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As Doug Andreassen, the chairman of US Soccer’s diversity task force, looks across the game he loves, all he can see is a system broken in America. And he wonders why nobody seems to care.
He sees well-to-do families spending thousands of dollars a year on soccer clubs that propel their children to the sport’s highest levels, while thousands of gifted athletes in mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods get left behind. He worries about this inequity. Soccer is the world’s great democratic game, whose best stars have come from the world’s slums, ghettos and favelas. And yet in the US the path to the top is often determined by how many zeroes a parent can write in their checkbook.
Andreassen watches his federation’s national teams play, and wishes they had more diversity. Like many, he can’t ignore the fact that last year’s Women’s World Cup winners were almost all white, or that several of the non-white players on the US Copa America roster grew up overseas. The talents of some of America’s best young players are being suffocated by a process that never lets them be seen. He sighs.
“People don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
Andreassen used to dance gingerly around the topic, using the same careful code words as the other coaches and heads of leagues, trying not to push or offend only to find that little changed. He has stopped being political. He is frustrated. He is passionate. He is blunt.
“The system is not working for the underserved community,” he says. “It’s working for the white kids.”
But why? How come soccer can’t be more like basketball in America? How come athletes from the country’s huge urban areas aren’t embracing a sport that requires nothing but a ball to play? How have our national soccer teams not found a way to exploit what should be a huge pool of talent?
“We used to say to ourselves: ‘How good would we be if we could just get the kids in the cities,’” one former US official says.
And yet a quarter of a century into soccer’s American boom, that hasn’t happened. Coaches, organizers and advocates say interest is there, especially among immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, where devotion to soccer runs generations in families. But finding those kids is hard. Money has only hardened the divide between rich and poor, leaving the game to thrive in wealthy communities, where the cost of organized soccer has become outrageous, pricing out those in lower income neighborhoods.
“I don’t think it’s systematic racism,” says Nick Lusson, the director of NorCal Premier Soccer Foundation an organization to grow soccer in California’s underserved communities. “It’s just a system that has been built with blinders to equality.”
Three years ago, Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers and Greg Kaplan, a University of Chicago economics professor, set out to study the effects of the pay-to-play system on American soccer. They compared the background of each US men’s national team member from 1993 to 2013 to that of every NBA all star and NFL pro bowler over the same period, using socio-economic data from their hometown zip codes. They found the soccer players came from communities that had higher incomes, education and employment rankings, and were whiter than the US average, while the basketball and football players came from places that ranked lower than average on those same indicators.
Those numbers have tightened since 2008, reflecting more recent diversity in soccer, but the gap remains.
“I’m – to be honest – surprised that the data is so striking,” Kaplan says.
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Briana Scurry (back row, far right) is among a small number of non-white players who have made their name for the US women’s national team. Photograph: David Madison/Getty Images
There are a lot of reasons for this disparity, but mostly everything comes down to perception and economics. “It continues to be seen as a white, suburban sport” says Briana Scurry, who won the Women’s World Cup in 1999 with the US, and was arguably the country’s most prominent black female player.
As a child growing up in Minneapolis, Scurry loved basketball. She assumes it would have been the game she chose to play in college. That changed when her family moved to the suburbs when she was in grade school, and a teacher handed out flyers for a local soccer league. There had been no such activities in her former home. The idea city kids would play suburban soccer was too ludicrous to consider.
People do want to change the pay-to-play system. US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati says he believes the organization “has made a lot of strides” before adding: “We have a long ways to go.” Andreassen believes Gulati is committed to the issue, as are a handful of others. But in a world where soccer coaches in wealthy communities can earn decent livings, there are few, like Lusson, who gave up what he calls a “cushy job” running a league in the pricey East Bay suburbs of San Francisco to direct a program in the underserved community of Hayward.
“You are buying skill,” Scurry says of those parents who can spend on their children’s soccer. “But there are some pieces of the game that just can’t be bought.”
Sometimes on weekends Julio Borge, who is director of coaching at the mostly Latino Heritage Soccer Club in Pleasant Hill, California, will spend the day watching games in the ligas Latinas around San Francisco’s East Bay. Most of the area’s English-speaking population knows nothing about these games that are played at local parks in neighborhoods filled with immigrants from Central and South America. But to the families who gather on the fields to barbecue, listen to music and watch soccer, they are the highlight of the week.
