Pay to play: U.S. youth soccer has an access problem. Can the World Cup help?

Paula Caicedo is a soccer mom who’s fed up with soccer cost.

She was one of several parents who took the dais at a recent North Miami Beach City Commission meeting to urge its members to sponsor the expansion of a youth soccer program known as Little Haiti F.C. into their community.

“I’ve tried all the soccer teams in this area, and weekly it’s about give-or-take $150,” Caicedo said of the expense of having her kids play in a typical youth tournament soccer club in South Florida and across the country.

“And for a single mom, it’s really hard.”

READ MORE: Haiti — and Little Haiti — are finding reminders for hope in the World Cup

Her children, though, can play and travel with the Little Haiti F.C. organization for free. That’s an exception to the U.S. youth soccer norm — and, according to Little Haiti F.C. co-founder Pat Santangelo, it serves to broaden the country’s player development as well as benefit families’ pocketbooks.

“There’s so many kids out there that have tremendous talent,” Santangelo, who runs the program with co-founder and coach Gomez Laleau, told WLRN.

“But their families can’t afford to put them in most youth programs.”

The World Cup that’s underway in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico will no doubt spark even more American interest in soccer. The question is: will it spark more efforts to push the sport outside the affluent, white suburban club culture it’s known for in this country — and make it more accessible to kids in lower-income and minority communities?

“U.S. soccer culture still selects for income much more than we do for talent,” Doug Andreassen, former president of youth soccer in Washington state — and former head of U.S. Soccer’s diversity task force — told WLRN.

Little Haiti F.C., or Football Club (football, of course, is how the rest of the world says soccer), started 12 years ago as an affordable alternative to the tournament club programs known as the pay-to-play system that dominates U.S. youth soccer. It has since become a national model for opening more doors to the sport.

“What we do at Little Haiti F.C. is pretty easy to do, actually,” said Santangelo, a former City of Miami communications official, “so kids get the same experience that all the parents who are paying $600 a month are getting for their children.”

Little Haiti F.C.’s support blends City of Miami grants with sponsorship from private partners, including developers such as Magic City Innovation District and Redwood.

Its success has won acclaim from Gianni Infantino, president of soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, who recently visited a tournament at a Little Haiti soccer park.

“We support them,” Infantino said. “This is absolutely fantastic, and we congratulate them.”

And that recent initiative to bring Little Haiti F.C. into North Miami Beach? The city commission approved it.

Other key U.S. soccer institutions have adopted the outreach ethos of programs like Little Haiti F.C., most notably the the U.S. Soccer Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In 2017, it launched an initiative to install a thousand so-called mini-pitches in underserved communities by the end of 2026. Pitches are playing fields in soccer parlance.

“We’re going to hit that goal,” said Ed Foster-Simeon, the U.S. Soccer Foundation’s president and CEO. “We’re at over 900 installed already, and we’ll complete the remainder this year.”

Foster-Simeon says the mini-pitches were deemed the most efficient way to give disadvantaged kids their introduction to the game because, as they’re smaller versions of regulation-size soccer fields, they can fit more easily into urban parks and schoolyards.

“Just the way I grew up playing basketball in New York,” he said.

“And that’s the way soccer is played around the world. Around the world kids are not going to fancy soccer complexes; they’re playing in their neighborhood. And we want to make that just as easy for kids here in the States.”

In Miami-Dade County, the Foundation has partnered with The Children’s Trust, Miami-Dade Public Schools and Miami hedge fund billionaire and soccer enthusiast Ken Griffin.

Griffin Catalyst, the civic engagement initiative of the Citadel fund founder, has donated $5 million to build 50 mini-pitches in Miami-Dade by the end of this year. The campaign includes programming, such as soccer instruction in physical education classes in schools like Oak Grove Elementary in Miami, which dedicated the most recent mini-pitch in April.

“Around the world kids are not going to fancy soccer complexes; they’re playing in their neighborhood. We want to make that just as easy for kids here.”

“Ken’s support for the mini-pitch effort here in Miami reflects a longstanding belief that every child should have access to safe places to play soccer regardless of their zip code,” said Julia Quinn, Griffin Catalyst’s director of philanthropy.

Quinn said having the World Cup come to the U.S. —including Miami, one of the host cities — was an engine for efforts to get soccer into underserved communities . She expects it will accelerate more projects like the mini-pitches afterward.

“We really see this as one of the longer-term kind of legacy opportunities for the World Cup coming to Miami.”

Critics of the focus on mini-pitches, which usually feature harder acrylic surfaces instead of grass, say it still deprives low-income kids of the real playing field experience their wealthier counterparts in the suburbs take for granted.

That leads soccer equal-access advocates like Andreassen to lament that the U.S. game still shuts underserved communities out of the player development mix.

‘Follow the money’

“Don’t get me wrong, I applaud those groups that are trying to help this situation,” Andreassen said.

“But we’re still a pay-to-play system in this country. Follow the money. The costs have escalated. Travel, food, hotels, coaches, gear, tournament fees — and the referee fees. It’s an overall system that we’ve got to fix.”

Andreassen points out that because soccer is still a relatively new and unfamiliar sport in America, it continues to carry an air of exclusivity that club teams and tournament organizers have been able to, as he puts it, “monetize.”

And he believes it not only has made U.S. soccer less socio-economically equitable, but has also stunted the potential of U.S. soccer’s perennially underachieving men’s national team — which has rarely performed at the famous championship level of the U.S. women’s team.

“In our country, we don’t get the best kids at soccer,” Andreassen said.

“And until we solve it, we’re not going to get the best talent — and we may not have a men’s team that is competitive at the World Cup level.”

The U.S. men’s team is more racially diverse today. Still, studies in past years have shown that, compared to players in U.S. pro football and basketball, the soccer roster has come largely from higher-income backgrounds — and its player pipeline tends to be fed from highly organized academy and camp structures.

That can stifle a certain spontaneous creativity that kids in Latin America and Europe bring to their more successful national teams, says soccer scholar Eduardo Gamarra.

“It’s this tradition of kids growing up in neighborhoods that don’t have much except for a potrero, a field of some kind,” said Gamarra, “where they have this very free style of playing.”

Gamarra is a political science professor and Latin America expert at Florida International University. He’s published a book this month titled De Argentina al Mundo (From Argentina to the World). In it he explores that culture of the neighborhood soccer potrero and what he calls picardía — a more streetsmart and innovative flair on the field.

“It’s a creativeness that then gets tapped into by organized teams,” Gamarra noted. “In the United States we try to coach kids very professionally from the time they’re very, very young — but what they lack is the picardía.”

That spirit is something Miami youths like Ishaaq Zephirin say they try to embody.

“I would love to represent the U.S. someday,” said Zephirin, a tall and talented 13-year-old Haitian-American defender for Little Haiti F.C. — whose U-17 boys team last month won a prestigious international tournament, the Enigma Cup.

Zephirin said his coaches “don’t over-coach us but instead they make you feel that you’re good and stuff — it gets into your head and makes you want to do better.

“The kids here, they have a lot of passion, they’re good teammates, like, like family.”

With stadiums like Miami’s hosting the best in the world right next door to communities like Zephirin’s, this World Cup could galvanize the movement to make America’s soccer family come from more pockets of America.

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