This is a big summer for the national soccer teams of the United States. The women will be center stage at the Tokyo Olympics, attempting to become the first team to wrap gold around their necks after winning a FIFA World Cup. The men, suddenly flush with some of the best young talent on the planet, begin the journey of qualifying for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, after missing out on the 2018 finals. They also compete for the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the continental championship.
At the professional league level, soccer is thriving. The National Women’s Soccer League is finding sponsors, audience, and a voice in shaping the future of sports in America. Major League Soccer, with the addition this year of teams in Cincinnati and Austin, Texas, now has 27 clubs, up from 10 when the league launched a quarter century ago as an output of the U.S. hosting the 1994 men’s World Cup.
As the national governing body for the sport, the U.S. Soccer Federation has played a role in all these developments. But the mission of NGBs, as chartered by Congress through the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, is not just to grow the game at the elite level, for the very best adults with a ball at their feet. It’s to develop opportunities for all Americans, at all levels, from moment a child slips on a uniform.
Cindy Parlow Cone is president of the Federation. She was elected last year, the first woman to hold that position. She also is a former player, a member of the historic 1999 World Cup team and Olympic gold-medal winning teams in 1996 and 2004 that helped elevate women’s soccer – and women’s sports.
Last year, the federation became a member of Project Play 2024, a group of leading organizations across sports and sectors committed to taking action to grow national sport participation rates and related metrics among youth. The Aspen Institute serves as a backbone organization for the Collective Impact effort, facilitating dialogue and developing opportunities with the financial support of members.
In this Project Play 2024 member spotlight interview with Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, Cone shares her insights on the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead for soccer at the grassroots level, and the role of the game in improving the broader sport ecosystem and building healthier children and communities. Below are excerpts of their conversation.
Tom: Let’s start with the big picture, as soccer in America doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s the first sport that many kids play, but it’s not the only one. Within Project Play we’ve been honest about the gaps in access to a sustained experience for kids from lower-income homes, minorities, late bloomers, kids with disabilities, even girls, despite the progress made through Title IX. How do you assess the state of play for youth in this country?
Cindy: Let’s start with a positive. We're all well-versed in how sports benefit kids physically. I think COVID also demonstrated how much sports contribute to their mental well-being. So, it's great to see sports are now returning. However, the local, community-based soccer programs, like parks and recs, were the hardest hit. They not only shut down due to COVID, but they had budget cuts. Some of those programs aren't coming back. That's an area that's really concerning for me.
Tom: What is the Federation doing about that?
Cindy: We feel a greater responsibility to help address the greater systemic issues in our sport in general. This is the foundation of U.S. Soccer's commitment to the Aspen Institute and Project Play – the recognition that if you want to go further, you need to go together. You need partners, and this means coming to the table with other industry leaders to support the greater future of sport in general.
U.S. Soccer and its members also are offering more resources in areas like social emotional learning. There’s more awareness and education around concussions and head injuries. We're hoping to expand that conversation more into mental health and the well-being of youth. It’s also good that we're seeing urban facilities and stadiums (get built) and local partnerships being formed to support community-based play. Development pathways are growing in other forms of the game as well, such as beach soccer and (Paralympics).
Tom: The men’s national team is one of the most ethnically diverse in sports. Not so much with the women’s team – very few women of color. That’s a reflection of the youth pipeline, dominated as it is by families paying thousands of dollars a year to clubs, starting in grade school. How do you look at that challenge?
Cindy: While I think we're doing a better job on the boys and the men side of the game, I still think about how many are we missing out? How many people of color, whether they're a girl or a boy, grew up feeling that soccer isn't for them, that it’s not accessible to them? That's a problem, so we’re doing a study to find out what the real barriers are. How do we engage (disadvantaged youth)? How do we make them see that soccer or sport in general is for them?
Part of that is due to the pay-to-play model. But there's other issues as well, which is really why I'm excited about the study, which we plan to make public because it's not just U.S. Soccer solving this problem. It's all of us working together and bringing people of color not only to soccer but to every sport and to make sure that they have access and see themselves in different sports.
Tom: Soccer becomes a year-round thing at an early age which brings early specialization and higher costs. Is there more that soccer can do to promote multisport play through at least a certain age, so kids and families don't feel so pressured or squeezed early on?
Cindy: Yeah. I’ll say I think there's not a single pathway in soccer. Take myself. I played multiple sports growing up, played basketball and soccer through high school, and I'm a youth coach now and I encourage my players to play other sports. I mean, the social development piece is often that you play different roles on different teams. It’s not just about multiple sports. Whether it's playing a musical instrument or another sport, I think raising kids that are well-rounded and have multiple opportunities to experience different things in life is important.
Tom: What about adjusting competition structures? With all these teams competing for state cups and national tournaments as early as grade school, coaches can easily develop this idea that winning tournaments equals development. Is there anything the Federation can do in talking to its affiliated organizations, whether it be US Youth Soccer or US Club Soccer or others, about being more careful about that? Structure drives culture.
Cindy: Good point. One of the challenges that I see specifically in soccer that I don't necessarily see in other sports is you're either moving up or moving out. If you're not moving up a team or your team's not winning, either you quit because ‘oh, I'm not good enough’ or you move to another team. You don't see it as much of that in basketball. Basketball kids find the level for them and compete at and play at that level, and it's not a move up or move out mentality.
Tom: What opportunity does the World Cup present in driving progress?
Cindy: The ‘94 World Cup is still the most successful World Cup that's ever happened, and now we have 2026 which I think is going to be even more successful. Due to the ‘94 World Cup, we saw growth on both the boys and the girls side of the game and I expect to see that again. We’ll see huge growth with our game being showcased in every aspect of the sport, not just in the boys and girls side but at every (age) level and every ability level. I think we're going to see more and more investment in our game. This is just such a huge opportunity for us to grow, while finding ways to make sure every kid has access to play.
Tom: How can Project Play 2024 help? Is it fostering collaboration? Developing policy ideas? Advancing conversations that can drive systems change?
Cindy: It's all those things. You mentioned at the top of the interview that you know soccer is a part of this larger ecosystem of sports. I completely agree. We don't exist on an island. So, for me the collaboration across the sports is important. Can we rally around shared ideas areas of interest to improve sport as a whole, from aligning (program) standards to adults to (recognizing) a child's basic right to experience the sport?
Sport should be a birthright. If we work together on that, how does that shift our thinking? How do we make sure every kid out there that wants to participate in a sport, regardless of the sport, has access to it? If we have a ton of collaboration, we can achieve this. It’s not going to happen tomorrow but if we set goals and work together, we can achieve a lot.
Learn more about Project Play and Project Play 2024.
Join the Aspen Institute on July 13 (2-3 pm ET) for our Future of Sports conversation with Cindy Parlow Cone. Register or watch the replay here.