Boys play soccer as they wear Messi shirts outside the Red Bull arena ahead of the Major League Soccer 2023 match between Inter Miami and New York Red Bulls in Harrison, New Jersey, August 26, 2023. (Photo by KENA BETANCUR / AFP) (Photo by KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
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When the United States held the World Cup in 1994, the mission was clear: Use the tournament to expose the public to the sport, and begin building momentum for the redevelopment of the men’s professional game, including the launch of Major League Soccer in 1996.
The guiding purpose of the 2026 World Cup, jointly held by the United States, Canada and Mexico, may have been considerably less clear at the start. But for those who have labored at growing the game in the decades since 1994, it served as undeniable proof of concept that the appetite for soccer as a mainstream sport exists in the country.
For the U.S. Soccer Federation and its leadership, it is also a call to action to keep the foot on the gas.
“Priority 1 is: Take advantage of the interest, momentum, and belief that came out of the World Cup and translate it into sustained energy to improve the sport in the country,” said U.S. Soccer Chief Operating Officer Dan Helfrich. “And so that means things around re-architecting the youth system. It means finding ways to connect with the fans of the sport that we know more about now than we did in May, and (creating) ways for them to connect with the sport broadly.”
Possible vs. Knowable
Helfrich has only been at U.S. Soccer for a year, after a 27-year career at Deloitte Consulting, where he most recently served as chair and CEO. But after playing collegiate soccer at Georgetown, he has remained involved in the collegiate game throughout his adult life as a broadcaster and, more recently, as the chair of U.S. Soccer’s Next Gen College Soccer Committee.
In other words, he’s been around the game long enough to know just how exceptional the World Cup data is.
By any measure, World Cup TV viewership shattered expectations. The audience of more than 60 million for the final between Spain and Argentina was the largest non-NFL sporting event since the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan-Tanya Harding Olympic figure skating saga. The average English-language audience of 7.7 million per World Cup match was roughly a third larger than the same figure for this year’s NBA Playoffs — which themselves were the most-watched in a generation.
Even accounting for the heightened focus on the tournament from being a co-host, and for the quadrennial nature of the world’s biggest sporting event, it’s impossible to look at those numbers if you are selling soccer in this country and settle for niche sport status when it’s clear the number of American fans is so big.
“I think the first thing is that there are a lot more of them with passion for the sport than was documented as known before the World Cup,” Helfrich said. “Now, many of us had the belief that things like (the TV audience data) was possible. But now that is knowable. And there’s a big difference between possible and knowable, and then having the confidence to create plans, again, with potential commercial partners and others to invest more in the sport.”
Start At The Beginning
Where does the investment start? In the aftermath of the United States’ disappointing 4-1 loss to Belgium in the round of 16, the consensus is U.S. youth player development needs considerable improvement.
Perhaps some of that outcry is overstated. The USMNT lost to Belgium because they played terribly, not because they were demonstrably less talented.
Major League Soccer has covered enormous ground in player development since introducing the Homegrown Player pathway in 2008. On the women’s side, the U.S. remains arguably the game’s dominant force.
But Helfrich says it would be an error to waste energy quibbling over those details, when the bigger picture is that there is unprecedented momentum and agreement over the importance of reshaping the youth development pathway.
“We welcome that attention because it’s the right attention, because ultimately, I assure you that if the overall readiness level and quality level of the players that step into these international tournaments goes up, then our on-the-field performance will go up as well,” Helfrich said.
While there is no clear solution to all of the pay-to-play barriers that limit participation in the U.S., Helfrich identifies a couple of obvious areas for incremental reforms.
Keep Soccer Local
In terms of exposing children to the game, some of the key work is as simple — if repetitive and time-consuming — as working with local recreation departments across the nation to place a higher priority on soccer in their overall programming.
In terms of retaining competitive youth players, Helfrich says there are numerous opportunities to consolidate competitive structures so that less travel and time is required to encounter rigorous competition.
“We are working right now on ways to eliminate or at least reduce that fragmentation to keep competition occurring, including the early stages of elite talent identification happening, rooted in local markets and communities,” Helfrich said. “And if that happens, then our view is the funnel of player development and talent identification starts wider and stays open for longer.
“In adolescence, it’s really important that we keep people in the game and we keep them growing and developing because there are myriad examples of players at 10 or 11 or 12 that don’t jump off a field at the average evaluator who, at age 15 or 16, is a classic example of a late developer that has a chance of emerging as a high talent.
“We have to create the conditions where that occurs more often. Put it all that together, the cost of a good game, if you have that as a metric, what’s the cost of a good competitive game? It has to come way down in our country.”
U.S. Soccer can’t execute these changes in a vacuum, of course. And the federation has faced criticism in the past for lacking strong enough leadership to keep the various wings of the nation’s soccer landscape on the same page.
What makes Helfrich hopeful is a sense that those various wings may have arrived at the same conclusions on their own.
“I can tell you, having had lots of those conversations with all those stakeholders, the alignment on the need to do that is very high,” he said. “And the World Cup has helped that alignment come into focus. And so our job now is how do you take alignment, and turn it into a series of whatever, you can call them interventions, you can call them a series of redesigns, you can call them a series of things, but to actually build a new system, and that’s the work we’re doing right now.”