SEATTLE — Andreassen simply didn’t understand the words coming out of his friend’s mouth.

Andreassen, a former Washington Youth Soccer president, was catching up with a friend whose two children are 6 and 8 years old when Andreassen’s friend mentioned the family was preparing to travel to San Diego.

Not to visit Legoland. Or the San Diego Zoo. For a club soccer tournament.

“They are 7 year olds,” he said. “And they’re traveling. It just doesn’t make much sense to me.”

Soccer continues to grow in the United States, where more than 3 million children are registered to play the sport annually.

The performance of the U.S. men’s national team seems poised to create a surge of interest in the sport after a dominant showing during the group stage of the FIFA Men’s World Cup on home soil. On Monday, the USMNT returned to Seattle for its round of 16 game against Belgium.

Yet America’s youth-soccer system still faces a significant set of structural challenges, even as it makes its first real attempts to consolidate all the various branches of youth soccer into one cohesive pyramid.

Youth soccer in the United States follows the club format used by a majority of youth sports in this country. The Aspen Institute estimated Americans spend between $30-40 billion on youth sports annually in 2024. Parents must pay for equipment and registration. As a child begins showing aptitude for a sport, travel, private training and sports camps become additional expenses.

This is the pay-to-play system, which creates financial barriers and puts a heavy emphasis on winning instead of development for youth coaches.

Andreassen said select-level players in Washington — the middle level of competitive play — are likely paying around $7,000 per year. Premier-level players, the second-highest level, can easily pay double that and possibly triple if their club frequently participates in international tournaments. The costs are a major deterrent for children from underserved communities to get involved in the sport, Andreassen said, even if clubs offer scholarships.

“I think we’re making some headway there,” said Andreassen, who chaired the United States Soccer Federation (USSF) diversity task force for five years. “We’re finding some of those kids, but we’re not even close to casting that net to find really talented kids in the underserved communities.”

While soccer is far from the only American youth sport dealing with the ramifications of the pay-to-play system, it’s perhaps the most frequently discussed because there’s another viable option.

Many of the world’s best soccer-playing countries rely on the academy system, where professional clubs directly scout and develop talent to incorporate into their professional teams in the future.

It’s why Barry Pauwels, USSF’s head of development for the men’s youth teams, was confounded by the pay-to-play system he encountered when he moved to the United States from Belgium, his home country, in 2018 to take his first job with USSF.

“I think the pay-to-play model is one of the most significant barriers to participation and talent development in the game,” Pauwels said.

Pauwels dreams of a national, consolidated framework where competition costs are lower and families aren’t traveling thousands of miles for club competition. But completely reworking the fabric of youth soccer in the United States will take significant time and national cooperation among the USSF, MLS and the two organizations primarily responsible for facilitating competitive youth soccer: U.S. Youth Soccer (USYS) and U.S. Club Soccer (USCS).

In January 2025, USSF and its former sporting director Matt Crocker announced “the U.S. Way,” an ambitious set of guidelines to restructure the fractured youth-soccer ecosystem before the World Cup’s arrival in 2026. It focused on player development and national talent identification, opening the Arthur M. Blank National Training Center as the new home of the U.S. national teams and USSF in Georgia, and creating accessible professional development for coaches and administrators around the country.

Crocker departed for a similar position with Saudi Arabia’s soccer federation in April, but his vision has been continued by people like Pauwels, who worked heavily on the U.S. Way project.

Pauwels and the USSF have emphasized trying to create and explain a clear pathway for talented children with aspirations of playing professionally and for the national teams. It’s easier said than done.

“What I’ve seen here is that for players and parents, it’s often very difficult,” Pauwels said. “The sport has grown so much now, that there’s a lot of offerings from clubs. And it’s very difficult for them to navigate the landscape, because there’s all these leagues and all these competitions and all these development pathways making it difficult for parents to determine which is the most appropriate environment for the long-term development of their children.”

There have been recent steps to streamline some of these leagues and create cohesion between them. In January, USCS and USYS announced a merger between their two national premier-level leagues with an emphasis on regional travel.

The creation of National 1 League is a direct result of the pathways strategy USSF announced in November 2025 to revamp the youth-soccer pyramid as part of the U.S. Way program.

“There’s been a lot of work done to create opportunities and access to the game,” Pauwels said. “But our challenge is more structural. Because the system is growing so rapidly, we need to align a little bit more and create that clarity so we can create the appropriate platform for the players and make it more easy for the players and parents to make choices.”

And Pauwels and Andreassen have also been encouraged by the growth of MLS academies as a better option for boys. MLS teams started opening academy programs in the mid-2000s. The Sounders opened their academy in 2010. But Andreassen said it took time for academies to cultivate relationships with local club teams, who were hesitant to send their talent away even if it was better for the players’ development.

More than 15 years later, Andreassen said he’s finally seen those relationships improve. And in 2020, MLS reorganized its developmental leagues and relaunched them as MLS Next, a new option for elite-level players with a direct pathway to professional opportunities.

Concentrating rising talent at the MLS academies, Pauwels said, will also make talent identification easier for USSF. He’d like to see MLS academies expand to include age groups even younger than the under-13 level, the youngest age group for MLS Next.

It’s important to note that teams who play in MLS Next are not strictly MLS academy teams. There are more than 120 elite club teams competing alongside MLS academy teams in the highest division of MLS Next, called the Homegrown Division.

While MLS academies are free to attend, the other elite clubs they compete against function with the same pay-to-play model as any other club. Girls Academy is the girls’ equivalent of MLS Next but has significantly fewer free options since only five of the 16 NWSL teams currently have academy infrastructure.

MLS academies are intrinsically tied to their MLS teams, meaning there are only 30 academy teams to cover the entire country. The only MLS Next member club offering Homegrown Division soccer in Washington is the Sounders academy. Only 32 of the 50 states — 33 of 51 if Washington, D.C., is counted — even have a registered MLS Next club playing in the Homegrown Division.

Pauwels added he’d like to see MLS support the grassroots leagues, too, building relationships with local clubs and helping better educate coaches who can communicate soccer expertise and create environments that are welcoming and encourage development for children on and off the field. MLS announced MLS Go, a recreational sports program designed to introduce younger players to soccer, in 2023.

And Pauwels is encouraged by the growth of the sport he’s seen during more than eight years with the USSF. He said he believes the future — the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles and the 2030 World Cup — is even brighter.

Many of the players who will be eligible for the 2028 U.S. Olympic team, where all but three players must be age 23 or younger, represent the first generation of players who’ve spent several years in these academy systems. Of the 20 players called up for the USMNT under-21 team’s games in March 2026, 12 had spent stints at an MLS academy including former Sounder Reed Baker-Whiting, who was developed by Sounders academy.

“I am very, very optimistic for (the 2030 World Cup) and the one in Saudi Arabia a couple of years later,” Pauwels said. “I think the future is very, very bright.”

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