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 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 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 solutions. 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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