FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. – U.S. Soccer CEO J.T. Batson sat in a glossy conference room at the newly opened national training center in the Atlanta suburbs, entertaining the conversation in front of him, but he slipped in a reminder about what his next order of business was.
“Out there is the leadership team of one of the largest companies in the world and what did their CEO do when he saw me earlier today?” Batson started on Thursday. “He goes, ‘What can we do to help?'”
The U.S. men’s national team’s World Cup run had been over for 10 days, their 4-1 defeat to Belgium in the round of 16 now old news after a batch of entertaining quarterfinal and semifinal matches as the show went on. The groundswell that followed the USMNT along for the ride, though, was not imaginary – more than 50 million people tuned in for their showdown against Belgium, making for the largest broadcast audience for a soccer game in the country’s history. The work on the pitch now complete, the focus for Batson and his colleagues pivots to what they can do to ensure this summer is the start of something momentous rather than a flash in the pan.
The federation laid out the bare bones of a long-term plan on Thursday, hoping to fill in the gaps somewhere along the way. The vision is a compelling one and has the backing of Arsene Wenger, the ex-Arsenal coach turned FIFA’s chief of global football development. Wenger has worked in collaboration with U.S. Soccer for several years in the hopes that a nation with unlimited resources could actually enter the elite levels of the game on the men’s side, all while ensuring the women’s program remains best in class. It will involve multiple parties, U.S. Soccer’s leaders insist, and they are willing to engage them all – Batson is quick to point out that his phone is still dealing with an influx of messages and calls that have come from notable people en route to the USMNT’s round of 16 run, all eager to lend a helping hand.
“There are lots of things that need to be true for us to continue to win World Cups on the women’s side and for us to truly compete for them on the men’s side,” Batson said, “and our focus is on putting ourselves in the best position to do that.”
The team’s World Cup may have come to an anticlimactic end but Batson argues the work is only beginning for an ambitious federation that is now on the clock to prove their plans are actually the right ones.
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“From U.S. Soccer’s standpoint, the 2026 World Cup has been incredibly successful and has fundamentally changed the trajectory of the sport in the United States,” Batson said. “As we think about ’95, ’96 and ’99, that five year run, what it did to usher in an era of soccer in this country, we feel like we’re one month in to the next five year period of this summer, LA ’28 and the Women’s World Cup in 2031 to ultimately ensure that the U.S. is one of the world’s great soccer countries.”
Filling in the missing roles
Batson and COO Dan Helfrich have plenty on their plate but perhaps most pressing is filling several roles, the federation’s workforce now standing at 600 people and looking for more employees in a variety of roles. The most high-profile, though, are the vacancies for sporting director and the USMNT’s head coach.
U.S. Soccer has made its pick with the latter, extending a new contract to World Cup boss Mauricio Pochettino before the tournament began. Batson said the parties remain in “active discussions” but do not have a timeline set for the decision, though the picture on sporting director is murkier. Matt Crocker departed the role in April and the job is almost by committee in the interim, though Helfrich technically has the final say.
“We feel confident we have a great team and that great team has soccer expertise from deep within the American system and soccer expertise from other parts of the world,” Helfrich said. “As we are talking about and making strategic choices, we have [assistant sporting director] Oguchi Onyewu and Barry Pauwels and Tracey Kevins [head of player development for the men’s and women’s national teams, respectively] and [women’s national team head coach] Emma Hayes, who are part of the discussions we’re having both about near-term choices and about longer-term structure and so I anticipate in the months to come, there’s a little more clarity on structure, but the fundamentals of the team are there.”
Batson previously said that the sporting director may not have a traditional look in the future, while Helfrich suggested that the next set of people who join U.S. Soccer’s sporting operation should offer a wide variety of viewpoints.
“Any great organization and certainly any great sporting organization has to find input from outside itself and so it’s really important as we think about our sporting and soccer direction that we’re not only tapping into folks like FIFA but we’re, every week, having conversations with alumni, both on the men’s and women’s side who have strong perspectives about certain topics and expertise and certain topics. We want that input. I want those voices in the team and at the table. We want the perspective of professional league, chief soccer officers and owners and coaches and so part of our process is making sure that we have input from that wide variety of people so we can make those decisions.”
There is one vacancy they have filled timely, though — the coach who will lead the U.S. men’s team at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. Former national team player and ex-LAFC head coach Steve Cherundolo will take charge of the group for the Games, which organizes a U-23 tournament on the men’s side while full senior teams compete on the women’s side. The Olympics have rarely been part of U.S. Soccer’s wider vision for the men’s national team, in large part because the U-23 side had failed to qualify for the 2012, 2016 and pandemic-delayed 2020 editions. The federation — with the help of Pochettino, who Batson said played a key role in Cherundolo’s hire — hopes to use the tournament as a key peg not only to grow the fanbase, but to accomplish its goals with the senior team.
“We have prioritized the men’s Olympics,” Helfrich said. “We think as a U-23 competition, it creates an extraordinary moment on home soil in Los Angeles for both our fans to experience incredible talent and for our players and coaches to grow and so the addition of Steve Cherundolo to our team is a really important one and we’re excited about what that means to our preparation to the Olympic Games but more importantly, what it means to prepare as set of players that we know, based on looking at the data, a lot of them, if we do this right, will end up on a senior World Cup some day.”
