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HOW THE WORKING-CLASS MAN’S GAME BECAME AN ELITE SPORT IN THE U.S.
 
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Sean Jacobs
June 30, 2026
Hammer & Hope
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_ The path to the World Cup is accessible to only a narrow slice of
American soccer players. _

, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi for Hammer & Hope

 

On the surface, the U.S. men’s national team playing the World Cup
this summer looks like many other teams playing what has long been a
working-class sport popular with Black and brown players: 13 of the 26
players are Black, and another four have Latin American ancestry. But
a closer look complicates that picture. Very few of those players came
through U.S. soccer’s traditional development pipeline or
recreational soccer. Many either were born or grew up in Europe or
moved there at an early age. Several come from professional sports
families, with relatives who played in the NFL; one player’s father
won the Ballon d’Or, the highest individual honor in men’s soccer
globally.

In other words, the numbers alone do not account for class. Nor do
they suggest that the exclusive, suburban, middle-class infrastructure
of U.S. soccer has fundamentally changed. The system remains largely
intact — it just happens to include more Black players within it.

Elite soccer has locked the working class out of pathways to the top
of the U.S. pyramid. The exorbitant cost of club fees, travel, and
tournaments, paired with a lack of financial aid or scholarships for
college-level athletes, has limited access to the sport. It wasn’t
always so, however, and there are ways to course-correct.

 

Much of the journalism and analysis trying to understand what is wrong
with elite U.S. soccer blames “pay to play.” In the predominant
system in U.S. youth soccer, families are required to pay high fees
— often between $1,500 and $7,000 per season for children as young
as 7 — for club registration, coaching, and league enrollment. On
top of that come the additional costs of uniforms and the travel
(usually borne by families) required to attend tournaments, which are
often hundreds of miles away. Some clubs claim to offer scholarships,
but any visitor to a field where elite clubs — usually organized
through MLS Next, Major League Soccer’s official youth league, or
the Elite Club National League (ECNL) — are playing will immediately
notice the lack of diversity among players, coaches, and the broader
talent pool.

MLS Next is a curious beast. Created as an elite development pathway
modeled loosely on academy systems at professional clubs abroad,
especially in Europe’s top leagues, it has expanded beyond Major
League Soccer clubs to become another lucrative revenue stream in many
markets.

The tournament circuit funnels families into designated hotels and
sprawling exurban field complexes, generating revenue for organizers
while concentrating players already inside the pay-to-play system for
easier recruitment. College coaches heavily prioritize finding players
at top MLS Next and ECNL showcases because it is cheaper and easier
than scouting unaffiliated leagues across the U.S. (Compounding this
exclusion is the growing interest in youth sports from venture capital
and private equity firms, which increasingly see profits to be made
from the system, particularly through facilities, coaching, and data
management opportunities.)

The result is that working-class players are far less likely to be
seen or evaluated. The journalist Isma’il Kushkush reported in The
Nation
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that recruiters often overlook unaffiliated leagues with strong Black
and Latino talent in favor of ECNL and MLS Next academies serving
wealthier players, who are disproportionately white. The
identification (ID) camps for teens that many colleges with soccer
programs host, ostensibly to allow coaches to discover players, also
charge fees, reproducing many of the same racial and class
disparities. The advertising for ID camps is often misleading,
creating the impression that attendance provides a meaningful pathway
to recruitment, when in practice they function largely as a
fund-raising mechanism for schools and programs.

A related factor is that the vast majority of Black and brown
working-class kids attend schools with severely underfunded athletic
programs, although soccer is mostly played outside schools. In fact,
many MLS Next teams discourage boys from playing for school teams,
even warning some that doing so could jeopardize their progress in the
academy or violate club participation rules.