“The soccer is amazing quality,” says Borge, who will sometimes try to recruit players from the ligas Latinas for his teams. But with a cost of $1,395 a year, which he uses to cover coaches, fields, insurance and officials, he knows most won’t afford to play on his team. He can occasionally offer a scholarship to a player if someone donates the money to do so, but there is never enough for the children whose families hover above the poverty level.
“In my area, we are missing a ton of these kids,” he says. “A lot of coaches don’t have time to see everybody. It’s expensive to try out for the big programs, so many don’t even go after the opportunity.”
The cost of youth soccer these days is outrageous. Borge’s $1,395 team is a bargain compared to many travel programs where the base fee is $3,000 a year. “How can you charge that for just a year?” Scurry asks. “That’s ridiculous.” And yet two of her friends are paying more than that for their kids in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Across the Potomac River, in Maryland, parents can pay up to $12,000 a year on soccer after adding the cost of travel to out-of-state tournaments.
Most of these teams offer scholarships to kids with financial needs. The gift is kind and usually well-meaning, but they come with their own problems. Usually they go to the very best players in the poor neighborhoods, and they come with the implication that the scholarship kid is expected to help their new team win. They also displace children in the lineup whose parents are paying full price, and wonder why they are spending thousands a year to have their child sit on the bench.
Scholarships often cover the cost of the league but little else. They don’t provide transportation for the player whose parents might work during practice, or don’t have enough money for gas to drive to games. Some families don’t have email and can’t get the club announcements. Resentment builds.
“The parents will say to scholarship kids – and I have seen this countless times – ‘Why did you miss the game on Saturday? We are paying for you to be here,’” Lusson says. “What does a kid say to that? Or what happens if they are late to practice? Or who is going to pay for them to travel to that tournament in San Diego? That’s like the moon to some of these kids. We have kids here in the East Bay who have never seen the beach.
“They drop out of the program and then what happens?” he continues. “They have burned the bridge back to their old club by leaving, and aren’t welcome back. They drop out and drift away and we lose them and that’s terrible because they were really, really talented.”
Economics work against the poor kids in American soccer. Lusson sees this every week as he moves between the teenage girls team he coaches in the wealthy San Francisco enclave of Pacific Heights, and the teams he manages in lower-income Hayward. One night, a few weeks ago, he listened as girls on the Pacific Heights team talked excitedly about applications to elite east coast colleges. The next day, in Hayward, nobody talked about college.
And yet he is amazed by the skill of his Hayward players, who he says would crush the Pacific Heights team in a match. These are the players who could be the future of American soccer, perhaps even rising as high as a national team. But he also knows that the Pacific Heights players will be the ones to play on their college teams and will be identified by US Soccer. They are the ones who will get a chance that the Hayward kids won’t. And this strikes Lusson as very wrong.
The other day, he went to watch a match between a team made up of mostly upper-income San Francisco-area college players against a group of players from poorer neighborhoods in the East Bay and Fresno three hours away. For a few minutes, the college players controlled the game until their untrained opponents deciphered their system, and then ripped it apart by half-time. In the second half, the East Bay-Fresno team trampled the San Francisco team.
“I’ve been seeing that game my whole playing career,” Lusson says. For a time, just out of college, he played professionally in Brazil. It feels rigid in the organized levels here, drained of any life. The difference is as simple as Brazilian children dribbling balls on the streets as they walk to school while American kids lug balls in bags, only pulling them out once they reach the field for a practice or game.
“We are delivering a lot of people who do soccer but not play soccer,” he continues. “I think sometimes we have to be courageous with ourselves and admit when we have a problem.”
One of the biggest complaints about the pay-to-play system is that the over-coaching in suburban programs strips kids of the creativity that comes from playing on the streets. Borge loves his recruiting trips to the underground leagues where kids are free from restrictions. Too often, when a skilled and imaginative player leaves their neighborhood team to join a bigger team in a wealthier community, their gifts are considered a hindrance. The clever dancing with the ball that makes them unique earns them the label of not being a team player. A message is delivered: conform or leave.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Soccer is an inner city sport in most of the world but seen as a suburban preserve in the US. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Those who deal in diversity in American soccer know this is a problem. They talk about it all the time. “We are making these little robots,” Lusson says. No one seems sure what to do. How do you tell players to be imaginative while at the same time fitting into the more rigid needs laid out by American coaches? No one knows.
