Why Free Youth Soccer Wouldn't Save Team USA
Outrage at Alexi Lalas Ignores the Real Cost of Making America Good at Soccer
Fox Sports studio analyst Alexi Lalas enraged a lot of people with the following tweet, in response to a Clay Travis lament about how USA soccer development is undermined by expense:
Youth soccer (youth sports) is a competitive market with businesses selling a product that obviously customers are willing to pay for. I’d love if soccer was free to all. But who is going to pay for all this free soccer?
The scale of scorn directed towards Lalas, which included famous sports pundits with large followings, was pretty impressive. There were many variations of the following sarcastic reply:
Won’t someone please think of the private equity squid consuming American youth sports, it too has needs.
I don’t harbor some intense love of “private equity,” and understand it has an influence on the youth sports market, but I believe it’s become a bit of a boogeyman when problems defy simple solutions. For example, I disagree with the idea that “private equity” is to blame for Jaylen Brown getting traded. Private equity isn’t the main explanation for why American youth sports are expensive. Ambitious parents are. I say that less to “blame” parents than to acknowledge the reality that they’re willing to pay a lot for their dreams.
More to the point, the expense of youth sports, whosever fault it happens to be, isn’t the reason we get our ass kicked by Belgium. Yesterday, I wrote about why Europe is far ahead of us in soccer, and always might be. Today, I’m looking at why there’s no utopian political solution to our soccer struggle, even as politicians posit otherwise.
EOD, as America licks its wounds following a World Cup humiliation, the question still stands: