Every athlete who makes it to the top climbs a ladder to get there. Baseball is the best comparison in the United States. A player starts in Little League at the recreational level. Those who continue with higher level competition move to travel ball and high school. From there, the options are to play in college or get signed into the minor leagues — Single-A, Double-A, Triple-A — and a few keep climbing all the way to the majors.

Before you can understand why player development doesn’t pay in this country, you have to understand something more basic: how the United States even keeps track of who a player is and where she has played. It begins with a small laminated card — and it explains a great deal.

The women’s game is being repriced in real time. In the rest of the world, the transfer fees that flow back into the youth clubs that developed the player create sustainable ecosystems and financial incentives for reinvestment into low-cost development programs. The player development system in the United States breaks down because of this missing piece. That is the critical void. Let’s understand and solve that systematically.