this from being a nerd on the youth game and independently. So it's amazing to see what you've built it up to be.

Marcus: Thank you. It's been a very organic and interesting ride. I'm super grateful, and I think it goes to show how open and supportive the community is here in the United States, and frankly small, which is probably the thing that surprised me the most. I've had a lot of moments of almost imposter syndrome, being able to talk to and work with some of the people that I've gotten to, but I'm very thankful for it.

Jake: So I know when we talk about pay to play, it's kind of this bogeyman word, but what I feel about this topic and about this channel is I want to be an optimistic outlet. I want to be able to think about realistically, what does it mean for our nation, for our senior team? And how can we solve it? Or is it even a bad thing?

The last time we chatted was probably two and a half years ago. We mentioned an event that happened in 2020 where US Soccer and MLS decided to get rid of the development academy and move to something more focused on projects like MLS Next. Now, I know COVID impacted a lot of critical development years for different age groups, but now that we're a few years on from that, I just want to revisit that event and how you think it shaped the current environment and if it can help set the scene for what the professional development pipeline was like and how it is now.

Marcus: I think the long-term strategy for MLS Next as a whole, good or bad, just basing this off of actions that I'm seeing, is to really become the all-encompassing governing body of both youth and professional soccer.

I don't think they're super interested in connecting with other youth leagues and professional leagues, which I think has been made evident by what's going on with the U.S. Open Cup. They want to be all of it. That's even starting to happen on the MLS Next, which is their primary league competition at the youth level. I think they envision a world where the top academies that aren't in MLS Next eventually make their way there and you really don't have a reason to be anywhere else.

MLS Next continues to grow, adding academies in different parts of the country. They're changing their age format to be a little bit more consistent with the rest of the world. In large part, it's been positive from a competitive level and how it's growing. The big question mark in this pipeline still is MLS Next Pro as a viable reserve league under kind of 19, under 21 league that connects from the academy level to the professional level.

There's still a lot of question marks there, but overall I think MLS Next continues to grow and the competitive level seems to be getting a bit better.

And then I know a lot of MLS academies, the more resourced academies, are definitely engaging with players at a younger level, whether that be under nine to getting official teams up and rolling at the under 12, under 13 level. Whereas the clubs that are less interested right now in youth development may not be starting to engage until the under 15 level.

Jake: Now help me connect the dots here because a lot of MLS academies are free for kids that make it to that level. The way that a lot of European clubs or federations all across the world are successful in reducing payments for parents and families is through solidarity payments.

The way that I see MLS trying to develop some of the youth leagues and the Federation getting more involved is that it makes it easier to have solidarity payments as kids move through the pipeline. So what I mean by that is, a nine or ten-year-old is in a development academy for six, seven years and gets sold. At least that goes towards funding the next nine, ten, eleven-year-olds and the families aren't necessarily paying for it. So is that one of the benefits that will come?

Are solidarity payment something that is looking to be more implemented within this more MLS-focused structure?

Marcus: Yeah, they have that program in place where if you are at a non-MLS affiliated academy at any point, move to an MLS academy, or even make a jump from that academy to professional in MLS, there are solidarity payments that go to that non-affiliated club. So that's definitely in place. That then helps subsidize.

I don't know how the money is then used at that non-affiliated MLS academy to help subsidize families. The majority of those non-MLS academies are pay to play, and we can get into that. But I would imagine that the solidarity payments help to cover a lot of things, and I'm sure one of them is to have a scholarship-like program.

Jake: From a professional perspective, can you help set the scene on what pay to play looks like at that higher level? Is pay to play a thing, or is it more the solidarity payments and the clubs that make money and have well-funded academies make that free for kids and families? Not just at a casual recreational level, but towards the professional level, what does pay to play actually mean in America?

Marcus: Broadly, professional academies, whether that's MLS, USL, are of no charge to the players, and the non-professionally linked academies, of which there are a lot in the MLS NEXT ecosystem. There's MLS NEXT and ECNL, the two primary youth leagues in the United States. USL also has its own youth league. But MLS NEXT has hundreds of academies, some of which, all of the MLS academies are tied to that, not pay to play.

But then there are many, many more in that same league that are pay to play, as are ECNL. That's kind of the way it generally breaks down. I do think some MLS academies may have second or third-tier teams at certain levels that can be pay to play, to help fund the program, but their first teams, their best teams at each age group are always going to be free for the kids.

Jake: A lot of the beneficial work that's been done to lower the cost for these kids and these families has happened over the last few years and it hasn't necessarily gotten to that ground level where we're more talking about upstream, right?

If you've already made it into a professional development process or experience, you've probably been playing for a few years and been identified. So how do you think more at the starting point economic barriers impact the identification and development of young soccer talent in America?

Marcus: That is really the fundamental problem with pay to play, I think. And at the root of that, I think, is access to good coaching. I think that is the primary difference and my opinion on why pay to play is such a bigger thing here in the United States than bigger, soccer-dominant countries around the world.

So if you think about the sports that are popular here, like take basketball, for example, you don't have to go too far in any community to get access to someone who maybe even played college basketball and has a pretty high-level understanding of the game and can coach. You'll find good coaching pretty much anywhere in the United States.

That's just not the case here with soccer.

And so what that creates is a business opportunity so that if you are a coach that is competent and has played at a decent level, you can make a lot of money in the United States starting a club or coaching a competitive team.

So what happens is at younger ages, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, really important developmental times in kids' lives, it can be really difficult to get good coaching, depending on where you live. So, if the only good coaching in your area is pay to play and you don't have the resources to do that, it puts you at a huge disadvantage.

