Understanding the Player Pathway

Before we compare the United States to the rest of the world, let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. “Player pathway” sounds like jargon. It isn’t — and you already understand it if you understand baseball.

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.

Those minor leagues have a name familiar to fans of the game: the farm system. Major-league clubs have different structures within their respective development systems. Some choose to simply have an affiliate agreement with their independently owned minor league teams, while others are direct owners at every level. However, regardless of who owns the stadium or the local franchise business, the MLB parent club always owns and controls the contracts of the players and on-field coaches. The major league club invests in that system on purpose, because the players it grows there either reach the majors or become valuable in a trade. Development isn’t charity. It’s how a smart baseball club builds its future.

A player pathway in soccer is the exact same idea.

How a player pathway works: baseball’s farm system compared to soccer’s academy and lower divisions

Let’s start where the seed is planted for a soccer player. A child starts in grassroots recreational youth soccer with either intramural or local competitions. The next step would be to a travel team that is part of a multi-age club that competes against those in a larger region. On the men’s side, players within a defined territory around a pro club may be selected to attend its youth academy. This is the soccer version of baseball’s minor leagues. From there, players step into reserve or second-division teams, the way a prospect moves up to Triple-A. And the ones who make it reach the first team — the majors of soccer. At every rung, the club is developing the player within their specific system, and the player is climbing.

There is one important difference from baseball that runs through this entire climb in this country. Whether a player takes the next step often depends as much on a family’s resources as on the player’s ability — whether they can afford the rising costs at each level and get to the practices and games. Talent is not always what decides who keeps climbing here; cost and access do a great deal of the deciding. It is a thread this series returns to, because it shapes how the pathway works in the United States.

Here is the one thing to hold onto, because the rest of this series builds on it: in baseball, the big-league club owns the player contracts in its farm system, so the value it creates comes back to the club. Who owns the development tiers — and who retains this player value as an organizational asset — is the whole ballgame.

The value of each player is the key component in building a financially sustainable pathway for the women’s game in this country. The United States finally has a thriving top division with the NWSL — a genuine “majors.” What is yet to be built is the farm system beneath it for girls: the academies and lower-division pro teams where the next generation is actually developed.

Next in this series: how the rest of the world builds this pathway — and what we can learn from it without copying it wholesale.