What Is a Player Pathway? Start With Baseball

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 build these systems differently — some just hold an affiliate agreement with an independently owned minor-league team, others own every level directly. But regardless of who owns the stadium or the local business, the MLB parent club owns and controls the players' contracts. 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 club builds its future.

A player pathway in soccer is the exact same idea.

Let's start where the seed is planted for a soccer player. A child begins in grassroots recreational youth soccer — intramural or local competition. The next step is a travel team, part of a multi-age club that competes across a larger region. On the men's side, players within a defined territory around a pro club may be selected into its youth academy — the soccer version of baseball's minor leagues. From there, players step into reserve or lower-division teams, the way a prospect moves up to Triple-A. And the ones who make it here reach the first team — the majors of soccer. At every rung, one club owns the development and keeps what the player becomes worth. The player climbs; the value stays with whoever owns the rung.

There is one difference from baseball that runs through the 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. And that traces back to the same point: because no club owns the pathway here, no club has a financial incentive to fund it — so families pay for it instead. It is a thread this series returns to, because it shapes how the pathway works in the United States.

The rest of this series builds on a single idea: in baseball, the big-league club owns the player contracts in its farm system, so the value it creates returns to the club. Who owns the development tiers — and who keeps the player value as an organizational asset — is the whole ballgame.

That value is the key to building a financially sustainable pathway for women's soccer in this country. Two things have to be true for a pathway to pay: the incentive to develop players, and the structure to do it — and underneath both, an owner who keeps what the player becomes worth. For the first time, the incentive is real — the United States has a thriving top division in the NWSL, a genuine "majors," a valuable place for a developed player to arrive. What is not yet built is the structure beneath it for girls: the farm system of academies and lower-division pro teams where the next generation is actually developed, and where that value is first created.

While plenty of U.S. youth clubs call parts of their programs "academies," two things a real academy needs are missing here. The first is the money: when a player these clubs developed is later sold, no established mechanism returns a development fee to them. Most of the world has one; MLS has only recently begun to collect it on the men's side, and even then U.S. clubs keep a small fraction of what their players generate. The second is the record: the U.S. youth system is segmented, and a single player can hold more than one sanctioned registration at once. You cannot return the value to a developer you cannot even identify.

Next in this series: the player pass — and why, before a player can be developed, sold, or paid for, someone first has to keep the record that she exists.