Youth Soccer Ranks Teams, Not Players

In the United States, there is no official national ranking of youth soccer players. In its place, a private ranking of teams became the scoreboard the whole game chases. It decides which teams are prioritized in the system, and which players get seen by default. It measures a team's results as part of a system that rewards resources. It does not measure the quality of the individual players.

For close to thirty years the dominant youth ranking system has been GotSoccer, now GotSport. It runs registration, tournament operations, and the rankings that sit on top of them. It ranks teams from under-10 through under-19. In a fragmented system with no shared record of players, a private team ranking filled the vacuum and became the national standard.

Here is what earns a team ranking points.

• Winning games at the platform's sanctioned events.

• Placing well in its tournaments. Beating a higher-ranked team is worth more than beating a weaker one.

• Points come only from those events, so the more a team plays in them, the more it can score.

Here is what earns nothing.

• A player's own development. The ranking is built on team results and never reads down to the individual player.

• The elite girls' leagues, the ECNL and the Girls Academy, which run their own competitions and do not submit those league games, so the top of the game is not fully counted.

The unit being measured is the team. The individual player never appears. A team ranking cannot tell you how a player is developing, only whether her team is winning. So results get chased, and development does not. The girl on a weaker team can be the best player on the field and never register, because the scoreboard only sees the score.

A team can be ranked from under-10. A player's own development scores zero.

The ranking also reaches into the years that matter most. It ranks children at nine and ten years old. Coaches who study development call the nine to twelve age range the golden age of skill, the window to build technique before the body takes over. Rank results in that window and results get chased there too. Bigger and earlier-maturing children win more games, so their teams rank higher, and the late developer is filtered out before her game arrives, regardless of technical ability. As the coach and author John O'Sullivan has put it, teams do not earn ranking points for style, or possession, or a close game. They earn them for beating teams.

This is not a fight with the federation. U.S. Soccer has said it does not support ranking teams at the youth level, and that its focus is developing players rather than winning trophies. The measure that runs the youth game is one the governing body itself does not stand behind.

Because points come only from sanctioned events, the ranking rewards volume and proximity. A team with access to more of these events can enter more of them and earn more points, and a higher rank draws tougher brackets that are worth more points again. That is the same incentive behind last week's overlap tax. The scoreboard rewards the long drives, and those with the resources to make them.

There is a business underneath it. Tournaments pay to feed their results into the rankings, which makes an event look more established. It is another participation tax, added to the tournament fees and passed on to families. The problem is not that a private company runs a ranking. The problem is what this ranking rewards. It rewards results and resources, and it treats that as development.

This lands hardest on the players Own the Pathway is built around. A girl on a weaker team, a late developer still growing into her game, a talented player whose club cannot afford a heavy tournament schedule. None of them show up well on this kind of inequitable ranking of team results, and some of them do not show up at all. What gets measured gets chased. When the measure is team results, development is not the motivation.

Here is the part no scoreboard shows. The player improving faster than anyone around her, on a team that loses more than it wins, does not exist on this type of ranking solution. Her progress is the most valuable thing in a development system, and it is the one thing the national scoreboard cannot see. A talent identification program should catch her, but too often it does not, because she is not at the tournaments being scouted. An accredited academy would build her identification and her development into the system itself. That structure does not exist here yet.

There is a cleaner way, and the pieces are coming into view. As registration and leagues align under one governing body, the game can measure a player on a shared record instead of a team chasing points. The question is not whether teams should be ranked. It is whether that ranking should be the priority. A team ranking does not even look closely at who is on the roster. Players hold more than one registration, and guest players are a common way for a team to add strength and lift its rank for a weekend. Who is a rostered player and who is a guest for the day? A system built on a shared player record could answer that. It would add accountability to any team ranking, and it could finally track the individual player and the impact she has, and rank her accordingly. With a national soccer registry coming online and the computing power to run it, the time to make that switch is now.

Other countries protect the young player from these ranking system priorities. In Norway, there are no championships of any kind for children through the year they turn twelve, and results and rankings arrive only later and with care. In England, the Football Association tells grassroots leagues not to publish standings for the youngest age groups, and its academies develop each player against an individual plan rather than a league table. In Spain, players are developed inside the accredited academy, the cantera, where the measure is the player's development, not a team's place in a table. None of them hand the measure of a nine-year-old to a private events company.

A better version is within reach here, and it does more than rank. Begin measuring a player's development around age 13, when her game is steadier and less ruled by early growth, and never at nine years old. Build it on accredited academies, so identification and development sit in one place. Reward the programs that develop players, not the ones that recruit them. And use it to teach, because a ranking built on development would show parents what the scoreboard is hiding. It would show the value of the midfielder who never scores and the defender who shuts down the opposition, the players a results-first soccer culture in this country is least equipped to value. Doing so may not only change the value placed on player development, but the culture around the game.

The measure we choose is the game we get. Measure teams, and clubs will assemble them. Measure players, and the country will develop them.

Next week, the feature. Four problems named over four weeks, and the pathway built to answer them. How the record, the standards, the leagues, and identification finally connect into one.

A note on sourcing. The mechanics follow GotSport's own published rankings documentation, which ranks teams from under-10 through under-19 and builds points from results at its sanctioned events. GotSport weights opponent strength, so a win over a stronger team is worth more, and this piece does not claim otherwise. U.S. Soccer's stated position against ranking youth teams is on the record from its response to the ranking of under-10 and under-11 teams. The golden-age framing and the critique of ranking young children are the views of development coaches including John O'Sullivan (Changing the Game Project) and Dr. William Steffen (US Sports Academy), attributed as opinion. The comparisons are drawn from Norway's Children's Rights in Sport provisions, the English Football Association's guidance against publishing youth results, and Spain's academy (cantera) model. The use of guest players and multiple registrations reflects common practice in U.S. youth soccer.