He sees well-to-do families spending thousands of dollars a year on soccer clubs that propel their children to the sport’s highest levels, while thousands of gifted athletes in mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods get left behind. He worries about this inequity. Soccer is the world’s great democratic game, whose best stars have come from the world’s slums, ghettos and favelas. And yet in the US the path to the top is often determined by how many zeroes a parent can write in their checkbook.
Andreassen watches his federation’s national teams play, and wishes they had more diversity. Like many, he can’t ignore the fact that last year’s Women’s World Cup winners were almost all white, or that several of the non-white players on the US Copa America roster grew up overseas. The talents of some of America’s best young players are being suffocated by a process that never lets them be seen. He sighs.
“People don’t want to talk about it,” he says.
Andreassen used to dance gingerly around the topic, using the same careful code words as the other coaches and heads of leagues, trying not to push or offend only to find that little changed. He has stopped being political. He is frustrated. He is passionate. He is blunt.
“The system is not working for the underserved community,” he says. “It’s working for the white kids.”
But why? How come soccer can’t be more like basketball in America? How come athletes from the country’s huge urban areas aren’t embracing a sport that requires nothing but a ball to play? How have our national soccer teams not found a way to exploit what should be a huge pool of talent?
“We used to say to ourselves: ‘How good would we be if we could just get the kids in the cities,’” one former US official says.
And yet a quarter of a century into soccer’s American boom, that hasn’t happened. Coaches, organizers and advocates say interest is there, especially among immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, where devotion to soccer runs generations in families. But finding those kids is hard. Money has only hardened the divide between rich and poor, leaving the game to thrive in wealthy communities, where the cost of organized soccer has become outrageous, pricing out those in lower income neighborhoods.
“I don’t think it’s systematic racism,” says Nick Lusson, the director of NorCal Premier Soccer Foundation an organization to grow soccer in California’s underserved communities. “It’s just a system that has been built with blinders to equality.”
Three years ago, Roger Bennett of Men in Blazers and Greg Kaplan, a University of Chicago economics professor, set out to study the effects of the pay-to-play system on American soccer. They compared the background of each US men’s national team member from 1993 to 2013 to that of every NBA all star and NFL pro bowler over the same period, using socio-economic data from their hometown zip codes. They found the soccer players came from communities that had higher incomes, education and employment rankings, and were whiter than the US average, while the basketball and football players came from places that ranked lower than average on those same indicators.
Those numbers have tightened since 2008, reflecting more recent diversity in soccer, but the gap remains.
“I’m – to be honest – surprised that the data is so striking,” Kaplan says.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Briana Scurry (back row, far right) is among a small number of non-white players who have made their name for the US women’s national team. Photograph: David Madison/Getty Images
There are a lot of reasons for this disparity, but mostly everything comes down to perception and economics. “It continues to be seen as a white, suburban sport” says Briana Scurry, who won the Women’s World Cup in 1999 with the US, and was arguably the country’s most prominent black female player.
As a child growing up in Minneapolis, Scurry loved basketball. She assumes it would have been the game she chose to play in college. That changed when her family moved to the suburbs when she was in grade school, and a teacher handed out flyers for a local soccer league. There had been no such activities in her former home. The idea city kids would play suburban soccer was too ludicrous to consider.
People do want to change the pay-to-play system. US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati says he believes the organization “has made a lot of strides” before adding: “We have a long ways to go.” Andreassen believes Gulati is committed to the issue, as are a handful of others. But in a world where soccer coaches in wealthy communities can earn decent livings, there are few, like Lusson, who gave up what he calls a “cushy job” running a league in the pricey East Bay suburbs of San Francisco to direct a program in the underserved community of Hayward.
“You are buying skill,” Scurry says of those parents who can spend on their children’s soccer. “But there are some pieces of the game that just can’t be bought.”
Sometimes on weekends Julio Borge, who is director of coaching at the mostly Latino Heritage Soccer Club in Pleasant Hill, California, will spend the day watching games in the ligas Latinas around San Francisco’s East Bay. Most of the area’s English-speaking population knows nothing about these games that are played at local parks in neighborhoods filled with immigrants from Central and South America. But to the families who gather on the fields to barbecue, listen to music and watch soccer, they are the highlight of the week.