That ultimately includes the chance at medaling two years from now. Only eight nations have ever won the men’s World Cup, all of them considered amongst the game’s elites. Youth tournaments tend to be more of a free-for-all, the Olympics in particular — Mexico, Cameroon and Nigeria have won gold in the last 30 years despite never advancing further than a World Cup quarterfinal, appearances in the last eight rare in their history. It is part of a wider operation to give young players as many high-level experiences as possible, Helfrich echoing the statements of many including Hayes on the limited number of opportunities for players aged 16 to 22 to develop compared to their counterparts in Europe.
“We have three very clear ambitions, the first of which is soccer success and winning major tournaments and so we view the men’s Olympics in ’28 as a major tournament and we will put all the resources of the federation to work to create the conditions to give our team the best chance to succeed and medal and win,” Helfrich said. “We’ll know the margins are small in major global football competitions, including the Olympics but we go into this eyes wide open that this is a major opportunity and can we envision full stadiums and tens of millions of people watching both our men and our women in meaningful games in the summer of ’28? 100%, and that is a motivating factor for all of us as we think about the Olympics.”
Youth development takes center stage – again
U.S. Soccer’s many missions are ultimately in service of one colossal goal — creating the most seamless, opportune youth soccer system the country has ever seen. The pipeline is any team’s key to success but ensuring the top prospects have every chance to succeed is easier said than done and comes with no exact recipe. Federations the world over have tried a multitude of strategies and will continue to do so, the exercise almost like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what happens.
The federation has yet to specify what exactly it will do in the coming months and years but one thing they are adamant about is that the number of opportunities needs to increase. They are now in the habit of touting the $250 million national training center as a focal point, recently using the facility to host the U-20 women’s national teams of England and Colombia as well as their own as they prepare for this fall’s World Cup in Poland and also used the grounds to hold coaching education courses. Wenger argues that the benefits of the training center are even simpler than that in some ways.
“In the States, there’s no tradition of sports [where you] use your feet,” he said. “All the sports, you don’t need the skill with your feet so that’s why the quality of the pitch is important because for a long time, this was not seen as an important part, the pitches and unfortunately, to develop the skill of your feet, you need to start very early. You cannot start at 14 years of age and become an international. Maybe in some other teams sports, you can do, but in football, you need to start very young because feet demand to be educated at five, six, seven years old.”
This is where the root of U.S. Soccer’s framework for the future begins. The federation recently announced plans to ensure every school in Atlanta has access to soccer, an initiative they hope to roll out in different major cities across the nation. There is also a buzz word each of Batson, Helfrich and Wenger used – alignment. Pathways to the top have been fractured for young American players for decades now, a system of pay-to-play only adding more hurdles along the way. U.S. Soccer hopes to simplify the process for all, working out the specifics with as many stakeholders as it takes in the meantime.
“We are not seeking to make the current system more affordable,” Helfrich said. “We’re trying to create a new system that then we make highly affordable and so it’s a really important distinction and so when we talk about the alignment of leagues, for example, at the youth level, we’re talking about creating a system that materially decreases the amount of travel that is required. Travel costs, both for commuting during the week to training and travel to competitive matches and showcases, is a bigger contributor to youth soccer accessibility issues than player fees for clubs in many areas.”
Quality coaching and education at the youth levels is essential to the whole process.
“It’s not a short-term fix,” Wenger said. “I was part of the opening of the first academies in France and it took 10 years – ’73, first academy opened in France, ’84 France won the European Championship so maybe we could have done earlier because ’82, they could have won the World Cup but it takes a few years and you have to be consistent and one of the things that is most neglected is identification of talent. It demands an eye, it demands an education, it demands consistency to always give a chance to young players to identify who has talent in five years, not now and that is not easy to develop in every country.”
Philanthropic and governmental pipeline
While U.S. Soccer is trying to create a simpler and more effective route to the top, Batson is quick to note that affordable does not mean free – and that is where the many people on the CEO’s contact list come in. Philanthropic contributions have become a key part of the federation’s sporting operation in recent years, donors pitching in with Pochettino’s salary and playing a sizable role in the completion of the new national training center. Batson hopes to leverage them again as U.S. Soccer gets the ball rolling on its plans to grow the game.
“The U.S. has an incredible history of philanthropy and we know that we’re sitting in a building as a testament to that, of the belief of philanthropic capital being able to impact lives of kids all across the country,” Batson said. “We know from conversations that there are people in every community in this country who care about soccer success in their country. They want more kids to be able to play and they want to be able to produce great players.”
He also noted that local governments across the U.S. have previously pitched in with funding for other sports, signaling that U.S. Soccer may ask for their support along the way since they are already in the habit of doing so. The project to ensure full access to soccer in Atlanta’s school is a collaboration between local authorities, the private sector and nonprofit organizations.
“One of the things that you all have seen if you go to a park, if you go to a school,” Batson said.
“What do they all have? They have basketball hoops. That’s taxpayer money making basketball money. As Americans, we spend $3 to $5 billion a year of taxpayer money on high school football. Think about how many development academies you could have for that sort of money and so we know how to do this as a country.”
Ultimately, Batson feels like the well-documented issues that have plagued American soccer are finally being noticed by larger audiences, the executive hoping to strike while the iron is hot to ensure that those who paid attention this summer ultimately commit to growing the game before the World Cup officially becomes a thing of the past.
“I think what’s been exciting as someone who grew up in the American system, yes, I’m familiar with this dialogue. It’s the first time it felt like it cut through and to where you have a much broader set of people in this country saying how do we go win and what needs to be true for us to do that?” Batson said. “This summer has given me incredible belief in our ability to actually go do it. [It will] take time. It’s of course going to be expensive but one of our great strengths as a country is we have resources and when applied – and applied thoughtfully – I think that we can be successful here.”
