There’s no dearth of sports dominance by the US when it comes to the NFL, NBA, and MLB, or even in Olympic sports. However, when it comes to soccer, development is still in the nascent stage. They reached the FIFA World Cup quarterfinals in 2002, and since then, the round of 16 is the farthest they have progressed. As per the former USMNT veteran, Landon Donovan, the answer lies in the US’s faulty youth soccer development system.

“Our college system isn’t competitive enough to feed into professional soccer. So basically, if you’re 16 or 17, you haven’t made it; you’re not on an MLS roster, a first-team roster. You kind of fall into this abyss. But the bigger problem is that our youth soccer in this country is a disaster. And so you have all these youth clubs charge 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,” Professor Anthony Kalamut quoted Donovan on X.

Elite players (especially in the men’s game) increasingly bypass the NCAA for professional club academies and early contracts, as college programs fail to offer the daily, year-round tactical and technical intensity found in Europe and South America. NCAA rules limit coaches to 20 practice hours per week during the season and 8 hours in the offseason. Furthermore, the season is a dense 3-to-4-month sprint, which causes burnout, increases injury risk, and prevents the year-round development seen in global soccer.

According to Donovan, all these are making it difficult to have enough of a talent pool for the USMNT. And then there’s the challenge of exorbitant fees charged by the youth clubs.

The American “pay-to-play” model has turned youth soccer into a multibillion-dollar commercialized business. This system effectively blocks millions of children from participating due to severe financial barriers. Unlike other nations where pro clubs fund grassroots development, U.S. youth sports treat parents as paying customers. According to Donovan, only 2% of the total youth talent taking up soccer as their primary sport are coming from households with earnings of less than $50,000.

Even Donovan himself was a victim of this same system. “So I played in Germany when I was 17. The guy who coached our under-16 team was like 60 years old and had been doing it for 25 years. He wasn’t trying to be the first-team coach. He was one of their best coaches, and they wanted him with the 16-year-olds, not with the pros. They wanted those kids to develop and get better, but we do it the opposite here.”

Donovan may just have revealed why the USMNT struggled to get past the round of 16 challenge against Belgium.