The USWNT’s salvation lies in youth development. Will the status quo stop it?

SYDNEY, Australia — Though Spain’s women’s World Cup triumph was the nation’s first, it was far from a one-off. It was years in the making, thanks to major investments in youth player development.

There’s a lesson in that for the U.S. women, and it has nothing to do with the dreams of those fans who obsess about the team’s playing style.

Spain’s most important push in women’s soccer came not from its national governing body, but from its pro teams. Their youth academy setups, especially Barcelona’s, have created a pipeline of players that America currently can’t match.

If you’re the parent of a youth or college soccer player, or a coach or administrator of a league, you might have just done a double-take. How is it that a country as big as the United States, with so many players and teams and leagues and scholarships, isn’t producing enough quality?

The answer is actually quite simple. In Spain, England, France, Germany and other big-time women’s soccer countries, elite prospects get coaching worthy of their pro potential starting as teenagers. In the U.S., only a tiny handful of players can dream of that.

Most of them play through their high school years for youth clubs that focus on their own interests, then hope to get to an elite-level college team that can launch them to the pros in their early 20s.

» READ MORE: Spain wins the women’s World Cup and arrives as a women’s soccer superpower

No wonder the U.S. under-20 team hasn’t won its age-group World Cup in a decade, and the under-17s never have won theirs. Meanwhile, Spain won last year’s under-20 women’s World Cup and is a two-time under-17 reigning champion.

Some players from those squads were on the field at Stadium Australia on Sunday, including 19-year-old phenom Salma Paralluelo, who won the World Cup’s top young player award.

For years, close observers of the National Women’s Soccer League have complained about its lack of a homegrown player rule akin to Major League Soccer’s — a way for young players to sign directly with teams instead of going through a draft. And for years, the NWSL has promised a rule would come.

But the wait has dragged on for so long that it took a lawsuit from then-15-year-old Portland Thorns prospect Olivia Moultrie in 2021 to force the NWSL to drop a ban on all players younger than 18. And it took another year after that for the league to allow its teams to sign two under-18 players to their squads without having to petition the league for special permission.

In the NWSL’s early years, some teams didn’t have the internal infrastructure to handle having minors in their squads. But those days are in the past as ever more investment comes to clubs and the league as a whole. Now people who’ve been pushing for bigger change are done waiting, including some of the biggest names in the game.

“I think there’s conversations that are going to happen,” said San Diego Wave president Jill Ellis, the former two-time World Cup-winning U.S. manager who chaired FIFA’s technical committee at this tournament. “I know there’s some fantastic talent. … I think there are opportunities to grow in certain areas, and pull certain levers to continue to accelerate.”

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Ellis knows firsthand about that fantastic talent, because she has signed quite a bit of it to the San Diego Wave. She drafted Naomi Girma, convinced the league to let Jaedyn Shaw turn pro at 17, and this year brought in 15-year-old Melanie Barcenas.

They’ve rewarded Ellis with impressive play. Girma was on this year’s World Cup team, Shaw was last year’s U.S. Soccer Young Player of the Year, and Barcenas has played in 11 games this year.

“I do think allowing the minors to sign now has been a big step,” Ellis said. “We’ve got to make ourselves so attractive [that] people don’t want to go anywhere else. And we’ve got to also commit to the development process.”

On the other end of the Pacific coast in Portland, Thorns general manager Karina LeBlanc is also pushing for reform. The former Philadelphia Independence and Canadian national team goalkeeper joined the club after the Moultrie lawsuit, and ensures no guessing is needed of her opinion.

“What [the] Portland Thorns did and Olivia Moultrie did broke a barrier,” LeBlanc said. “I think the pathway of what it was, is going to be different from what it is in the future. And it’s about us sitting at the table and having those honest discussions of, what do we need to do differently?”

She revealed that some meetings have already taken place, with “honest conversations” about focusing on youth development.

“Everything was discussed,” she said, followed by an admission she wasn’t allowed to say what everything meant. “It was an open discussion. And I think it was important because we had owners, GMs, we had across the board — other stakeholders that are not within the league. … We all understand that the game is growing, and we have to grow with the game.”

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So the ideas are there, which is a good sign. Now they need executing.

It will take a lot of money, and not every NWSL team has the funds to run its own youth academy. Some already do, and there’s a growing sense they should be allowed to reap the rewards. Those without the resources could be allowed to partner with a local youth club of choice to build a pipeline there, as some MLS teams did before they could fund their own full-fledged academies.

Proof that the matter has reached NWSL team owners’ suites came from a conversation with Julie Uhrman, president of Angel City FC. The Los Angeles-based team doesn’t just have piles of money, Hollywood fame and a willingness to push boundaries, it has Alyssa Thompson: the 18-year old winger who debuted for the senior U.S. team at England’s Wembley Stadium as a high schooler last fall, was the NWSL’s No. 1 draft pick this past winter, and charged on to the World Cup squad.

“You’re seeing younger and younger players not only enter the NWSL, but have meaningful impact on the pitch.” Uhrman told The Inquirer, name-checking Moultrie, Shaw and Thompson unprompted.

“How do we develop the best program for young players to come in, develop and grow, learn the game, mature and have the support necessary to be successful on and off the pitch?” she continued. “We’ve started with Alyssa Thompson, and I think you’re seeing some exceptional players at a younger age. We just have to create a system that can really support them.”

» READ MORE: As the NWSL keeps growing, its draft could become a barrier to progress

The other big stumbling block isn’t about money. It’s about emotions. It took almost a decade for MLS to overcome youth clubs that complained about the pro teams taking “their players.” In some cities, there’s still ample ill will. (Fortunately, Philadelphia isn’t one of them, thanks to the savvy of the Union academy’s leaders.)

How can that status quo be beaten? Former U.S. women’s team and Orlando Pride manager Tom Sermanni has seen a lot of ruffled feathers in his years around the American game, and didn’t hesitate to ruffle a few more.

“It is hard to beat that,” he told The Inquirer. “I would say there’s two things. One is that you’re not taking all of your players, you’re only taking a few. The second thing I would say is that from a club perspective, would it not be a big advantage to say that we’ve actually produced players who are getting identified on a level?”

Common sense to an outsider’s ear, but a stick in the chest of the youth soccer-industrial complex.

“For me, it’s selling it to the club in the sense of saying that it’s showing that your club is actually doing a very good job,” Sermanni said. “But ultimately, the state associations, probably in conjunction with the national association, have just got to sort of bite the bullet.”

His vision is state- or regional-level hubs giving players elite training under U.S. Soccer’s supervision. Sermanni added the carrot of allowing players to go back to their local clubs part-time.

» READ MORE: The USWNT’s long era of success is over, but a new one could be on the horizon

“If those programs are run well, players will want to go there and play,” he said. And if those programs are free, some players will want to go there and play. The other thing is that you don’t necessarily then have to take the player all the time — you might take the player in a training program, but they can go back and play for the club.”

The biggest challenge of a U.S. Soccer-run structure, even more than the nature of top-down rule, is the country’s vast size. It’s easier to scout everyone in a European or South American country with a smaller land mass.

That’s where the NWSL comes in, and the new women’s league planned by the USL to join its second- and third-tier men’s leagues. Sermanni called on the pros to lead the way.

“They’re the ideal vehicle to be that elite pathway, if it’s too challenging for it to come through the governing body and the state bodies,” he said.

For decades, the U.S. women’s team’s most prized skill has been its been its decisiveness in big moments. As a consensus forms that change is needed, one can only hope the people in charge act the same way.

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