It also matters who runs soccer in the U.S. if it matters that Black
and brown kids are properly identified, evaluated, and developed for
elite teams — and if it matters that all levels of soccer reflect
the rich diversity of the sport. In 2020, the Fare Network, a group
that works to combat discrimination in soccer, commissioned the U.S.
academics Brenda Elsey and Jermaine Scott to examine barriers to
diversity in the sport’s leadership structures. Elsey, a professor
of history at Hofstra University, writes about the politics and
history of soccer in Latin America; Scott, an assistant professor who
teaches African American and sports history at Florida Atlantic
University, researches Black soccer in the U.S. They found that people
of color also remain markedly underrepresented at the executive level:
“There are two Black Head Coaches and one Black General Manager, but
it is rare to find any significant Black presence beyond assistant
coach level.” It is still unusual to see a Black MLS head coach or a
front-office official of color, let alone a general manager. Their
report estimated that fewer than 10 percent of senior positions
across the MLS, the National Women’s Soccer League, and U.S. Soccer,
the organization that governs the amateur game in the United States,
were held by Black and Latino leaders. They made several
recommendations, including recognizing minority participants in soccer
leagues as central to U.S. soccer’s future, implementing antiracist
diversity and inclusion policies, adopting a soccer version of the
NFL’s Rooney Rule 2.0 to ensure minority candidates are interviewed
for jobs, and valuing the performance and cultural benefits of
coaching diversity. While MLS actually did update its diversity hiring
policy in 2021 to require that minority candidates be among the
finalists for front-office and coaching jobs, that was eliminated in
November 2025. Black players, former and current, publicly expressed
their disappointment. As far as I could verify, currently there is
only one Black head coach in MLS, Robin Fraser at Toronto FC.

The Fare report described the informal barriers that limit Black and
Latino coaches’ access to top-level positions in the men’s game,
particularly network-based exclusion and other personal gatekeeping
practices. Although the report did not address it directly, similar
dynamics were also evident at the highest levels of the U.S. men’s
national team until recently. Often covered like a soap opera because
of the lurid details — family involvement in coaching decisions and
the incestuous relationships
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between team management and certain players and their families —
these episodes are more than sensational distractions. Examined more
closely, they reveal the extent to which the upper tiers of U.S.
soccer have functioned as a closed shop.

U.S. Soccer established a Diversity Task Force in 1994, but it became
a real concern only in 2008. Under new leadership in 2013, it put
forward a new proposal to address the issue seriously. By 2015,
however, the effort had fizzled out, and the task force was put on
hiatus. Critics pointed out that the group’s webpage never listed
its members. In 2022, U.S. Soccer announced the creation of a
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging Advisory Council that
included former stars such as Cobi Jones and Abby Wambach, but there
have been few if any announcements about the details of its work.

Six years later, during an interview, I asked Jermaine Scott whether
U.S. Soccer had ever invited him to present his and Elsey’s
findings. He responded with a wry smile — the answer spoke for
itself.

 

As in many former European colonies, soccer was introduced to the
United States by white European settlers in the mid-19th century,
especially in Northeastern and Midwestern industrial cities where it
became popular among college students and some white working-class and
European immigrant communities. Early team names reflected the
industrial base sponsoring the sport: Bethlehem (Pa.) Steel Company,
Indiana Flooring Company, Todd Shipyards in Brooklyn, and J. & P.
Coats FC in Rhode Island, among others. By the 1920s, soccer had
become a mass sport in the United States with the establishment of the
American Soccer League in the Northeast, school leagues in Boston,
national amateur club competitions, and local club leagues in cities
such as Chicago and St. Louis. The country was one of the first
non-European nations to join FIFA.

The interwar leagues included Black players and teams, as well as
players from countries such as Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina.
According to Scott, Black teams — including the New York City teams
the Western Tigers, the Maroon Soccer Club, and the Falcon Athletic
Club of Harlem — competed successfully well into the late 1940s.
Soccer also attracted large crowds during this period, at times
drawing nearly 40,000 spectators — not far from the 60,000 attending
baseball games at Yankee Stadium.

Immigration from Central and South America from the mid-20th century
on further deepened soccer’s working-class character in the United
States. The sport became embedded in public parks, neighborhood clubs,
and Sunday leagues across American cities, where immigrant and
working-class communities sustained and expanded the game outside
elite institutions.

Ownership at the top levels resembled that of other American sports,
with many early soccer clubs owned by baseball executives and local
elites. Yet elite ownership did not fully define the game’s social
character. The sport’s players, supporters, and neighborhood
institutions remained overwhelmingly working-class, rooted in
industrial communities, immigrant enclaves, and urban ethnic networks.