While it's really nice that MLS Academy's starting maybe as early as the U13 level are free, if you have not been in a competitive, well-coached environment from ages nine to thirteen, you are at a huge deficit.

That is fundamentally the problem with pay to play in the United States. It's giving kids such a big advantage at those earlier ages because good coaching and good development are hard to find. So it comes at a premium.

Jake: It's funny you mention the coaching because when I started doing the research for this video specifically and thinking about the script and laying it out, something that didn't come up right away was the coaching aspect.

Actually, through reading a lot about it, watching a lot of videos of experts on the topic, that continually came up. Then I thought about my own experience through the coaching pyramid. My next coaching license is the US B license, which can be like $3,000 for the license and then thousands more for travel and accommodations just to get to the B license. I was able to get level two FA in England for £75 each, and that was a UEFA C license at the end of it.

This is kind of a separate problem, but even for coaches, it gets really expensive to move up the ladder and become credentialed to coach higher and higher levels. What have you seen in terms of whether it is MLS Next or other innovative solutions that you've seen or proposed that make soccer more accessible to all socioeconomic backgrounds?

Marcus: I don't have a ton of tangible examples. It might be more of an informed opinion or hypothesis, but I think a lot of the positive work that happens in terms of identifying and connecting with talent in more challenging economic neighborhoods or just areas that are not obvious soccer communities.

Let's face it, soccer is still very much a middle, upper-income sport. It is not the sport for the people in the United States, like it is in a lot of places throughout the world. But I do think there is some success when individual people that have the ability to connect with certain communities go out and do some philanthropic or community-driven work to help bring attention to the sport at younger ages and really connect and commit to a community where soccer may not be the most obvious sport of choice.

It really takes passionate people that can connect with communities that don't necessarily think about soccer as a primary sport or a potential career pathway for them and bringing awareness that way. Young people and their families want to see people that look like them have success. By bringing that awareness to these communities, there has been and can be a lot of success. Some MLS academies are doing a good job with this too.

I'm not going to name names, but there are stories where some academies are trying to be more creative about how they find players, not just going to the obvious pay to play programs within their hundred-mile vicinity, but going to different neighborhoods and places to find talent that might not otherwise have the opportunity to play at an MLS Academy.

There's one story in particular I'm aware of, of a player that's now one of the top players in the 2010 class where they found this particular player in a really unique way. The more that MLS Academies can get creative and invested in their community as well, the more helpful it will be.

Jake: You have no idea how perfectly that connects to the other conversation for this series with a philanthropic organization Open Goal Project.

Not only was one of their biggest challenges at first getting enough funding to have a travel team where everything was free for inner city kids that had lower economic ability to go to pay to play systems, but their second challenge, which was close to the first, was finding representation within the coaching staff that looked and came from the same places and had similar experiences to the kids. That was something they weren't expecting, not in terms of the challenge, but what it actually meant to make sure that their kids had that. I'm really glad you brought that up.

Zooming out a little bit and just thinking more about the competitive state of the U.S. soccer senior national team, how do you think the current pay to play system affects the overall talent pool and competitiveness of U.S. national teams?

Marcus: I guess I just go back to the problem space of awareness at younger ages, opportunities at younger ages where development is pretty critical, especially in individual technical ability.

I think we're just limiting our pool. We live in this huge country. Team sports are incredibly valued and prioritized and funded. We're just limiting the amount of talent that could impact the sport in a big way by not having more high-quality, free grassroots programs throughout the country.

Our senior team has come a long way, and it's more diverse than it's ever been, which is amazing. Honestly, one of the primary reasons I started to fall in love with the team was those two factors. I just think the pool of potential young people that could impact the highest level is still limited, in a way. I don't want to take away from what some of these pay to play academies have done. A lot of our top players started there. Probably the majority of our top players started there.

They are up leveling the training and getting better and better. There's more competition, so they're forced to get better and better. There's more options for kids, so you have to really raise your coaching level and what you offer to these kids to stay relevant and get the best players.

In terms of quality, they are trying to raise the bar of quality at these younger ages. That is important and having an impact. You can't look at our senior team and not see pay to play in their background, I'm sure. But I do think to get the full potential of this immensely diverse and massive country, there needs to be both. There need to be options for people who can't afford it.

Jake: I love that you hit on the player development part, but then also your own fandom was impacted by the diversity of the team. That's awesome.

You just mentioned something within pay to play of raising the bar. There is some benefit to it. So just leave me, leave us with the optimistic bit in all of these conversations. What are you most optimistic about?

Marcus: I guess I just see all the foundational elements of a sport that's growing in popularity and understanding. I also think this is a country that is going to get more diverse and mixed, and I think that is a good thing for this sport.

The reason to be optimistic is that you see growth in coverage in youth soccer, growth in talent levels at younger ages. There are really exciting players coming through at younger age groups. You're seeing growth in professional clubs starting throughout the country.

I still think it's a bit fractured and segmented, but you can't argue with the growth of the sport and the growth in popularity and hopefully the growth and understanding of how to get to the highest level. Generationally, as the sport grows, you start to solve some of those coaching issues we talked about. The more people fall in love with the game, the more people play the game at different levels, they're going to give back to it in the future and be good coaches.

It may be a while, but the growth is going to pay off. In the next few generations, there will be more people who love and understand the sport and can give better education, pass that love on to more people, whether that be their sons or daughters or what have you. The growth is inevitable, and that in itself is a reason to be really optimistic.

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You can follow Marcus’ coverage at https://www.ussoccercollective.com/approach and follow him on X

On the next part in the series I’ll be chatting with the co-founder of Open Goal Project who provides 100% free organized, high quality travel soccer for underprivileged families in Washington DC.