“The soccer is amazing quality,” says Borge, who will sometimes try to recruit players from the ligas Latinas for his teams. But with a cost of $1,395 a year, which he uses to cover coaches, fields, insurance and officials, he knows most won’t afford to play on his team. He can occasionally offer a scholarship to a player if someone donates the money to do so, but there is never enough for the children whose families hover above the poverty level.
“In my area, we are missing a ton of these kids,” he says. “A lot of coaches don’t have time to see everybody. It’s expensive to try out for the big programs, so many don’t even go after the opportunity.”
The cost of youth soccer these days is outrageous. Borge’s $1,395 team is a bargain compared to many travel programs where the base fee is $3,000 a year. “How can you charge that for just a year?” Scurry asks. “That’s ridiculous.” And yet two of her friends are paying more than that for their kids in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Across the Potomac River, in Maryland, parents can pay up to $12,000 a year on soccer after adding the cost of travel to out-of-state tournaments.
Most of these teams offer scholarships to kids with financial needs. The gift is kind and usually well-meaning, but they come with their own problems. Usually they go to the very best players in the poor neighborhoods, and they come with the implication that the scholarship kid is expected to help their new team win. They also displace children in the lineup whose parents are paying full price, and wonder why they are spending thousands a year to have their child sit on the bench.
Scholarships often cover the cost of the league but little else. They don’t provide transportation for the player whose parents might work during practice, or don’t have enough money for gas to drive to games. Some families don’t have email and can’t get the club announcements. Resentment builds.
“The parents will say to scholarship kids – and I have seen this countless times – ‘Why did you miss the game on Saturday? We are paying for you to be here,’” Lusson says. “What does a kid say to that? Or what happens if they are late to practice? Or who is going to pay for them to travel to that tournament in San Diego? That’s like the moon to some of these kids. We have kids here in the East Bay who have never seen the beach.
“They drop out of the program and then what happens?” he continues. “They have burned the bridge back to their old club by leaving, and aren’t welcome back. They drop out and drift away and we lose them and that’s terrible because they were really, really talented.”
Economics work against the poor kids in American soccer. Lusson sees this every week as he moves between the teenage girls team he coaches in the wealthy San Francisco enclave of Pacific Heights, and the teams he manages in lower-income Hayward. One night, a few weeks ago, he listened as girls on the Pacific Heights team talked excitedly about applications to elite east coast colleges. The next day, in Hayward, nobody talked about college.
And yet he is amazed by the skill of his Hayward players, who he says would crush the Pacific Heights team in a match. These are the players who could be the future of American soccer, perhaps even rising as high as a national team. But he also knows that the Pacific Heights players will be the ones to play on their college teams and will be identified by US Soccer. They are the ones who will get a chance that the Hayward kids won’t. And this strikes Lusson as very wrong.
The other day, he went to watch a match between a team made up of mostly upper-income San Francisco-area college players against a group of players from poorer neighborhoods in the East Bay and Fresno three hours away. For a few minutes, the college players controlled the game until their untrained opponents deciphered their system, and then ripped it apart by half-time. In the second half, the East Bay-Fresno team trampled the San Francisco team.
“I’ve been seeing that game my whole playing career,” Lusson says. For a time, just out of college, he played professionally in Brazil. It feels rigid in the organized levels here, drained of any life. The difference is as simple as Brazilian children dribbling balls on the streets as they walk to school while American kids lug balls in bags, only pulling them out once they reach the field for a practice or game.
“We are delivering a lot of people who do soccer but not play soccer,” he continues. “I think sometimes we have to be courageous with ourselves and admit when we have a problem.”
One of the biggest complaints about the pay-to-play system is that the over-coaching in suburban programs strips kids of the creativity that comes from playing on the streets. Borge loves his recruiting trips to the underground leagues where kids are free from restrictions. Too often, when a skilled and imaginative player leaves their neighborhood team to join a bigger team in a wealthier community, their gifts are considered a hindrance. The clever dancing with the ball that makes them unique earns them the label of not being a team player. A message is delivered: conform or leave.
FacebookTwitterPinterest
Soccer is an inner city sport in most of the world but seen as a suburban preserve in the US. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Those who deal in diversity in American soccer know this is a problem. They talk about it all the time. “We are making these little robots,” Lusson says. No one seems sure what to do. How do you tell players to be imaginative while at the same time fitting into the more rigid needs laid out by American coaches? No one knows.