Two overlapping developments began to change the game in the 1960s.
According to Scott, as football, basketball, and parts of baseball
opened up and Black athletes and other minorities began to excel —
and in some cases dominate — at the school, college, and
professional levels, many white suburban families began turning toward
soccer. Some went further. When the American Youth Soccer Organization
formed in 1964, it banned all “foreign-sounding” team names and
permitted only English to be spoken at its games. This shift also
reflected a growing perception that soccer was safer than football,
said Martha Saavedra, a retired academic and former youth coach who
has researched women’s soccer. Her father, Fred, helped found a coed
recreational center where they started a girls’ soccer team in the
suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s. She told me, “Our
club, our parents, eschewed American football, the staple fall sport
of many boys’ clubs at the time — too expensive, too dangerous,
and not friendly to girls. Instead they embraced the ‘new’ sports
of soccer.”

At the same time, commercial interest in soccer increased
dramatically. Investors and businessmen began jostling for control of
the sport, and two professional leagues merged in 1968 to form the
North American Soccer League.

But the NASL was built on unstable foundations. At times, it resembled
more of an exhibition sport than a sustainable competitive league,
with clubs relying heavily on celebrity spectacle and aging football
stars imported from Europe and South America to entice crowds to the
stadiums and viewers to TV broadcasts. Some teams bucked the trend,
recruiting players from Africa and Latin America and foregrounding
them in their marketing. The Atlanta Chiefs and Washington Darts
explicitly marketed themselves to Black communities; for years, the
most visible star of the Minnesota Kicks, in a very white state, was
the Black South African midfielder Patrick “Ace” Ntsoelengoe.
Decades later, the writer and editor Matt Weiland, who grew up in
Minneapolis and supported the Kicks, remembered Ntsoelengoe — who
helped the team win four division titles between 1976 and 1981 — as
“the Magic Johnson of the NASL.” Yet the league at large oriented
itself toward white suburban audiences rather than the working-class
urban communities that had historically sustained the sport. By 1984,
plagued by dwindling crowds, limited television coverage, and poor
management, the NASL had shut down.

One of the conditions attached to the United States hosting the 1994
FIFA World Cup was the establishment of a new top-flight professional
league. As a result, MLS was founded in 1993, launching its inaugural
season in 1996. The arrival of MLS coincided with the reorganization
of the United States Soccer Federation, which became the governing
body for amateur football in the country, investing resources into the
game. Now known as U.S. Soccer, the federation established an Olympic
development and academy program. Eventually, that program was largely
displaced as a feeder system by MLS Next and ECNL.

In the United States, sports is often organized less as a public good
than as a consumer product to be marketed and sold. Rather than
something communities collectively build, it gradually became
something families purchase access to — an ethos U.S. Soccer
embodies. U.S. Soccer effectively fast-tracked pay-for-play. MLS,
despite its earlier commitment to develop and showcase local talent,
continues to fall back on quick
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solutions
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It is telling that the league’s most globally visible team today
centers on aging superstar Lionel Messi and a supporting cast of
former teammates and rivals from his years in La Liga.

Calls for reforming U.S. soccer are often framed by comparisons to
other sports or to the women’s game. Yet the Fare Network’s
researchers found the same shortcomings among the women. While writing
and researching this article, I asked random fans what U.S. soccer
needed to achieve “Dream Team”–level global dominance. I was
repeatedly told that soccer needs to be like basketball, based on the
assumption that basketball succeeds because it is rooted in public
schools and municipal infrastructure, requiring only a ball and a
court. But elite basketball shares many structural features with elite
soccer. Top players are funneled into the highly commercialized AAU
system, where access to elite coaching, tournaments, scouting, and
networks often depends on travel costs, fees, and private connections,
much like MLS Next.

 

The English historian Eric Hobsbawm was a Communist until his death in
2012. He also had a lifelong interest in soccer. Born in Egypt in 1917
to a Jewish family, Hobsbawm grew up in Vienna, where football was a
key part of radical working-class culture and politics. The original
name of Rapid Wien, the most successful club in the city, was First
Viennese Workers’ Football Club. Hobsbawm later moved to Berlin and
fled Nazi Germany for London in 1933. Much later, in 1990, writing
about the power of modern sport, Hobsbawm recalled “Red Vienna,”
concluding that “the imagined community of millions seems more real
as a team of eleven named people.” Had Hobsbawm, who spent many
years in New York City as a visiting professor, paid attention to U.S.
men’s soccer, he would have concluded that the sense of collective
identification he witnessed in Europe did exist in some form in
working-class and Black soccer history in the U.S. He might also have
noticed that the myth of American exceptionalism takes on a peculiar
variant when it comes to U.S. soccer: that only in the U.S. is soccer
mostly white, suburban, and middle-class, and working-class Black and
Latino people are barely at its top level.

