Parents of most youngsters taking up soccer in the US are well placed to afford the high sums it takes to put them in competitive arenas
Mauricio Pochettino, head coach of Team USA, gestures during the international friendly against Senegal at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina, in May. Photograph: John Dorton/USSF/Getty
Tue Jun 09 2026 - 06:00 • 6 MIN READ
A youth club on Long Island is advertising the opportunity to register kids for Under-three soccer training. For a mere $165 (€140), your boy or girl, fresh out of nappies presumably, can work on their first touch. The same outfit offers Under-14s eight training sessions and one tournament over the course of the summer for a measly $400. That fee is separate from the $2,200 every child needs to find to play in the fall and spring leagues. Welcome to the United States of America and the soccer-industrial complex – a suitably lucrative location for Fifa to pitch its bloated World Cup tent for some supersized grifting.
There has been a Paris St Germain superstore on Fifth Avenue, the most coveted retail real estate in Manhattan, for a while now. Across two storeys and laid out more like a chic boutique than a club shop, well-heeled customers sift through elegant racks of jerseys and leisure-wear before sauntering further along the main drag to eyeball Cartier watches, Christian Louboutin shoes and Prada blouses. Its presence among such high-end couture underlines that PSG is a global brand, and the US has long been identified as fecund terrain for its sportswashing project.
At the cosy Tavern on Jane down in the West Village, one of the few remaining, authentic neighbourhood bars in New York , an incongruous sign on a wall reads Dean Court. An AFC Bournemouth scarf hangs nearby, confirming the link to The Cherries. It turns out the pub owner is friends with one of the Americans who has a piece of the sixth-best team in England. In a city where watching live soccer from Europe used to require extraordinary effort, the all-powerful Premier League has infiltrated shebeens on every block.
Farther downtown, Classic Football Shirts, another thriving English export, has planted its flag in Soho, hawking vintage exotica from every league on earth. The clientele on Canal Street ranges from hipster kids to Asian tourists to Wall Street types, demographics that don’t flinch at an AC Milan number from decades back retailing for $500. Serious money is being made peddling football nostalgia in a country still perversely regarded by some ill-informed commentators as new to the sport’s top table. Which it isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time.
Regardless of what happens once Team USA kicks off its campaign against Paraguay next Friday night, this World Cup can’t be about growing the game in a nation already suffused with soccer culture, a place where 17 million people play regularly. At last count, 47 Americans have featured in the modern iteration of the Champions League, 16 more than Ireland can boast in the same period. Christian Pulisic is one of the best players in Serie A (admittedly not the flex it once was), and has team-mates plying their trade in Mexico, Germany, France, Spain, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and of course, Major League Soccer (MLS).
A firework show prior to the MLS match between Inter Miami CF and Austin FC at Nu Stadium in Miami, Florida, in April. Photograph: Leonardo Fernandez/MLS/Getty
For keeping tabs on the 25 Americans regularly starting across the top five European leagues, Mauricio Pochettino earns $6 million a year, roughly what Thomas Tuchel gets for helming England, and more than France pays Didier Deschamps. Everything about the US’s commercial approach points to a seriousness of purpose, properly resourcing the operation with no expense spared. Yet, they enter this tournament with low expectations. Thirty-two years after hosting its first World Cup, 24 years after being very unlucky to lose a quarter-final, most pundits think reaching the round of 16 in this elongated format is the summit of their ambition.
“Our college system isn’t competitive enough to feed into professional soccer,” said Landon Donovan, when asked why the US has failed to push on since his own era. “So basically, if you’re 16, 17, you haven’t made it. You’re not on an MLS roster, you kind of fall into this abyss. But the bigger problem is, our youth soccer in this country is a disaster. And so, you have all these youth clubs charging you crazy fees. It’s all about winning. The kids get left behind because the clubs want to make money. The coaches want to make money. They want to win. And the kids don’t develop. And now we’re seeing sort of the fruits of that, sadly.”
As long as the price of admission to kids’ teams is prohibitive for most blue-collar families, an outbreak of national soccer hysteria would be nothing more than a passionate summer fling
Arguably the most instinctive American player ever, Donovan has repeatedly called fo…
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