The USMNT is as good as parents can afford

I don't know anything about any of this. But USMNT made me think of TMNT and I started singing 🎶US Mutant Ninja Turtles🎶 in my head

Preach it, sister

The World Cup is next year and the United States will again be contending to be the best soccer team in the world. Again. The US Women have won the tournament an astounding four times since 1991. On average, that’s a World Cup win every other World Cup. Add to it five gold medals and it’s clear that the USWNT has found something that the rest of the world has been trying to capture to varying degrees of success – and a lot of success in Spain’s case.

The reason for the team’s dominant success goes back to getting a jump on the rest of the world when it came to soccer. That jump came from a massive push from the Federal Government of the United States of America when Title IX was created and women’s college sports was given the financial resources to create a competitive environment that the rest of the world lacked. In short, funding sports at the amateur level gave more players more opportunities to play at a high level and it has paid dividends in terms of World Cup trophies, victory parades, and Olympic medals.

American male soccer players have not had this level of intervention from the state and struggles to win soccer games. Instead youth soccer players who drop college tuition amounts of money to pay for a sport that the best players in the world learned in alleyways using a bag of rags for a ball. Meanwhile, sports like basketball have a clear and affordable pathway from playground to being noticed by scouts in middle and high school to college to professional levels. This allows a deeper talent pool and doesn’t exclude players whose families can’t afford to send their kids to play for expensive youth clubs. In short, the USMNT is held back by a system that prices many players out of the sport and changing it is extremely difficult. To be clear, this is an emerging issue for the USWNT, but getting a head start from Title IX means the women’s program is leading the world and not playing catchup.

Interesting analysis. It sounds like they need to find a way to make school soccer teams more competitive so that kids can learn the game well there instead of having to play in expensive private leagues. Title IX didn’t just benefit collegiate sports but middle and high schools. With their limited budgets, though, the schools are prioritizing the most popular boys’ sports: football and basketball, and in guessing baseball comes in ahead. In the girls’ side the most popular sports are basketball, soccer, and probably softball. So really, this becomes a chicken-and-egg popularity problem: men’s soccer isn’t very popular so it doesn’t get much funding, which means the men don’t end up being very good and people aren’t going to be very interested in watching bad soccer so men’s soccer isn’t very popular in the US.

I wonder if a similar factor contributed to the decline of American tennis. We have plenty of free tennis courts around the country, but if you want a good coach you’re largely going to have to pay. Tennis should attract the best women athletes because tennis players are the highest-paid women athletes, and I’m not sure any other sport even comes close to what’s possible in tennis. But how many kids are getting good coaches to develop their game when they’re young?