Scott likes to tell the story of the Falcon Athletic Club in Harlem
(which he has written about) to illustrate how different things could
be when soccer was organized around egalitarian and antiracist
principles. The Falcons, made up largely of players of Caribbean
descent, were the most popular Black team in the city in the interwar
years. Founded in 1928, the club played for more than two decades,
until 1949, but it was in the Metropolitan Workers’ Soccer League,
run under the Communist Party’s Workers’ Soccer Association and
Labor Sports Union, that the team truly flourished. These sports
unions called for a workers’ sports movement opposed to the
capitalist ethos of American sports and encouraged their members to
openly oppose racism and agitate for full employment and for
socialism. The Labor Sports Union also operated leagues in Chicago and
Detroit. The MWSL had at least seven African American teams. According
to Scott, it was here that the Falcons found not only competitive
success but also an environment shaped by ideals of racial equality
and solidarity that stood in sharp contrast to most of the U.S. at the
time. If Black members alleged racism from white members, the MWSL
held them accountable, including expulsion. Some Falcons members also
held leadership positions in the MWSL.

In 1935, the Falcons joined the non-Communist Metropolitan League,
which was largely made up of and led by white European immigrants, and
immediately encountered the discrimination absent from the
Communist-run league. Their membership was “limited to on-field
competition,” said Scott. In one infamous incident, they were
refused admittance to a league party at the Irish-run Innisfail
Ballroom in Manhattan “on the ground of color.” None of the other
clubs in the league defended them. In 1940, the Falcons returned to
the Metropolitan Workers’ Soccer League (now the Manhattan Soccer
League), enjoying even greater success, especially during the
1940–41 season, when they defeated the majority-white teams Brooklyn
Edison and Brooklyn Collegians.

As Scott explained to me, the story of the Falcon Athletic Club shows
how soccer can become a space for thinking more diasporically, where
national identities can be renegotiated. On a team made up of diverse
Caribbean American identities, soccer could elide differences that
often divide the working classes. Long after the Falcons ceased to
exist, another Black team made bigger headlines, Scott reminded me. In
1974, Howard University became the first majority-Black college to win
the NCAA men’s soccer championship. A reporter who interviewed the
players — a mix of Caribbean and West African students — concluded
that by playing together, they had “shed their national cliques”
and developed more collective identities. (The coach was Lincoln
Philips, who became the first and only Black coach in the history of
professional soccer in the U.S. when he led the NASL’s Washington
Darts.)

The second lesson from the Falcons’ story, Scott said, is the
possibility of creating a different kind of league, one not built on
the existing capitalist structure. Alternatives can work.

 

There is an argument that it is not worth expending energy on making
the national team more class-diverse. Scott and Nathan Kalman-Lamb, an
associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick in
Canada and a co-host of the podcast _The End of Sports_ (tagline:
“Your anti-capitalist sports podcast”), separately walked me
through it. The critique goes that efforts to improve elite U.S.
soccer merely end up endorsing an Ugly American project of imperial
dominance, the same project defended by former players Alexi Lalas,
who increasingly mimics Donald Trump in dress, diction, and jingoistic
pronouncements blaming “diversity” for the national team’s
lackluster form, and Landon Donovan, who claims dual nationals (who
happen to be mostly Black) don’t have the same desire to represent
the U.S. men’s national team as players born in the U.S.

Kalman-Lamb said that, beyond not wanting to share a WhatsApp group
with Lalas or Donovan, some on the left also argue that FIFA is
already too deeply captured and that the sport itself has become so
bound up with spectacle and commercialization that it can no longer be
reclaimed. The soaring ticket prices for the 2026 World Cup, which
effectively exclude poor and working-class fans, only reinforce that
point. In this view, American soccer is simply another extension of a
global system built on exclusion, capital, and soft power.

But that conclusion is too easy, perhaps even a cop-out, because it
would mean abandoning soccer to those who want only to exploit or
market the sport for consumption. As Scott told me, if you want that
Black or Spanish-speaking working-class child to succeed, then you
need a new system; otherwise, you are underwriting the existing one
without changing it. The lesson is not to walk away from the game but
to fight for, build, and sustain structures that make different
outcomes possible, he argues. The Falcon Athletic Club understood that
decades ago.

_SEAN JACOBS is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was
previously a professor of international affairs at the New School from
2009 to 2026. He edits the Substack __Eleven Named People_
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