We Are the Only Solution

There’s a lot wrong with American soccer. If you disagree – if you think instead that the US’s very impressive wins in the first 2 games of the 2026 World Cup, the establishment of premier youth leagues like MLS Next and ECNL mean it’s now just a matter of time – then you might object to a lot of what I have to say here. But if you believe as I do that we have a very long way to go then keep on reading. Because just knowing there’s a problem hasn’t fixed the problem. We’ve been diagnosing it for decades. And the fix isn’t easy.

It’s worth pointing out that despite lots of hand-wringing and even more agreement about the various shortcomings in American soccer, there have been very few comprehensive proposals to fix our problem. Nothing like the Japanese one-hundred year plan, or Germany’s masterplan. Our steady rotation of soccer leaders keep producing new training manuals, as if the problem is the drills we’re putting kids through when nothing could be less consequential. But suddenly there is renewed hope.

A New Perspective

I was inspired by a noteworthy voice this week. Our US national team coach, the great Mauricio Pochettino from Argentina had this to say when asked about the American “style of play”:

The culture is playful. They (the players) want to play. We told them, “Guys, playing soccer is one thing, competing is another.” They’re two completely different sports… American sports reward losers! But soccer is different: if you reward those who don’t win…if you don’t have goals, you don’t fight.

Everyone should hit the pause button and pay close attention. Both to what our highly experienced manager is broadly talking about and even more to the fine detail he provides. Professional soccer leagues in the rest of the world demote, or relegate, the losing teams each season to the 2nd division of the professional pyramid. American sports, on the other hand, offer them next season’s top round draft pick. Pochettino is surely referring to this systemic different, but he’s telling us even more; he’s pointing out how this impacts every player’s mentality. Note that he doesn’t refer to player ability or American soccer’s training style at all. It’s something bigger, much bigger; American soccer players – and he’s talking about our top professionals no less – don’t have the fight in them. That’s pretty harsh. He’s belittling our pros as liking to “play” soccer but not to “compete,” and thereby not really playing the beautiful game at all. How can this be true of the mighty U-S-A?

Culture, Not Structure

Appreciating the role of culture versus structure means pulling back, taking a wider, historical view, and eventually, coming to realize how every detail of the current failing system actually makes perfect sense. Our soccer system is doing what it’s built to do, very well. Culture is not a static thing, though. Like a tanker it has a lot of momentum and doesn’t turn quickly even when heading toward an iceberg, but all traditions are in constant flux, and for all its faults, America has proven itself especially adept at change.

Pochettino has offered us an incredible opening. Guys, there may not be any flaws in what we’re doing. No to-be-discovered problem with our system, and therefore no reforms to the existing competitive structure hold any promise. On the contrary, we’re great at what we do – we play soccer.

In terms of sheer numbers, we have more kids playing early youth soccer in this country than any in the world. We welcome everyone to organized play from the very start. We play, we play, we play. We have teams for kids who are still learning to dribble. We have added more play time, more seasons, so much so that now we’re questioning the merits of sport specialization. Is it too little, or too much?! Can anyone stomach another decade of debate about a question that might not even hold the answer? In our soccer culture, we’ve made it very easy to play organized soccer at a very low level, season after season, all the way to the top. It’s high time we started investing our precious time and resources in crafting an American culture of real football.

So going forward, if it isn’t improving the culture of competitiveness in our soccer, let’s just drop it! No more small tweaks to what exists – we need to build something alongside it, on purpose, in service of a culture we don’t have yet.

And this is the heart of it.

The Fight

Youth coaches know the challenge of player drive all too well. We talk a lot about athleticism, technique, tactics. But it’s the fight that actually wins games. Experienced youth coaches would far prefer to have an underdeveloped yet aggressively spirited young player than any technically superior young kid without that drive. And if we’re being honest – and to me this is both the key to the solution and the saddest thing of all – there is more fight in grassroots players, U9 to U13, than in the teenage divisions. (This is likely why so many of us love working with the young ones.) Consider that. American soccer culture is so good at underdeveloping real footballers – the coaches, the leagues, literally, the entire structural enterprise undergirding the sport here – that by the time our kids become early teens we’ve already tamped down the truly competitive spirits of a great many of them.

What we’re producing is not real football. Is it any surprise that this is the very thing our foreign national team coach is critiquing about our pros?

Is the lack of a fighting spirit all that’s wrong with “American soccer”? Absolutely not. And it may be useful to catalogue everything, if for no other reason than to be sure we avoid familiar pitfalls. You don’t have to search far on the internet to find this list. But the project ahead is to design homegrown systems that support our success rather than our comfort.

I conclude with perhaps the most obvious place to start: pickup.

Where to Start: Youth Pickup

It’s become cliché to say American kids need more casual, everyday play. It’s a lot harder to make it happen. But trust me, if you believe nothing else from this essay, there is no real football without pickup. At La Finca, we’ve been experimenting with igniting a pickup culture for about 5 years now. We made the early mistake of thinking we could actually launch the club with pickup, soon to realize we didn’t have the talent pool needed to make it work. A handful of kids standing around a field waiting for someone to organize them, or booting the ball and chasing it isn’t pickup, it’s just an unsupervised practice. It took years of clinics and club training first – structures American families already know and trust – before we had enough players who could actually carry a good game themselves.

Now we do. Pickup games need a critical mass of competent players: kids who don’t need a coach directing their every touch, who know the rules well enough to call their own fouls, who’ll argue about a handball call and then just keep playing because that’s what real football is. We’re not talking about a collection of all-stars. That’s not the point. The point is that once you have enough of them on a field at the same time, the magic happens – the game becomes the teacher. The players start managing the game themselves, picking teams, settling disputes, playing long past the final whistle because nobody told them to stop. That’s the thing we’ve been missing, and it doesn’t show up on a stat sheet or a coaching license.

Building that pool of players is the first step to igniting a pickup culture, and it takes time and resources. We’re happy to share how we did it, the age groups, the numbers, the mistakes. But there is no secret, and there’s no shortcut. The solution is necessarily local. If you also believe in the value of pickup, don’t deviate. Go make it happen. And then share how you did it.

We’ll Build it Together

Whether it’s pickup or another aspect of a real football culture, let’s start a conversation about what you’ve tried. What’s worked? What hasn’t? In these early stages of real football development in America, we coaches and club directors are not competing with one another. We all need to get that out of our systems. We’re building something new, there’s no room for secrecy; a great, foreign coach here for a few years can’t make it happen. It’s going to take all of us.