By Michael Phillips | Riptide | Part 2 of 3
Part one of this column laid out the diagnosis: the USMNT’s Round of 16 exit wasn’t a coaching failure, it was the visible symptom of a development pipeline built to produce college recruits instead of technical players, with a gatekeeping structure that keeps talented, lower-income kids out of the room before anyone sees them play. That diagnosis is no longer controversial — it’s showing up from soccer analytics writers, former players, and mainstream sports commentators alike. What’s missing from the conversation is a real answer to the obvious follow-up: replace it with what?
Follow the Money, Not Just the Talent
The incentive is to develop and sell talent, because that’s how a club without television revenue survives.
Hamza Karoumia framed the choice as one between two entirely different models of the sport. In an open, association-based pyramid — the model most of the world plays under — clubs rise and fall on merit, thousands of clubs are linked in a single connected system, and the incentive is to develop and sell talent, because that’s how a club without television revenue survives. American soccer, by contrast, runs on a closed, franchise model: leagues control access, membership is protected rather than earned, and there is no relegation forcing lower-level clubs to compete on player development. Karoumia’s example is instructive — France, without anything close to Premier League television money, consistently produces some of the most technically gifted players in the world, in large part because its clubs make their money selling talent rather than protecting franchise value.
Leagues control access, membership is protected rather than earned.
The English pyramid makes this concrete in a way American soccer simply has no equivalent for. It isn’t two divisions with a gate between them — it’s nine connected levels, from the Premier League down through National League South and dozens of regional Step 5 and Step 6 leagues, with two-way promotion and relegation running through every single tier. A player, and a club, can theoretically climb the entire structure through performance alone, with no draft, no expansion fee, and no closed membership standing in the way.
James in LNK made the same point about incentives from a different angle, describing travel soccer as a genuinely lucrative business where organizations are too often optimized not around developing the best players, but around filling rosters and generating revenue — keeping the players who can pay, not necessarily the players who can play. That’s the same failure mode as the ODP example from part one, just running at the club level instead of the selection-committee level.
Wrexham is the proof of concept, not a hypothetical. The club spent fifteen years in England’s fifth tier, the National League, before new ownership in 2021 rebuilt it from the bottom up. Three consecutive promotions later, Wrexham sits in the Championship, one tier from the Premier League — a rise built entirely on the pyramid doing what it’s designed to do: reward performance with access to the next level up. Now picture a young player developing inside that club across those same seasons. He isn’t stuck choosing between a college scholarship track and a professional track at eighteen. He’s playing competitive, meaningful, rising-stakes soccer inside one continuous institution, against better opposition every single season, with the club’s own success pulling his development along with it.
A talented American player’s path upward depends far less on his club climbing with him and far more on being seen, at the right showcase, by the right scout, at the right age.
The U.S. has no version of that ladder. There is no path from a USL League Two amateur club to MLS built on-field performance; MLS is a closed, franchise-protected league that admits new members by expansion fee, not promotion. A talented American player’s path upward depends far less on his club climbing with him and far more on being seen, at the right showcase, by the right scout, at the right age — a matter of timing and luck the English pyramid was explicitly built to remove from the equation.
The English pyramid was explicitly built to remove timing and luck from the equation.
Wrong American Sport to Copy
If English promotion and relegation feels too foreign a model to import wholesale — nine tiers, shared governance across leagues that have never had to cooperate, no draft anywhere in the system — soccer doesn’t actually need to look overseas for the blueprint. It needs to look at baseball.
Soccer doesn’t actually need to look overseas for the blueprint. It needs to look at baseball.
American soccer’s current shape resembles hockey more than anything else: a tight, expensive, closed funnel running through a small number of elite rinks, private travel programs, and a major-junior-to-draft pipeline that filters players early and narrowly, mostly along lines of who can pay for ice time and travel. Baseball is the opposite. Minor league affiliates, independent professional leagues, and semi-pro town teams exist in nearly every state, at price points nowhere near what a competitive travel soccer program charges. Players who love the game will show up and play for a few hundred dollars a month, or for nothing at all, purely for the chance to keep playing and be seen. That’s not a fringe pathway in baseball. It’s the sport’s entire base layer, and it’s part of why the country produces baseball talent across every income bracket instead of only the ones who can afford a $3,250 club fee.
A player enters that system and climbs it over years, at whatever pace his development supports.
Soccer could build something closer to that without needing England’s full nine-tier apparatus, and baseball’s actual organizational model — not just its accessibility — is the more useful thing to copy. Every MLB team runs a full affiliate chain underneath it: rookie ball, Single-A, Double-A, Triple-A, each with its own roster, its own coaching staff, and its own facilities, sometimes including a spring-training complex where a player can live and train full-time regardless of whether the minor league season is in session. A player enters that system and climbs it over years, at whatever pace his development supports — exceptional talent can jump straight from rookie ball to the majors, while most players spend seasons working through each level before they’re ready. MLS could run the identical structure: each MLS club fielding a formal chain of affiliate clubs, from a USL Championship-level side down through USL League One and USL League Two, with real development staff and real facilities at every level, not just a loosely connected pathway a player has to be scouted into separately at each stage.
