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On October 10, the US men’s national soccer team failed to qualify for the upcoming World Cup. All they needed to play in Russia 2018 was a draw with Trinidad and Tobago; instead, they turned in one of the most listless performances of an already-lackluster qualification campaign. As the whistle blew on a 2-1 defeat, the Americans slumped off a soggy Trinidadian field, having missed the World Cup for the first time since the Reagan administration. There’s lots of blame to go around for last week’s screw-up, and much of it has been directed at US Soccer Federation (USSF) president Sunil Gulati, who was already a controversial figure. On the one hand, he has presided over some of American soccer’s greatest successes, including a 2015 World Cup victory for the US women’s national team, unprecedented growth for Major League Soccer (MLS), and the foundation of the National Women’s Soccer League. Then again, he also issued a firm “no” when the women’s team demanded to be paid as much as their male counterparts. When one of those women took a knee in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick last spring, Gulati’s organization immediately passed a new rule mandating that players “stand respectfully” for the anthem. Finally, there’s the hiring and firing of controversial men’s team manager Jürgen Klinsmann, followed by the choice of the conservative, uninspiring Bruce Arena to lead the ultimately disastrous World Cup qualifying campaign. But looming behind Gulati’s controversies are more systemic issues: the monopolistic structure of US soccer, the disregard for training at the lower levels, and the deeply unequal access to the sport. These issues conspire to create a rot at the heart of US soccer, compounding disparities while driving down performance over time.

Complacent at the Top A national football association (the USSF, in our case) is the supposedly neutral governing body for soccer in a given country. It serves as that country’s representative to FIFA, the International Federation of Football Associations, and organizes domestic competitions. That involves creating a multi-tiered structure, known as a pyramid, that ranks the country’s professional soccer leagues. There’s generally one league in the top tier, similar but less-glamorous leagues in the second and third tiers, and regional leagues in the tiers below that. Teams can move from lower leagues to higher ones or vice-versa based on their performance. The process by which they can move is known as promotion and relegation, or pro/rel, and it’s taken for granted many parts of the world. The team or teams that finish highest in a given league move up to the league above them, switching places with the lowest finishers from the higher league. In short, pro/rel creates a pathway from obscurity all the way to the top, making for some of the greatest stories in all of sports. For example, Leicester City FC’s 2016 English Premier League title, won only two years after the club was promoted from the second division, was celebrated the world over and has been called the unlikeliest championship in sports history. None of that happens in American soccer. MLS has been the dominant force in American soccer ever since its founding. Broadly speaking, it is the only major soccer league in the world that does not promote teams from below and relegate its weakest members. Nowadays, second- and third-tier clubs are gaining popularity in the United States, and have begun calling for pro/rel. Those calls have intensified after the Trinidad and Tobago match, with many pointing to pro/rel as the obvious solution to complacency at the top of the pyramid. The USSF, as soccer’s “neutral” governing body, should be cracking the whip and forcing MLS clubs to accept more competition. Instead, it has stood together with MLS to quash moves towards pro/rel. This crony dynamic between the USSF and MLS isn’t just evident in the pro/rel controversy. It can also be seen in another flashpoint in US soccer: the solidarity fee.

No Solidarity Solidarity fees are a time-honored tradition among soccer federations everywhere else in the world. According to FIFA rules, if a player transfers to another team during their contract, 5 percent of the transfer fee is distributed to the clubs involved in the player’s training and education over the years. It is a lucrative method for supporting youth clubs and incentivizing quality training at the lower levels. And the United States is the only place where it doesn’t exist. One of the players at the center of the solidarity fee controversy is DeAndre Yedlin. After making waves with the Seattle Sounders, Yedlin moved up, signing with Tottenham Hotspur of England’s Premier League, which forked over £2.3 million for the acquisition. In accordance with FIFA rules, and evidently unfamiliar with the American concept of a “student-athlete,” Tottenham contacted the University of Akron, where Yedlin played in college, to give them a cut of the transfer fee. This sparked a battle in US soccer. Major League Soccer intended to keep all the money and block solidarity fees for good. But Crossfire Premier, the club where Yedlin actually trained as a youth, saw Tottenham’s mistake as a chance to get a cut of the transfer, to which they felt entitled. Had he been from any other FIFA-member country, roughly $185,000 of his price tag would have been distributed to Crossfire and the other clubs where the young Yedlin developed. In 2014, Crossfire Premier joined with two other clubs in a class-action suit for the right to collect solidarity fees. The suit captured the attention of the American soccer media, but it was dismissed on the grounds that US courts don’t exist to enforce FIFA rules. That’s a shame, because without solidarity fees, youth clubs don’t have the money to give young players the strong foundation they need to break into professional soccer later. This is only compounded by the fact that US soccer is plagued by a particularly exclusionary pay-to-play model. Instead of providing intentional, systematic support for young players, US soccer’s institutions have left them to the whims of the market.