The same can be said for England, where players in small amateur clubs outside of the professional league system will pay small fees in the neighborhood of $8/week, which covers basic fees including kits, referees, and other necessities, but not coaching. The coaching there is for the love of the game. Going to a higher level in the community, but still outside of the professional academy system, this is where the English Football Foundation, funded by the FA, Premier League, and English government, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into subsidizing costs for clubs. This keeps player registration fees nearly non-existent while bringing paid coaches into the fold with part time wages and allowing the players greater access to development and education within the game.
In Mexico, according to Queretaro FC scouting guru Mauricio Pedroza in another recent on-record conversation, players in professional youth academy setups do not pay. In the community programs there are small monthly fees that can be as high as $50 for a player depending on the location, quality of facilities and coaching, but most of the time outside of the major cities, it’s as low as $10 per month. This is done, as in England, through the coaches’ love for the game and willingness to volunteer their time and resources to help their community grow.
Even in Iceland, the smallest nation to ever qualify for the World Cup, and without a ton of financial assistance available from a large federation or large, generous tax-base, it only costs roughly $850 per year to play with one of the elite academies, such as Breidablik. This club, with one of the best development systems in Iceland, produced (or helped to produce) four players on the team that just qualified for the World Cup, including Gylfi Sigurdsson and Alfred Finnbogason, and five more who have been used this year (and sidenote for trivia buffs, Aron Johannsson for a short spell). This figure changes by age as well, so that the youngest players in the academy only pay about $140 per year. These small fees help to cover some very basic necessities such as maintenance and transportation costs, but the low prices are helped by the close involvement of clubs’ professional players having active involvement in youth coaching. For many of the younger players on the first team rosters, a stipulation in their contracts is that they dedicate a small number of hours each week to coaching at the youth academy.
The Icelandic federation’s investment into its youth over the past 15 years has paid dividends as evidenced by last year’s Euro run, and this year’s qualification for the World Cup. Even though the federation has limited resources, they devote what they can to improving the country’s sporting future. To bolster this investment, the individual clubs work with their sponsors, and use compensation awarded from successfully exported players to put back into their youth academies. This has created a machine in Reykjavik and Akureyri that sees several players a year exported into the Netherlands, England, and Denmark, with each one capable of bringing back as much as $150,000 straight away, and sell-on clauses that will keep players producing even more money for their childhood clubs as their careers progress.
But Then There’s Youth Soccer in America
This is all in contrast to American registration fees that run up to several thousand dollars per year even in community club programs, and is largely because of the increased cost of coaching wages which come with the assumption that higher paid means higher quality. This unfortunately feeds into another growing niche market in the United States which is the import of youth coaches from Great Britain; These same coaches doing the job for free in the small charity programs in London, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Manchester are brought over by companies like UK Elite who pitch their expert European services to communities bereft of knowledgeable soccer leaders, and procure lucrative contracts that pay as much as $110 per man hour for coaching kids as young as the U6 level. Keep the player:coach ratio at 10:1 for a four-day-a-week, two-hour, 60-player after school U6-U10 program, and it’s easy to see why registration fees cost as much as they do. It’s not about kit costs, it’s not about field rental, it’s not about referee fees, it’s not about insurance; The biggest financial hit to a club is the cost of coaching, and it’s not a field where you’re guaranteed to get what you pay for.
This is a major part of the underlying cause for why so many potential players, especially from minority backgrounds, are excluded from even basic community programs, let alone from the more difficult to navigate academy programs. Regardless of the difficulty of access though, there are still plenty of talented players whose parents can afford to pay the registration fees required to get their kids into programs. The United States has an estimated 30-million soccer players at all levels, and over 4-million of them are registered youth players. The mounting problem that these players then face is in the developmental side, and that is where so much is lacking, and where the evidence mounts up against the highest paid youth coaching industry in the world.
Not only are entire communities being deprived of the opportunity to play in “scouted” leagues, but those who do have access are finding it more and more difficult to find coaching quality that lives up to the expectations set forth in a club’s charter. The US Soccer coaching accreditation system is simply not an accurate gauge of a coach’s competence in the field, same as a student’s grade in school has very little applicability in the real world. Seasons are long, player personalities are diverse, and just because someone passed a test that may or may not have involved a bit of field work, doesn’t mean that they can take a team and progress with them full time.
How many USSF-produced coaches have gone on to make an international impact? The answer: Not many. We can’t generalize and say that they simply aren’t good enough - there’s certainly a case to be made for a number of coaches, such as Caleb Porter, Jason Kreis, Jesse Marsch, who are among a younger generation of coaches that will produce their own “family trees” that spread into other parts of the game. But beyond some MLS success, we’re hard pressed to find an impact beyond Bruce Arena’s 2002 World Cup campaign. And we just saw firsthand how little Arena has evolved from 2002 to 2017.
Again, it’s not to state that the US soccer coaching pool is a dumpster fire. There are a lot of good coaches working in the youth system in the United States, hailing from all over the world. Not all of them get paid high wages. Many do it for the satisfaction of being involved in the game they love. These hardworking, dedicated coaches are valuable, and worth every penny that they’re paid, or in some cases worth way more than they’re paid. These elite coaches come from every nationality and every background, but it’s naive to think that the 461 boy’s USSDA teams and the 100,000 odd other teams around the country can have access to them all. There are thousands upon thousands of parent volunteers who spend their time on their kids’ and community’s teams because of their own unique love and passion, but like with any industry where there is profit to be found, there are so many bad actors making their way into the field, claiming their piece of the pie. And for the American youth soccer pie, there are huge pieces of it available to someone clever enough to make their claim.
At the moment, there’s no accountability for clubs taking piles of money from parents believing that their kids will have a shot at college, short of bad customer reviews on Facebook. Add the Federation’s apparently adamant stance against subsidizing youth soccer costs in order to correct the market, and there is no end in sight for increased fees, under-qualified and overpaid coaches, and mediocre performances from the National Team which these programs collectively end up feeding into.