This isn’t actually foreign to soccer, either — it’s closer to what the rest of the world already does than the current U.S. system is. Spanish and German clubs run reserve and B-teams that exist for exactly this purpose: a pipeline a young player rises through inside one organization, coached toward the parent club’s system, rather than bouncing between disconnected programs that don’t share a philosophy or a coaching staff. An MLB-style affiliate ladder, owned and operated by MLS clubs the way Barcelona operates Barça Atlètic or Real Madrid operates Castilla, would give American players the same thing: years of structured development inside one institution, with a real, visible path to the top instead of a single high-stakes cutoff at eighteen.
An MLB-style affiliate ladder… would give American players years of structured development inside one institution, with a real, visible path to the top.
Baseball’s international pipeline points to the piece still missing here: the ability to sign players before they turn eighteen. MLB clubs sign international prospects, mostly out of the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, well before that age, and develop them for years inside academies built for that exact purpose. That’s also standard practice at the clubs the U.S. is trying to catch — European academies sign, house, and develop players from their early teens, which is a meaningful part of why an eighteen-year-old prospect abroad already has years of professional training behind him. U.S. Soccer’s traditional objection to that model has always leaned on protecting amateur status, but that argument has mostly collapsed on its own: high school athletes can now earn NIL money in several states, and college athletes have been able to for years. If a sixteen-year-old can be paid to endorse a sneaker brand, there’s no longer a coherent reason he can’t be paid to train inside an MLS academy.
If a sixteen-year-old can be paid to endorse a sneaker brand, there’s no longer a coherent reason he can’t be paid to train inside an MLS academy.
The other missing piece is who gets paid when that development happens. In Europe, a smaller regional or local club that develops a player through his early years is compensated, directly and substantially, when a bigger club eventually signs him — FIFA’s training compensation and solidarity mechanism formalizes this, requiring a fee to every club that contributed to a young player’s development when he’s later transferred. That’s the financial engine underneath the entire European sell-on model Karoumia pointed to earlier: a regional club with no television revenue can survive, and even thrive, purely by identifying and developing talent it will eventually sell up the chain. The U.S. has never built an equivalent. A local club that spends years developing a player currently gets nothing when he signs with an MLS academy or heads off to a big program — no fee, no compensation, no return on the investment it made in a kid who couldn’t have afforded to develop anywhere else. Build that mechanism into a U.S. affiliate system, and regional and local clubs stop being feeder programs working for free. They become the base of a functioning market, with a direct financial incentive to find and develop the kid nobody else is looking for.
A regional club with no television revenue can survive, and even thrive, purely by identifying and developing talent it will eventually sell up the chain.
Even without England’s full pyramid, a network of low-cost, regional semi-pro and minor clubs — genuinely open to walk-ons and tryouts, the way independent baseball leagues operate below the affiliated system — would do more for accessibility than another expansion-fee MLS franchise ever will. And the draft doesn’t have to be the model at all: clubs could build direct affiliate relationships with colleges and private schools, the way baseball organizations invest in specific academies and college programs, giving players real opportunities to both develop and get an education without funneling every path through a single recruiting-and-showcase industry built around one outcome.
A sell-on model… flips that. It gives clubs and academies a direct financial reason to find the kid who can’t afford travel fees but can actually play, because that kid becomes an asset instead of a cost.
Clay Travis’s proposal from part one fits directly into this framework: academies with contract rights to a portion of a young player’s future earnings, mirroring the sell-on model European clubs already run. It’s not just a cost-relief idea — it’s the incentive fix that makes the rest of this system self-sustaining. Right now, no one profits from developing a talented kid who can’t pay club fees, which is exactly why the ODP gatekeeping from part one persists. A sell-on model, tied to a real affiliate ladder and a training-compensation mechanism, flips that. It gives clubs and academies a direct financial reason to find the kid who can’t afford travel fees but can actually play, because that kid becomes an asset instead of a cost.
The Honest Version
None of this is a call to trash U.S. Soccer as an institution, or to pretend the last cycle produced nothing worth crediting. But a tactically sound team with a hard technical ceiling will keep losing to teams with a higher ceiling, no matter who is coaching it, and no single reform fixes that on its own.
The point isn’t to copy baseball’s org chart exactly, or the English pyramid exactly, or Barcelona’s academy exactly. It’s that the pieces of a real fix already exist. Nobody has assembled them into one system.
The point isn’t to copy baseball’s org chart exactly, or the English pyramid exactly, or Barcelona’s academy exactly. It’s that the pieces of a real fix — an affiliate development ladder, accessible regional entry points, the ability to sign and develop young talent, and a financial mechanism that rewards the clubs who find and build that talent — already exist, individually, in America or in the leagues the U.S. is trying to catch. Nobody has assembled them into one system. Until someone does, the U.S. will keep producing athletic, competitive, well-coached teams that fall short at exactly the moment O’Hanlon’s box score describes: the moment a team needs a player who can simply put his foot on the ball and take over the game.
Until someone does, the U.S. will keep producing athletic, competitive, well-coached teams that fall short at exactly the moment a team needs a player who can simply put his foot on the ball and take over the game.
Sources: Hamza Karoumia (@HamzaKaroumia), X post, July 7, 2026. James in LNK (@huskersjames), X thread, July 7, 2026. Clay Travis (@ClayTravis), X thread, July 8, 2026.
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